By now, everyone who reads this blog surely knows that Maricopa County Attorney Andy Thomas is resigning next week to run for Arizona Attorney General.
he news was greeted in downtown Phoenix with a mixture of surprise (many were starting to wonder if Thomas would pull the trigger, being that he hasn't gotten a lot of positive ink in recent months) and outright glee.
Obviously, many big changes are coming down the pike, and soon.
We suspect that one of the new county attorney's first acts in office -- whomever he or she is -- will be to offer Lisa Aubuchon a new position in the agency, preferably in the paper-clip-counting room.
A far more likely scenario: Lisa joins another Lisa (public-relations queen Lisa Allen) over at the Sheriff's Office in some kind of made-up gig that pays well.
Maybe they'll call her Commander Aubuchon.
Readers are sure to remember Ms. Aubuchon, who decidedly isn't the babe running from someone or something in the photo.
Aubuchon is that ubiquitous loser of a prosecutor who won a role as "special assistant" to Thomas a few years ago and has been one of the secretive elected official's few confidantes.
Unfortunately, she's not so hot in the courtroom.
Most recently, Aubuchon convened a bizarre press conference to blast the late-February rulings of Pima County Superior Court Judge John Leonardo that savaged Thomas and Thomas' boss man, Sheriff Arpaio, for playing dirty, especially in the then-criminal case against county supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox. (Aubuchon represented Thomas in the Leonardo hearings.)
Here is my colleague Sarah Fenske's take on the Leonardo rulings, written at the time.
A few hours ago, a reliable passerby tells us, he saw Aubuchon leaving the building at 3rd Avenue and Jefferson inside which the County Attorney's Office is housed.
He says that two women were smoking cigarettes outside the building where Aubuchon was exiting,
The women immediately began to heckle Aubuchon, wondering loudly and not in especially good humor where she was going to work now that her boy Andy is splitting.
Our source says that Lisa didn't respond but quickly walked north in the direction of her other office (yes, she has two), in the sheriff's part of the Wells Fargo Building.
There, one can only imagine that MCSO Chief Deputy David Hendershott greeted her warmly.