Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich had hopes of moving into the U.S. Senate today, but it just didn’t go his way.
Former President Donald Trump, widely popular and influential in Arizona, endorsed somebody else in the GOP primary and the highly-accomplished state law enforcement official lost in a race ultimately won by Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly.
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The endorsement put Brnovich, a first-generation American, in an odd place. Not only did Democrats criticize him, but so did Republicans who agreed with Trump that the former AG didn’t try to overturn the 2020 election results that led to Trump’s ouster.
Now, after clearing out his office, Brnovich has a long list of jobs he’s eyeing. But running again for Senate against embattled independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is not one of them.
“I think my wife and kids would disown me if I ran for the Senate again,” he told Secrets as he packed moving boxes in his office. “The notion of just getting kicked in the ba*** for another year and a half just has no appeal to me,” he added.
Thank you for allowing me to serve as your attorney general. Today’s my last day in office, but we will continue to fight for truth, justice, and the American dream! https://t.co/w1bE40gDG3
— Mark Brnovich (@GeneralBrnovich) January 2, 2023
After taking a break from the daily grind, Brnovich said that he plans to piggyback off his long list of achievements as attorney general to give speeches and possibly team with think tanks to continue fighting for election integrity, corporate fairness, and transparency.
“I do want to stay engaged,” he said. “There are big policy issues I want to continue to work on. And so I just need to figure out what’s the best way to do that,” he said.
Topping his list of policy priorities are taking on the airline industry and forcing it to provide payment for weather or mechanical inconveniences similar to last week’s Southwest Airlines crisis. He also wants to continue fighting President Joe Biden’s open borders policy and counter the environmental, social, and governance principles movement in corporate boardrooms.
During his eight-year run, Brnovich became a national headline regular in his fights for consumers against Google, Theranos, General Motors, and Ticketmaster and for his battles in the Supreme Court for election integrity and on the border crisis.
He personally argued for Arizona’s election reform before the U.S. Supreme Court and won, giving him one of the most memorable experiences of his career.
“I remember going there as a young person and … you see the marble columns, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the most important place in the world other than the White House. This is where the law ends, and tyranny begins,’” he said.
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“So when I went to argue this last time against the Biden administration, I wanted to soak it in,” said Brnovich, adding:
“I remember walking from the lawyer’s lounge to the courtroom, and I kind of paused. I remember as a kid kind of shuffling through there where you get like five minutes, and you can’t talk and you saw where justices sat and you kind of looked around. And … you had the Solicitor General’s office and they wear those long coats, evening coats, the gray tuxedo thing. And I walked up there, I looked around and the clerk calls in, ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez, God Save the United States and this honorable court.’ And kind of not even caring if the microphone picks it up, I said, ‘What a f****** country.’ I just sit and think, here I am, a first-generation American, a public school kid, and I was arguing against these Ivy League cake eaters who worked for the president of the United States about important constitutional issues and I had a U.S. Supreme Court case named after me that I got to argue and win. I mean, how many people can say that in the history of this country? I thought I was able to leave a mark.”
