The ongoing feud between the Pinal County Board of Supervisors and Pinal County Attorney moved into a new field as the board voted to possibly file a charge against Brad Miller with the state board that licenses attorneys to practice law.
The board, meeting in a special session on Oct. 2, voted unanimously to allow its own outside attorneys to file a charge against Miller with the State Bar of Arizona if its attorneys thought that was necessary.
The action came in a meeting that lasted under three minutes and was light on details.
The board did not say what its potential complaint against Miller would be. But its feud with Miller, who by statute is supposed to represent the board, has plenty of options.
The supervisors have said Miller wrongly signed
an agreement with federal immigration authorities to deputize members of his office as frontline immigration agents. The board filed a civil suit against Millerin February.
In May, the board asked the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to investigate whether Miller wrongly directed his staff to use the messaging app Signal as a way to skirt the state’s public records law.
The motion the board voted on during its Oct. 2 meeting authorized one of its outside law firms to “take all necessary action, including filing a charge with the State Bar of Arizona” in order to meet the “objectives” of the board.
Those objectives were discussed in a Sept. 30 meeting the board had with its attorney. That discussion was held in executive session, not in public, but the meeting outlined the subject matter.
The board was going to meet to discuss Miller’s “ethical obligations to the Board of Supervisors … in light of various activities, statements and actions” made by Miller about the board and its individual members.
During the Oct. 2 meeting, no supervisor offered a window into what Miller’s statements or actions might have been.
Before the vote, Board Chairman Jeffrey McClure said that the disciplinary process for attorneys in Arizona was confidential. The charge filed could become public eventually, he said. That process was “designed to protect the attorney who is the subject of the Bar charge,” McClure said.
Vice Chairman Jeff Serdy said that any discipline against Miller would be decided by the Arizona Supreme Court, under the state Bar rules.
“We are not really doing anything,” he said before the vote. “If there’s misappropriate things happening, just be patient and it will all sort itself out.”
Miller’s office did not return a request for comment.
McClure did not return a request for a phone interview sent through a spokesperson for the county.
A written complaint, once filed with the State Bar of Arizona, would kick off a multistep disciplinary process that is outlined on the state Bar’s website.
If staff attorneys feel the actions outlined in the complaint were serious enough to merit a formal sanction — reprimand, suspension or disbarment — the case would be heard in what the website described as a trial setting.
At that hearing, witnesses would be called and both sides would make arguments. The disciplinary panel hearing the case would issue a decision, according to the website.
The possible charge filed with the State Bar of Arizona becomes the third front between the five-member Board of Supervisors and Miller, who took office as county attorney in 2005. All of the office holders, representing the largely rural county southeast of Phoenix, are Republican.
In August 2025, Miller signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that allowed select members of his office to serve as immigration agents.
The agreement is called a 287(g) after the statute allowing such arrangements between ICE and state and local law enforcement.
Miller’s office was one of 11 prosecutors’ offices in seven states to have 287(g) agreements with ICE. All of those agreements with prosecutors’ offices came in 2025, the first year of the second term of President Donald Trump.
Miller held a news conference in December outside his office, announcing the then-months old agreement.
That news conference, according to McClure, was the first time members of the Board of Supervisors had heard of it. Weeks later, it filed a lawsuit. That lawsuit was moved out of Pinal County to the Phoenix-area Maricopa County Superior Court.
In May, a judge ruled that Miller had overstepped his bounds in signing the 287(g) agreement and ordered his office to stop all activities related to it.
On the matter involving Signal, the board in February unanimously voted to ask the Arizona Attorney General whether Miller was violating the public records law.
A former employee in Miller’s office said in a notice of claim filed in December 2025 that she was asked to use the messaging app Signal as a way to circumvent Arizona’s public records law.
She said she was fired, partly, because she raised concerns about the use of the application.
Miller, in an interview with The Republic, said that his employees do use the messaging program, which sends encrypted messages that are designed to disappear on schedule. “We use Signal,” he said during the interview.
Miller said Signal was used only as a way to discuss captions that would be used with photos posted to the office’s social media channels. Signal, he said, was the best way to send photos among staff.
He said, during the interview, that the messages sent on Signal would possibly be subject to disclosure under the state’s public records law. But he said since the messages discussed photos that were eventually posted online, the information was already public.
The Republic filed a public records request and received one Signal message chain. It did not involve photos, but was a discussion about how an appellate court ruling would change advice the office would give to police agencies.
The office said that message chain was released to The Republic in error.
The Pinal County Board of Supervisors also asked the Attorney General to investigate whether Miller made unauthorized hires to his office.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Pinal County board OKs state Bar complaint against county attorney
