Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller has said his office started using the private messaging program Signal because it proved an easy way to share photos among office staff of himself at, say, a Sun City retirees club.
But a former employee has alleged in court that it was actually an effort to keep records of the office's internal discussions private, away from any members of the public who might ask to see them.
Signal uses an encrypted code to keep messages private. Users can also set messages to automatically disappear in a matter of seconds, days or weeks.
Miller said Signal became the preferred way for his office to discuss how to post photos on his social media sites.
He said there was no ulterior motive, as his former employee alleged. "They're trying to make it look like there's some nefarious things going on," he said.
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Miller told an Arizona Republic reporter that some Signal messages could be subject to disclosure under the Arizona Public Records Law.
He said those messages would show drafts of photo "headlines" posted on the office's social media accounts.
The Republic filed a request in January. A response came in April, with a single Signal thread from a high-ranking employee.
And those messages were not about posting photos. Instead, employees discussed how an appeals court ruling would affect potential police department searches of cell phones in Coolidge and Casa Grande.
Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller says his office started using the private messaging program Signal because it proved an easy way to share photos.
The use of Signal by the Pinal County Attorney's Office has become part of a feud between Miller, a Republican serving his first term in office, and the Pinal County Board of Supervisors.
The board members, all Republicans, asked the Arizona attorney general to investigate whether Miller’s use of Signal violated the state’s public records law.
All government agencies, under that law, are supposed to preserve records of their activities and make them available for members of the public to see, with limited exceptions.
Miller denied a request for a follow-up interview about his office’s use of Signal. A spokesperson said he was sick one week and on military leave another.
The law mandates that employees preserve documents, calendars, emails and other work products.
Signal is a messaging application designed to preserve privacy. Messages can be set to automatically disappear. They are also encrypted to guard against disclosure should a person’s phone or computer be hacked into by an unauthorized person.
An ex-employee of the office, Beth Goulden, mentioned that the Pinal County Attorney’s Office used Signal to skirt the public records law in a notice of claim she filed against Pinal County on Dec. 31.
Goulden, in her notice of claim, a precursor to a lawsuit against a government agency, said she questioned “direction” from Miller’s chief of staff, Jeremiah Brosowske, to use Signal.
Doing so, the notice of claim said, kept “official government messages offline, meaning they would not become part of the official public record for the purpose of avoiding public records request laws."
Goulden, according to the notice of claim, “expressed concern” about the circumvention of the public records law.
Goulden said she was fired in October in part, “because she complained that PCAO was potentially violating Arizona law,” according to her notice of claim.
The use of Signal constitutes only a part of Goulden's beef with the Pinal County Attorney's Office. The overall claim says she was wrongly terminated and is owed back pay.
Why public access to government records is critical
The public's ability to view public records has long been seen as essential to democracy, said Parker Jackson, a staff attorney for the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute.
His group, which advocates for libertarian policies, often uses public records requests to get information for court cases.
"Our entire system of government is predicated on the idea of consent of the governed and self-government," Jackson said. "You can't have consent of the governed unless the governed know what the government is up to. You can’t have self-government if the public doesn’t know what’s going on."
The use of Signal doesn't necessarily mean that someone has violated the Arizona Public Records Law, said Gregg Leslie, executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at the Arizona State University law college.
"It can be workable," Leslie said, "as long as you properly search (Signal) when you get a public records request. That can be perfectly fine."
However, Leslie said, if a messaging system like Signal was picked specifically because messages automatically disappear, or because internal administrators could not access it, "that's problematic."
Leslie said the law was in place so the general public could know what their government was up to and who was involved in any actions.
"If you're circumventing the system," Leslie said, "then that's a violation of the law."
Use of app raises questions that county attorney doesn't answer
Miller denied to the Phoenix New Times in January that he used Signal. But during an interview with The Republic that same month, he said something else.
“We use Signal,” he said.
Signal, he said, became the easiest method to share photos among staff. As an example, he mentioned photos of a speaking engagement in Sun City. His staff would also discuss how to caption that photo to post on social media.
“That’s the type of information we discuss in Signal,” he said. “Drafts back and forth.”
Miller said that some of that discussion “could be public record.”
He said The Republic could see such discussions of photo captions or headlines through a public records request.
“If you want to see a draft of a headline, we could provide a draft of a headline,” he said.
Though, he said, much of what was discussed ended up online and “was already in the public square.”
The Republic filed a public records request asking for any messages shared over Signal by employees of the Pinal County Attorney’s Office.
When that request was fulfilled in April, it contained messages retrieved from the phone of one person: William Wallace, the chief deputy county attorney.
A message from the county accompanying the release of the messages said that only Wallace used Signal.
“No one else within the Pinal County Attorney's Office utilizes text messages or the Signal application for business related communication on their work or personal cell phones,” the note sent through the county’s public records portal said.
Officials did not respond to a question about how the other office employees could respond to a Signal message thread without using Signal.
The September Signal discussion was about whether a police agency could share information extracted from a person’s cell phone with another agency.
“Does agency 2 need a new warrant to view that extraction,” asked someone with the name Patrick on the Signal chat.
A response came two minutes later.
“Yes, that’s what the 9th Circuit is saying,” wrote Kaitlin Hollywood, a deputy county attorney.
A person using the name Gina C responded: “That’s such a pain in the a--.”
In all, five people were listed in the Signal chat.
A spokesperson for the Pinal County Attorney’s Office, Christy Kelly, said the Signal message string was "attorney work product" that should not have been disclosed to The Republic. She said the release was in error.
Because of that, she said she would not identify the names or job titles of the other Pinal County attorney employees in that chat.
The title of the chat, some of which was cut off, was "PCAO (+Vince) goes to Nas…” A photo with the chat showed what appeared to be a nighttime scene of downtown Nashville.
Kelly, the spokesperson, said the message group was created for a conference trip. Signal was used, she said, because one participant did not have an iPhone. She said the messages were "mostly" limited to subjects such as dinner plans. She did not respond to a follow-up question about how many messages were about other subjects.
A person named in the Signal chat is Vince Goddard, presumably the Vince mentioned in the chat’s title with a plus sign, possibly indicating he was not part of the Pinal County Attorney's Office staff.
A person named Vince Goddard was a division chief for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office until he resigned in May 2021. He supervised prosecutors who brought criminal charges against a group of Phoenix protesters, alleging they were a street gang.
A spokesperson for Pinal County said someone by that name was hired to work as an attorney in March 2023. He left the county in July 2024, the spokesperson said.
The Goddard who wrote in the Signal chat shared legal opinions with Pinal County Attorney's Office staff members in September 2025, more than a year later.
A spokesperson for the Pinal County Attorney’s Office did not provide any information on Goddard's role with the office, nor any information about the convention he apparently attended alongside staff members.
The office’s use of Signal is not the only bone of contention between the Pinal County Attorney’s Office and the Board of Supervisors.
Another aspect of the feud involves Miller signing an agreement to have his office partner with federal immigration authorities to make street-level immigration arrests. The board asserts that Miller had no authority to sign an agreement, called a 287(g), after the section of statute that allows it.
That matter has a hearing scheduled this month in Maricopa County Superior Court.
