In the course of putting together this week’s Knappster column – about the deal that former Assemblyman Morse Arberry cut with the state to avoid prosecution on charges of doing funny stuff with campaign contributions – George Knapp put in a late-breaking request for comment to Secretary of State Ross Miller. He didn’t hear back by press time. Now, he has. George has filed a followup:

Ross Miller has way too much class and political savvy to get into a public spat with fellow constitutional officer (and fellow Democrat) Catherine Cortez Masto, Nevada’s attorney general. So it is no surprise that Miller declined to comment, on or off the record, about her decision to cut a deal with former assemblyman Morse Arberry.

But others familiar with the case say Miller made the correct decision when he decided to forward the Arberry matter to the AG for criminal prosecution. There will be no second-guessing from the SOS’s office, but you have to surmise that some of the folks over there are deeply disappointed by the deal, which allowed Arberry to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, serve no time, pay a small fine and agree to restitution. The SOS felt that Arberry’s allegedly blatant use of campaign money as his own personal piggy bank warranted felony charges. Miller hoped to send a message to Nevada politicians, who have mastered the art of camoflauging their pilfering of campaign coffers. The AG initially planned to pursue felony counts, but backed down after Arberry’s lawyers pointed out certain flaws in the Nevada statutes, and the fact that previous violators were let off with civil penalties and fines.

I can only imagine that critics of the AG’s decision do not agree that it was the right thing to do, or that Cortez Masto took the tougher road, knowing that she would take some heavy hits for going easy on Arberry. Arberry’s attorneys could have put the law itself on trial, could have injected racial considerations into the discussion, and in the end, the state could have ended up with nothing but a major embarrassment. 

Miller and Cortez Masto are not political adversaries, by any means. But both are ambitious and both have prominent government posts; a fundamental disagreement about something as high-profile as the Arberry case won’t exactly strenghthen their friendship. GEORGE KNAPP