Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas quietly filed paperwork on Tuesday to run for a second term as the Valley’s top prosecutor, making the move just days before the deadline to do so.

Ethics investigations target Thomas office

The filing came on the same day Thomas asked the state’s highest court to halt several ethics investigations by the State Bar of Arizona that are focusing on his past few months on the job.

He said nothing about running for re-election during a Tuesday news conference about the ethics probes, but he went out of his way to make it clear he is in charge of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office right now.

“If they want to be county attorney,” Thomas said of the people investigating him, “they should run for county attorney and win the votes that I won.”

Thomas accused the State Bar, which monitors lawyers throughout Arizona, of using the investigations to muzzle his criticisms of Valley judges.

He asked the Arizona Supreme Court to either end the investigations or appoint a special prosecutor.

Now, it turns out Thomas was filing his motion with the Supreme Court at about the same time he was officially launching his campaign for re-election.

According to the Maricopa County Elections Department, Thomas’ campaign turned in a stack of signatures that appears to be more than double what he needed to put him on the November ballot.

The filing means that he will be the only Republican in the race unless a surprise candidate joins in before the June 5 deadline.

While the launch came without fanfare, it was not a surprise.

Thomas has been raising money for his re-election since last year, putting together more than $210,000 by the end of January and adding on since then.

The January figure is already believed to have broken campaign contribution records for the county.

From another fundraising event Wednesday at a house in Paradise Valley, Thomas said it was a coincidence that he filed the well-publicized Supreme Court motion on the same day he kicked off his campaign.

“We’ve been working toward this for some time,” Thomas said. “It was a formality to go and get our petitions in.”

He said he was unconcerned about starting his re-election bid amid the ethics probes because a number of legal experts had filed sworn statements saying the investigations were “frivolous” and “retaliatory.”

“People don’t care about frivolous things like that,” Thomas said. “They care about the record.”

In the past four years, he said he has kept the promises of his first campaign to fight illegal immigration and reduce the number of plea bargains offered to defendants.

He also said he plans no major campaign events until after the September primary, when he will know which Democrat — Gerald Richard or Tim Nelson — he will face.