Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has died. He was a happy warrior and an innovator who wasn’t afraid to take on corporate titans for the greater good. He was elected Arizona Attorney General in 2014 and 2018.
While in office he secured more than $1.5 billion in judgments and settlements for Arizona consumers. In many instances he wasn’t coat-tailing on class actions lawsuits but rather leading the charge.
He negotiated an historic $85 million settlement—one of the largest per capita in U.S. history—to resolve claims that Google deceptively tracked users’ location data even after they disabled tracking settings.
He took on TicketMaster and achieved a first-in-the-nation settlement that returned over $71 million to consumers for Arizona events canceled or rescheduled due to the pandemic.
He reached a settlement with APS for $24 million for over 225,000 customers who were overcharged because they were not on the company’s most economical rate plan.
He won $4.8 million in restitution from CashCall Inc. for issuing high-interest personal loans with interest rates as high as 169%, violating Arizona law.
Brnovich created a first-in-the-nation FinTech Sandbox in 2018 which allowed startup companies to test innovative financial products without immediately needing to navigate expensive and time-consuming state licensing requirements.
Unlike other occupants of the office, as AG he did not define himself by suing the White House, but the Arizona Republican did challenge federal policies under the Obama and Biden administrations, especially policies dealing with immigration and environmental regulations. He knew a thing or two about immigration. His parents immigrated from the former Yugoslavia to escape communism.
He personally argued three cases before the United States Supreme Court, including Brnovich v. the Democratic National Committee, which upheld Arizona’s voting laws.
Brnovich wasn’t purely partisan. In November 2020 he was the first high-ranking Arizona Republican to state publicly that there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would change the 2020 presidential election outcome. That likely cost him a seat on the US Senate. In 2022, he lost the primary to Blake Masters after failing to secure Trump’s endorsement.
There appeared to be a reconciliation with Trump in March of 2025 when Trump nominated Brnovich to be ambassador to Serbia. That nomination was withdrawn in October. Brnovich blamed deep state politics.
Brnovich wasn’t above partisan politics, but he didn’t put partisanship above the law. As the son of immigrants who fled communism, he admired capitalism but successfully challenged corporate titans when they got out of line. He was a maverick in the tradition of Grant Woods and John McCain. Sadly, his legend was cut short before another chapter could be written.