Judge recuses from Arizona case over his email denouncing attacks on Harris
Judge Bruce Cohen speaks during a pre-trial hearing on Aug. 28, during the fake electors case in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix. (Photo by Cheryl Evans/The Arizona Republic via AP, Pool)
The judge overseeing Arizona’s case against allies of former president Donald Trump over their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results recused himself late Tuesday, after it emerged he had emailed colleagues urging them to speak out against conservative attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris’s gender and racial identity.
In an email sent to fellow judicial officers on Aug. 29, Maricopa County Judge Bruce Cohen criticized those who labeled Harris a “DEI hire” and said he was “sickened” when Fox News host Jesse Watters said on air that if she were elected, she would “get paralyzed in the Situation Room while the generals have their way with her.”
White men “must speak out,” he wrote in the email, which was later obtained by state Rep. Travis Grantham (R) and reported on by local media, and then cited by one of the defendants’ lawyers as they called for his dismissal.
In his email, Cohen also drew a parallel with Nazi Germany and those who did not speak out when others were targeted, adding “we cannot allow our female colleagues to feel as if they stand alone when there are those who may intimate that their ascension was anything other than based upon exceptionalism.” He also said this duty applied regardless of one’s political views.
Cohen, who was appointed by Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) in 2005, followed up his email the next day, apologizing to his colleagues for using the court’s internal forum to share his opinion, stating he allowed his passion to cloud his judgment.
After Cohen’s emails were published online, lawyers for one of the defendants in the case, state Sen. Jake Hoffman (R), who stands accused of nine counts of fraud, conspiracy or forgery as part of the election-interference case, filed a motion requesting that the judge recuse himself, alleging that he “demonstrated bias and prejudice.”
Richie Taylor, a spokesman for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, wrote Wednesday in an email that it was “within Judge Cohen’s discretion to recuse himself” and accused the defendants’ lawyers of attacking “Arizona’s chief legal officer and now the independent judiciary” with “tone and rhetoric” that was “beyond the pale.”
“This case has never been motivated by politics—it is rooted solely in pursuing justice and upholding the rule of law,” Taylor wrote.
Hoffman and 10 other Arizona Republicans were indicted by an Arizona grand jury earlier this year on felony charges related to their alleged efforts to subvert Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Seven other attorneys or aides affiliated with Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign were also indicted. All of them initially pleaded not guilty; one later signed a cooperation agreement, and another pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
Prosecutors alleged that after Trump’s defeat in 2020, his allies worked with attorneys, campaign aides and Republican activists in seven states—including Arizona—to employ a strategy to try to award the states’ electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden. All of the Arizona defendants or their attorneys have long maintained they have done nothing wrong, and have cast the indictment as politically motivated, but state prosecutors contend that they illegally attempted to facilitate obstruction of the certification of Biden’s victory in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump himself was not charged in Arizona but was described in the indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator.
In August, there were a series of hearings over the defendants’ claim that the case against them should be dismissed largely on the basis that their alleged actions were protected by free speech. During that period, Cohen sent a number of emails to judges and commissioners of the court that Hoffman’s lawyers said showed he “bears a deep-seated personal political bias” against Trump and the defendants.
In his Aug. 29 email, Cohen also said his “blood boiled” when he saw Trump had amplified a vulgar joke about Harris performing a sex act. Cohen also referenced a famous quote credited to Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi activist Martin Niemoller at the end of World War II, which described everyday people’s failure to speak up when Nazis persecuted Jews, socialists and trade unionists, and ends with: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
“When we cannot or do not stand with others, the words of Martin Niemoller are no longer a historic reference to the atrocities of WWII, those words describe the present,” Cohen wrote.
Cohen on Tuesday defended his emails, saying in a court notice they were “not reflective of bias” and were intended as a “cry for decency and respect” that could equally have been made “about disparaging comments from either political sphere.”
The judge, who is on the cusp of retirement, added that he had agreed to recuse himself “out of a commitment to justice” and to avoid “even the appearance of bias.”
Cohen had not yet ruled on whether to dismiss the case, and another judge will now be assigned to it.
Grantham, who serves as speaker pro tempore of the Arizona House, and who first obtained Cohen’s emails after his counsel told him that rumors about it were circulating among employees of the court, said he was “glad the judge recused himself” because sending the emails “showed poor judgment and a lack of impartiality.”
Taylor, the spokesman for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, said that the next hearing in the case is scheduled for Nov. 21.
