The Arizona sheriff overseeing the local investigation into Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance is facing a recall effort over his handling of the case and broader dissatisfaction with his leadership.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos reacted to the development on Tuesday, telling 13 News he would “always honor the will of the people,” and abide by whatever outcome is reached.
Daniel Butierez, a Republican candidate campaigning to represent Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, is leading the “bipartisan” recall initiative. He has roughly 120 days to collect around 120,000 signatures to oust Nanos from office.
Butierez has rounded up 500 volunteers working to collect signatures thus far, telling the New York Post this week that Nanos has proved “an embarrassment to Tucson and to Pima County with this Nancy Guthrie case.” The sheriff faced criticism for opening up the crime scene at Guthrie’s Tucson home in the early days of the investigation, which he later conceded was likely a mistake, among other issues.
In a NewsNation interview Tuesday evening, Butierez said his goal is to collect the signatures within 60 days, at a rate of around 300 signatures per volunteer, “which isn’t a lot.” Aside from Nanos’s handling of the Guthrie case, Butierez cited deep concerns about the sheriff’s leadership on the crime, homelessness, and particularly, the border.
“Pima County borders along the border. For four years, drugs have poured across that border by drug runners and backpacks,” Butierez said. “And there has been one arrest.” To the Republican candidate, the Guthrie case is “just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing on Feb. 1.
Police in Pima County “had a unanimous vote of no confidence” in Nanos on Friday, Butierez claimed. Nanos previously received a nearly unanimous vote of no confidence in 2024, when 98.8% among 86 deputies who responded to the poll questioned the sheriff’s “lack of competent leadership and mismanagement.”
The Pima County Deputy’s Organization, the police union that led the poll, has also pummelled Nanos over misrepresenting his resume, including multiple times during a sworn deposition. Doing so allowed him to pass over an incident in which he resigned from the El Paso Police Department in 1982 to avoid being fired. The county’s board of supervisors plans to discuss the “troubling” finding in its meeting at the end of the month.
On March 10, the sheriff’s office addressed the debacle, stating that the misrepresentation was due to “clerical errors.”
“The Pima County Sheriff’s Department recently identified two clerical errors in Sheriff Chris Nanos’ publicly posted resume. Both date discrepancies were administrative in nature and were not intended to mislead or misrepresent Sheriff Nanos’ work history,” Nanos’s office said.
Butierez said this week that Pima County deputies wanted to launch the recall campaign themselves, but were “afraid of repercussions from Sheriff Nanos.”
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“I’m probably going to go for 135,000 signatures,” he said. “Everyone’s pretty disgusted, Democrats and Republicans,” he added.
Nanos’s office declined to comment when reached for a response by the Washington Examiner.