Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval says he will not support a bill in the state Assembly to remove the Attorney General’s Office as legal counsel for the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Instead he praised Attorney General Adam Laxalt, his fellow Republican whose path to the governor’s mansion hit a bump recently over his lobbying of the Control Board on behalf of Las Vegas Sands, whose Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson is Laxalt’s biggest campaign donor.
Laxalt’s action came to light earlier this year when Control Board Chairman A.G. Burnett reported the attorney general had pressured him for a meeting last spring in hopes of persuading the board to take the unprecedented step of weighing into a private legal dispute between LVS and the former head of the company’s Macau operations. The executive had sued LVS for wrongful termination, and the case, which had been dragging on for years, was not going well for Sands.
Burnett eventually agreed to a meeting, but he refused Laxalt’s request to intervene in the case with a friend of the court brief. And he was concerned enough about Laxalt’s interest in the case to secretly tape their conversation. He turned the tape over to the FBI, which did not find cause for a criminal action. But the tape, together with an affidavit by Burnett, made its way to the Democratic-controlled Legislature, where Assembly Ways and Means Chair Maggie Carlton called a hearing earlier this month to promote a bill to remove the AG’s office as counsel for the Control Board and the Gaming Commission in favor of independent counsel. She claimed that Laxalt is too close to LVS and Adelson to independently represent the agencies.
Sandoval disputes that. “I’ve had the opportunity to visit with the gaming regulators and with the Attorney General’s Office,” he said. “I think everybody agrees that this is an isolated incident and that there’s no need to provide for independent counsel.”
Carlton’s hearing was a good idea, he said. “But now that all the facts are out there, I think everybody understands that it’s time to move on.”
He added, “We’re proud of our regulatory system. We have the best regulatory system in the world. We’re proud of our Attorney General’s Office and our attorney general.”
