As Auditor Diana DiZoglio tries to bring in an outside lawyer to sue state lawmakers over her stalled audit into their operations, Attorney General Andrea Campbell is raising questions about DiZoglio’s plan for a GOP gubernatorial candidate to foot the bill.
DiZoglio’s general counsel wrote to the attorney general’s office Monday, formally requesting that a trio of lawyers from the Boston firm Donnelly, Conroy & Gelhaar be appointed as special assistant attorneys general to represent DiZoglio in her dispute with the Legislature.
DiZoglio, the letter said, is seeking to bring a complaint against House Speaker Ron Mariano, Senate President Karen Spilka and the clerks of the House and Senate to compel them to produce records in connection with her audit.
Massachusetts voters resoundingly passed a ballot question in 2024 authorizing DiZoglio to audit the state Legislature, something the Methuen Democrat and former lawmaker promised on the campaign trail in 2022.
Legislative leaders have rebuffed her audit push, saying it violates the separation of powers under the state constitution. Campbell has declined to represent DiZoglio in a suit against the Legislature, saying the auditor’s office has not provided necessary information.
Appearing on Boston Public Radio Tuesday, DiZoglio dismissed Campbell’s reasoning as a “stall tactic.”
“Right now, and the way it’s always been up on Beacon Hill, friends, is if you step out of line, they circle the wagons and they shoot at you to make you step back into line,” DiZoglio said.
Earlier this month, Campbell told Boston Public Radio that the only agency she’s run into this issue with is the auditor’s office.
“And it’s not for lack of trying. It’s not for lack of trying to resolve this,” Campbell said. “There is a pathway forward. She still has to answer certain questions.”
Among the questions that Campbell’s office says have gone unanswered are inquiries about what it calls an “unusual financing arrangement” to hire the outside lawyers.
Michael Minogue, a former medical device executive who is now running for governor as a Republican, has offered to provide the funding. DiZoglio said Tuesday that he reached out to her, unsolicited, with the offer, before entering the governor’s race.
Campbell’s office is asking how this setup would square with state law, including ethics and campaign-finance rules.
DiZoglio said the state Ethics Commission provided her office with guidance saying that as long as the lawyers are appointed as special assistant attorney generals, they can be paid by a private entity. Campbell’s office says DiZoglio has not shared that guidance with them.
“If the attorney general doesn’t believe us and says she disagrees, she’s welcome to file an ethics complaint against our office and see where that goes,” DiZoglio said. “We are confident in our position. We have articulated that to the attorney general’s office.”
Minogue is using Beacon Hill’s resistance to the audit as a campaign issue, referencing it in a video he posted last week responding to Gov. Maura Healey’s State of the Commonwealth speech.
DiZoglio on Tuesday also said that the standoff over auditing the Legislature spilled into some of her office’s other work.
She said when her office tried to audit the courts on website accessibility, the chief justices of the state’s Trial Court and Appeals Court declined to participate. She said the judges contacted her office and said “that due to the attorney general’s position against the Legislature being audited, that they don’t want to be audited anymore either.”
The comments appear to reference audits DiZoglio released in August 2025, examining the websites of the Trial Court and Appeals Court.
Included in the audit reports are letters from Appeals Court Chief Justice Amy Lyn Blake and Trial Court General Counsel Daniel Sullivan that both say, “As an independent branch of government, the Judicial Branch is not under the [auditor’s office’s] purview.”
Both messages cite a November 2023 letter from Campbell, prior to passage of the ballot question, where Campbell said the state auditor lacks the authority to audit other branches of government.
