A Pima County assessor says Sheriff Chris Nanos scolded her after her office forwarded information about the Nancy Guthrie disappearance to the FBI, a claim that deepens questions about whether the sheriff has deliberately kept federal investigators at arm's length in one of the most closely watched missing-persons cases in the country.
Suzanne Droubie, the county assessor whose office handles property records, told the Arizona Republic that Nanos expressed sharp frustration after learning her staff had sent data the FBI requested. Fox News Digital reported that Droubie described the exchange not as outright yelling but as a pointed rebuke, the sheriff making clear he viewed the additional leads as a burden, not a help.
Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie, is believed to have been abducted from her home in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood of Tucson on Feb. 1. More than 14 weeks later, no arrest has been made. No suspect has been publicly named. And the tension between the sheriff's department and the FBI has only escalated.
Droubie told the Arizona Republic that the FBI had requested information from her office and that her staff complied. That decision, she said, brought a sharp response from Nanos. She described the sheriff as visibly stressed and frustrated.
"I wouldn't categorize it as yelling, per se, as much as kind of scolding and expressing frustration with all of the leads he was receiving, their obligation to follow up on them, and that my office was, was actually being more harm than good by providing more leads that they just had to follow up with."
Read that again. A county official cooperated with a federal law enforcement request in a case involving a missing elderly woman. The sheriff's response, in her telling, was to treat the cooperation as a problem.
Droubie further explained the dynamic in plain terms. She said it was "inferred" that her office was "creating a lot of additional work for the sheriff's department, due to us providing this information to the FBI, and then them having the responsibility to follow up on all of those leads that were provided."
The Pima County Sheriff's Department did not dispute or confirm Droubie's account. A spokesperson said in an email: "We are not authorized to provide any information or comment regarding these claims." Droubie was out of the office Tuesday and could not immediately be reached by Fox News Digital.
Droubie's account does not exist in a vacuum. It lands on top of weeks of accumulating evidence that Nanos has resisted FBI involvement from the earliest days of the investigation. The sheriff has deflected criticism even as the case has dragged past one milestone after another with no resolution.
The tension surfaced early when the FBI wanted to send DNA evidence to its lab in Quantico, Virginia. Nanos instead shipped the evidence to a contracted lab in Florida. Eleven weeks passed before that Florida lab finally forwarded the sample to the FBI for more advanced testing, a delay that, by any reasonable measure, cost investigators irreplaceable time.
Last week, FBI Director Kash Patel and Nanos traded public barbs over each other's handling of the case. Patel said the FBI had been "kept out of the investigation." The sheriff pushed back. But Droubie's account, from a fellow county official, not a political adversary, lends weight to the charge that Nanos has treated federal cooperation as an intrusion rather than an asset.
A Breitbart report citing the Daily Mail went further, quoting law enforcement sources who claimed Nanos had "locked down" the investigation and was not fully sharing evidence or information with federal agents. That report said only Nanos and two command-level officers were making major case decisions, sidelining experienced lead detectives.
Former Pima County department chief Richard Kastigar Jr. told the Daily Mail the case "should have been turned over to the FBI two weeks ago" and that evidence should have gone to Quantico from the start. The picture that emerges is one of a sheriff's department that circled the wagons around a high-profile case and then bristled when anyone, federal agents, county officials, or the public, tried to widen the circle.
The political fallout is catching up. Two members of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, Dr. Matt Heinz and Steve Christy, told Fox News Digital last week they plan to move to vacate the sheriff's office under a rarely invoked state law. The board was expected to address concerns about unrelated allegations of perjury against Nanos at a Tuesday evening meeting.
Christy reiterated his position Tuesday morning, 100 days after Guthrie's disappearance, in blunt terms:
"I will make, second and/or support any motion or efforts to vacate."
That two supervisors are willing to invoke an extraordinary legal mechanism speaks to how far confidence in Nanos has eroded. The recall effort gaining steam in Pima County reflects a community that has watched this case stall and wants answers about why.
Nanos also faces separate scrutiny over an incident in which he allegedly brought a loaded gun to an airport checkpoint, adding to the sense that the sheriff's judgment is under a microscope from multiple directions at once.
Behind the bureaucratic infighting is an 84-year-old woman who has been missing for more than 100 days. Nancy Guthrie was taken from her home. Her family has been left to endure the agonizing wait while the agencies that should be working together have instead spent weeks in a turf dispute.
Savannah Guthrie spoke publicly about her mother's disappearance in wrenching terms. The family's pain is not abstract. It is the direct downstream consequence of an investigation that, by multiple accounts, has been hampered by the very person charged with leading it.
Consider the sequence. The FBI asks a county office for records. The county office provides them. The sheriff scolds the county official for cooperating. DNA evidence that could have gone to the nation's premier forensic lab sits in a private Florida facility for eleven weeks instead. The sheriff refuses to comment. The FBI director says his agency was frozen out. A former department chief says the case should have been handed off weeks earlier.
Each of those facts, individually, might be explained away. Together, they form a pattern that any fair-minded person would find troubling. When a law enforcement leader treats cooperation with federal investigators as a nuisance, in a case involving a missing elderly woman with no suspect in custody, something has gone badly wrong.
A former SWAT chief has publicly said that the vast majority of the department has lost confidence in Nanos. If that assessment is even partially accurate, the supervisors moving toward vacating the office may be the only responsible course left.
Sheriff Nanos has every right to defend his record. He has every right to push back on critics. What he does not have is the right to treat a missing-persons case as his personal jurisdiction to wall off from federal resources, county cooperation, and public accountability.
Droubie's account matters because it comes from inside the county government, not from a political opponent, not from cable news, not from Washington. A fellow elected official says she was rebuked for helping the FBI. The sheriff's department's only response was that it was "not authorized" to comment.
That is not transparency. That is not leadership. And after 100 days with no arrest, it is not good enough.
Nancy Guthrie's family deserves answers. The people of Pima County deserve a sheriff who treats federal cooperation as a tool, not a threat. When an official's first instinct is to scold the people trying to help, the problem isn't the help, it's the official.
