The President of the United States has guaranteed Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos the vast, sophisticated resources of federal law enforcement to solve the Nancy Guthrie abduction case, only to have the elected Democrat box out the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and squander its involvement.
That claim is part of a growing list of criticisms detailed in a new report that cites sources within the investigation which is now entering its third week after the mother of Today host Savanah Guthrie was snatched from her Tucson, Arizona home.
“Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos has ‘locked down’ the Nancy Guthrie investigation amid escalating tensions between his team and the FBI that have reached the boiling point,” the Daily Mail reported on Friday.
According to the newspaper, the sheriff has also limited the guidance of his own best detectives and is “micromanaging” the case from his administrative office rather than trusting the street-level instincts of seasoned detectives.
The newspaper reported Nanos has dictated that only he and two of his command-level officers can make decisions in a case that traditionally would be guided by a seasoned lead detective instead of upper-level police executives who traditionally attend to staffing and other bureaucratic matters.
One law enforcement source told the Daily Mail:
He will only let himself or two of his handpicked staffers make decisions on the case. Everybody else is being told what to do, no one else has a say-so or an opinion. It’s just three men making the decisions. It’s incredibly unusual to do that, when you have so many people working together and the FBI are involved. All the other detectives are out there busting their butts and doing all they can, but those three people are making the ultimate decisions after everyone reports back to them. It’s limited to the thought-processes of three men.
“They’re keeping everything from the FBI — they just aren’t sharing,” the source added. “Nanos is pompous and wants the spotlight, rather than focusing on Nancy and letting the FBI do their job.”
Another source told the newspaper, “So no actual detectives are steering this, just command staff. This is highly unusual. Normally an experienced detective would steer it and provide updates through the chain of command… It’s the tail wagging the dog.”
Those two other command level officers are Chief Jesus Lopez, who serves as the department’s second-in-command overseeing day-to-day operations across patrol and investigative divisions, and Captain Juan Carlos Navarro, tasked with “supervising major case operations and department investigative strategy,” the Mail reported.
The department’s former chief, Richard Kastigar Jr., who spent 46 years on the job before retiring in 2023, said Nanos was a “quintessential micromanager” who is “not effective.”
‘This case should have been turned over to the FBI two weeks ago and the sheriff’s department should have followed and supported them,” he told the Mail.
On February 4, early in the disappearance, Trump assured Savanah Guthrie, whom he said he has known over the years and personally liked, that the federal resources would be there to solve the case.
“I spoke with Savannah Guthrie, and let her know that I am directing ALL Federal Law Enforcement to be at the family’s, and Local Law Enforcement’s, complete disposal, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on social media. “We are deploying all resources to get her mother home safely.”
Nancy Guthrie was last seen on January 31 at her home in Tucson by her oldest daughter and son-in-law, whom she dined with that evening. It’s believed she was taken against her will sometime around 2 a.m. on February 1.
Criticism on Nanos has been mounting each day as the case has gone unsolved, from inside sources as well as former FBI agents and other law enforcement experts who have taken nightly to cable news shows.
Nanos has been appearing lately out of uniform in nicely pressed shirts in one-on-one interviews with reporters like Fox News’s Jonathon Hunt.
Chief among his critics lately has been long time cable crime sleuth and former prosecutor Nancy Grace who said on Friday the sheriff is confusing everyone, giving away information to potential kidnappers and needs to “shut his pie hole.”
Nanos previously has been blasted for sending DNA samples to be tested to a private lab in Florida rather than allowing the FBI to use their state-of-the-art lab in Quantico, Virginia.
The former chief of the department agreed.
“All the evidence should have gone to Quantico from the beginning,” Kastigar said. “Chris is keeping this tight inner circle and not letting anyone in because he’s unwilling to turn the investigation over to the FBI so he can tightly control it himself.”
As Breitbart News’s reported this week, Nanos was appointed sheriff in 2015 and not long after the FBI began probing the department for misuse of civil asset forfeiture funds.
“Nanos was never charged, but the sheriff at the time was indicted, and Nanos lost the subsequent 2016 election for sheriff,” the New York Post also reported.
In December 2024, Nanos was reelected by a slim margin following a recount, the Arizona Republic reported at the time.
Kastigar said Nanos “has great disdain for the FBI” for investigating his department and he “holds a grudge.”
Even President Donald Trump weighed in this week on a miscue in the case when the sheriff confirmed a high-tech blue tooth “sniffer” was being used by a helicopter to see if authorities could detect the missing grandmother’s pacemaker in the Tucson area.
“I didn’t like when they talked about going after the pacemaker before they even started going after it,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Georgia. “If in fact they could do it that way, the person (the kidnapper) would say, ‘Well, I’m not going to let that happen’… I can’t imagine why they would have done that, just in terms of strategy.”
The sheriff himself has pushed back previously on claims he has not cooperated with federal partners.
As Breitbart News reported in the second week of the investigation, Nanos pushed back on a claim that he withheld essential physical evidence from the FBI and suggested the news media was sowing “division” among investigators.
He also said an FBI agent told him not to “let the media divide us.”
Despite that, the Mail reported that several sources claim Nanos continues to prevent the bureau from accessing evidence in the case.
“At this point they really don’t know what to do,” the source said. “He’s stonewalling them. They’re not even sure why.”
There has been no word from the Guthrie family members as to whether they are satisfied with the local sheriff’s handling of the case.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more
