Arizona AG Mayes ‘happy’ to supply public records for ‘unserious’ federal election probe

PHOENIX – The Arizona Attorney General’s Office confirmed reports that the Department of Homeland Security is looking into the state’s 2020 election, the latest federal intervention related to President Donald Trump’s loss almost six years ago.

Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement she was “happy” to supply public records from her Republican predecessor’s investigation while calling recent federal probes “unserious.”

“The Trump administration is engaged in an unserious investigation into an election that took place six years ago based on nothing but conspiracy theories and lies,” Mayes said. “At the request of local leadership at Homeland Security Investigations, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office provided them with public records from the 2020 election investigation conducted under the prior attorney general, Mark Brnovich.”

2022 Republican-led investigation addressed wild voter fraud claims

Mayes said the Brnovich-led 2022 investigation “speaks for itself.”

“The Attorney General’s Office spent 10,000 hours investigating every claim made by election deniers, from bamboo ballots imported from China to Italian spy satellites flipping votes to President Biden,” she said.

A summary of the investigation said there was no evidence to support the voter fraud claims.

“Those conclusions were true then and they remain true now. There was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election in Arizona,” Mayes said.

The Atlantic reported Tuesday that a top official for Homeland Security’s investigative branch notified Mayes’ office about the investigation a week after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Arizona in mid-February and called the state’s elections “an absolute disaster” during a Feb. 13 press conference.

Cyber Ninjas election audit records subpoenaed by FBI

On Monday, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen confirmed that he recently complied with a subpoena for records related to the Cyber Ninjas-led audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.

“Late last week I received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records relating to the Arizona State Senate’s 2020 audit of Maricopa County. The FBI has the records. Any other report is fake news,” Petersen said in an X post.

Federal election probes are ongoing in Arizona and Georgia, two battleground states Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020 while losing the White House.

In January, the FBI seized ballots and other records from Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, after the Justice Department sought a search warrant from a judge. The search warrant affidavit showed that the request relied on years-old claims, many of which had been thoroughly investigated and found to have no connection to widespread fraud.

The federal investigations into the 2020 election come as the Justice Department has clashed with a number of states, including some controlled by Republicans, over access to detailed voter data that includes names, dates of birth, addresses and partial Social Security numbers.

After Petersen confirmed that the Maricopa County audit records were given to the FBI, Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said the Trump administration’s efforts to relitigate the 2020 election are “undermining public confidence in our election system.”

“At this time, my office is working to identify legal options to secure personal voter information in the 2020 data that was shared,” Fontes said in a statement.

Mayes and Fontes recently sent joint letters to county recorders saying disclosure of unredacted voter files to federal authorities would violate state and federal law, Votebeat reported Wednesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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