A federal grand jury is apparently looking into the results of a long-ago-debunked "audit'' of the 2020 Arizona election.
Senate President Warren Petersen said in a social media post on Monday that he "received and complied with'' a federal grand jury subpoena for records relating to the Senate audit of Maricopa County results following the 2020 election.
That’s the race where Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Arizona.
"The FBI has the records,'' Petersen said.
He declined to comment further.
This comes just weeks after the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia — another state where Trump lost in 2020 — seizing their election records from that year.
Both events come amid ongoing claims by Trump, who lost the 2020 election, that there was extensive fraud. And he has publicly urged his Department of Justice to investigate.
"Great!!!'' the president posted on social media in response to the reports of the subpoena in Arizona.
There was no immediate response from the FBI.
Governor Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes, both Democrats, criticized the federal inquiry.
“Arizonans are tired of election conspiracies and lies that undermine our democracy,” Hobbs said. “Arizona’s elections are free, fair and secure, which numerous lawsuits and even the Arizona Senate’s ‘audit’ into the 2020 election results have confirmed. The FBI’s reckless actions are an attack on Arizonans and undermine our rights as voters.”
What Trump — or his agency — hopes to get out of it remains unclear.
Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, who reviewed what he got in 2022 from then-Senate President Karen Fann, found the report prepared by Cyber Ninjas as deeply flawed.
Brnovich noted that the report claimed that 282 people who had allegedly died in early October 2020 cast ballots in the November general election.
“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead,” he said. “Many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.”
In fact, the attorney general said, only one of 282 listed voters on that report actually was deceased. The others were not only quite alive but are current voters.
But it wasn't just what Cyber Ninjas had provided that Brnovich concluded was largely unfounded.
He said his agency's Election Integrity Unit looked at the names of another 409 allegedly dead voters that came from other sources.
And then investigators went through yet another report of 5,943 names, which made no distinction between dead voters and dead registrants.
"Once again, these claims were thoroughly investigated and resulted in only a handful of potential cases,'' Brnovich told Fann.
"Some were so absurd the names and birth dates didn't even match the deceased,'' he reported. "And others included dates of death after the election.''
And Brnovich said while his agency has previously prosecuted other instances of dead people voting, even those cases "were ultimately determined to be isolated incidents.''
The audit also included a hand count of the 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots. And it found that Biden actually outpolled Trump by an even larger margin than the official tally.
Responding to the reports of a grand jury subpoena, current Attorney General Mayes cited the Brnovich investigation into the Cyber Ninjas report.
And she said that complaints and allegations submitted to the AG's office "were also unsupported by factual evidence.''
"Warren Petersen knows all this,'' she said. "He has known it for years.''
Mayes also said that Petersen, who is running to be the GOP nominee for attorney general to take her on in November, has been "an unrepentant election denier.''
She pointed to a rally he held after the 2020 election, claiming, "We certified the vote prematurely."
Petersen then co-chaired the oversight of the Cyber Ninjas inquiry with Fann.
Mayes also took a shot at the president, saying that what his administration appears to be pursuing is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry.
"It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies,'' she said.
