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Admin Widens Probe of 2020 Election 03/10 06:23
PHOENIX (AP) -- The Republican leader of Arizona's state Senate said Monday
he has handed over records related to the 2020 presidential election to the FBI
in the latest sign that the Trump administration is acting on the president's
longstanding falsehoods about a race he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Senate President Warren Petersen said in a social media post that he
complied "late last week" with a federal grand jury subpoena for records
related to a controversial audit of the election in Maricopa County that had
been ordered by legislative Republicans.
"The FBI has the records," Petersen said.
He did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment, and a
spokesperson for Senate Republicans said in an email that Petersen "does not
have anything to add outside of his X post at this time." The FBI office in
Phoenix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It marks the second time this year that the FBI has obtained records related
to the 2020 election from the most populous county in a presidential
battleground state, both of which Trump lost as he sought reelection. 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.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, issued a scathing statement
in response to Petersen's post, noting that multiple audits, independent
investigations and legal challenges related to the 2020 presidential election
found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome.
"Warren Petersen knows all of this. He has known it for years. He spread
false stories of election fraud in 2020, and he remains an unrepentant election
denier," Mayes said. "What the Trump administration appears to be pursuing now
is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. It is the weaponization of federal
law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies."
A firm hired by Republican lawmakers spent six months in 2021 searching for
evidence of fraud in the previous year's presidential election, a process
experts said was marred by bias and a flawed methodology. It explored
outlandish conspiracy theories, such as dedicating time to checking for bamboo
fibers on ballots to see if they were secretly shipped in from Asia.
The audit ended without producing proof to support former President Donald
Trump's false claims of a stolen election -- and in fact found that Biden
received 360 more votes than stated in the certified results for Maricopa
County, which includes Phoenix.
The firm, Cyber Ninjas, also acknowledged that there were "no substantial
differences" between its hand count of the ballots and the official count.
Previous reviews of the 2.1 million ballots by nonpartisan professionals who
followed state law found no significant problem with the 2020 election in
Maricopa County, which was run by Republicans then and now. Biden won the
county by 45,000 votes and went on to win Arizona by 10,500 votes.
Federal officials took different routes to obtain election records in the
two states. The Georgia case involved a judicially-approved search warrant that
required the FBI to articulate grounds that probable cause exists to believe a
crime was committed. In Arizona, the FBI relied on subpoenas, a law enforcement
maneuver that does not require judicial sign-off or for prosecutors to assert
that there's probable cause of a crime.
The 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. Election officials have expressed concerns
that providing the information would violate both state and federal data
privacy laws, and that it could be used to remove people from state voter rolls.
Arizona is among the states the Justice Department has sued to obtain the
voter information. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, suggested that
at least some Maricopa County voter files could be among the records Petersen
gave the FBI. In a statement Monday, Fontes said his office was considering
legal options "to secure personal voter information in the 2020 data that was
shared."
Calli Jones, a secretary of state spokesperson, said the office is assessing
what was released to the FBI.
"This could be an end run by the Department of Justice to obtain unredacted
voter files," she said.
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