The results of the 2020 election in Arizona have never seriously been called into question. There was an official count of the state’s ballots, followed by an official recount. There was also an independent audit, which found literally nothing untoward. The facts were unambiguous: Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the Grand Canyon State.
Republican conspiracy theorists nevertheless refused to accept the outcome. In 2021, GOP state senators hired an odd and unqualified company called Cyber Ninjas to conduct yet another review of the ballots from Arizona’s Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county.
The whole endeavor quickly turned into a humiliating fiasco (“Rachel Maddow Show” viewers might recall our coverage of the hunt for “bamboo fibers” and the scrutiny of “kinematic artifacts,” whatever that meant) that left some Republicans feeling embarrassed.
“It makes us look like idiots,” one GOP state legislator conceded at the time. “I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous.”
In September 2021, the monthslong “audit” (such as it was) came to an ignominious end, after having found nothing to bolster Republican election deniers’ nonsense. (In fact, it found some extra votes for Biden.) Trump actually told people Cyber Ninjas’ probe might somehow propel him back into the White House, but those claims proved bonkers.
As difficult as this might be to believe, 4 1/2 years later, the absurdity is back for sadly predictable reasons. MS NOW reported:
The Trump administration has taken voting records from Maricopa County, Arizona, related to the 2020 presidential election, a state lawmaker said Monday, escalating a federal effort to sustain baseless claims that the results were rigged.
Republican state Senate President Warren Petersen said he provided to the FBI records from a GOP-commissioned review of the election results in the most populous county of the swing state, which President Donald Trump lost to former President Joe Biden in 2020.
“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,” Petersen wrote in a social media post.
There are still come questions as to the precise nature of the records, since the ballots were ultimately discarded as part of the state’s standard operating procedure, and the machines used during that election to tabulate results were also decommissioned.
Nevertheless, in a written statement, Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris 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.”
That’s true, though one might also note it’s the latest in a series of examples of the weaponization of federal law enforcement in the service of crackpots and lies. The president and his team have also deployed FBI agents to raid an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia; seized voting equipment in Puerto Rico; waged an aggressive campaign to acquire voter rolls from states that Democrats won; organized an unnecessary FBI elections “briefing” for state officials; and provided Kurt Olsen, one of Trump’s highly controversial former campaign lawyers, with classified information as he tried to advance election conspiracy theories.
All of this stems from the president’s obsession with relitigating the election he lost, but it also dovetails with his ongoing interest in a possible federal takeover of the nation’s electoral system.
Or put another way, the FBI’s subpoena in Maricopa County is absurd, but it’s part of a crusade that shouldn’t be ignored.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
