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.
In recent weeks, Trump has said elections should no longer be run independently by states and counties, and increasingly called for federal government control, arguing that a single national system is needed to prevent fraud and restore confidence in voting.
The president threatened on Sunday that he won’t sign any bills into law until the SAVE America Act is passed, which would establish stricter federal election rules, including nationwide voter identification requirements and enhanced verification of voter rolls.
In getting the records from Petersen, the Justice Department bypassed the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Democratic state leaders. Attorney General Kris Mayes denounced Petersen and the administration for ignoring prior audits, litigation and even GOP-led investigations that “found no evidence of fraud sufficient to alter the outcome. These findings are not in dispute by any credible authority.”
Mayes labeled Petersen “an unrepentant election denier” who is abusing his position to perpetuate conspiracy theories.
“What the Trump administration appears to be pursuing now is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry,” Mayes said in a statement. “It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies.”
The subpoena — first reported by journalist John Solomon, who has ties to the administration — comes weeks after the FBI executed a search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, another state Biden won in 2020. Agents seized roughly 700 boxes of election materials at the county’s elections headquarters. Officials in Fulton County, a heavily Democratic area that includes much of Atlanta, have sued seeking the return of the materials, arguing that the ballots had been secure and that the action could undermine confidence in election administration.
Courts and election reviews conducted repeatedly found no evidence of widespread fraud that would have altered the results in either state.
Trump celebrated the seizure of Maricopa County materials, calling it “GREAT!!!” in a post Monday.
In 2021, the Arizona state Senate hired a now-defunct Florida-based cybersecurity company, Cyber Ninjas, to lead an investigation into the election results in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. The state legislature took the county’s ballots and recounted them and found that Biden had won the county, per their hand count, by 360 more votes than originally believed.
The Cyber Ninjas investigation was fueled by election deniers after individuals at the state and county level resisted efforts by Trump and other allies to overturn the results.
The dispute is likely to continue in court as state officials challenge the subpoenas and the federal government presses for additional access to the records.
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at CNN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.
Vaughn Hillyard is a senior White House reporter for MS NOW.