Arizona lawmaker turns over 2020 election data to Trump's FBI
Published in News & Features
The president of the Arizona State Senate said he had provided records to the Federal Bureau of Investigation related to a review by Republican lawmakers into the 2020 presidential election.
“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,” Senator Warren Petersen, a Republican, said in a post on X. “The FBI has the records.”
The development comes after FBI agents raided a Georgia elections center in January, seizing ballots and voter records as part of a inquiry that originated with a lawyer who helped President Donald Trump unsuccessfully challenge results of that race in 2020.
The federal government is separately suing more than two dozen states for refusing to turn over current voter roll data. Elections experts have said the Trump administration may be laying the groundwork to challenge the outcome of the November midterms.
Other state officials in Arizona questioned the validity of the data Petersen says he turned over. The 2021 audit of the 2020 election results was widely criticized at the time as an attempt by Trump and his supporters to cast doubt on the voting system in Arizona, with auditors eventually submitting findings that increased Joe Biden’s win by several hundred votes.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said exhaustive reviews of the 2020 election found no evidence of fraud sufficient to alter the outcome of the race.
She called Petersen, who is campaigning to be her Republican challenger in the upcoming state attorney general race, “an unrepentant election denier.”
“What the Trump administration appears to be pursuing now is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry,” Mayes said. “It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies.”
The FBI and Department of Justice didn’t respond to questions about the subpoena or any pending investigations.
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