The Trump administration expands its investigation into the 2020 election as it obtains records from Arizona

PHOENIX (AP) — The Republican leader of the Arizona Senate said Monday he has turned 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 long-standing lies about the race he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Read more: The Trump administration is full of people who supported his false claims in the 2020 election

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 elections in Maricopa County ordered by legislative Republicans.

“The FBI has the records,” Petersen said.

He did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment, and a Senate Republican spokesman said in an email that Petersen “has nothing to add outside of his X position at this time.” The FBI in Phoenix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is the second time this year that the FBI has obtained records related to the 2020 election from the most populous county in a state witnessing a presidential battle, both of which Trump lost while seeking re-election. In January, the FBI seized ballots and other records from Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, after the Justice Department requested a search warrant from a judge. The search warrant affidavit showed that the request relied on years-old allegations, many of which were thoroughly investigated and found to have no connection to widespread fraud.

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Arizona Attorney General Chris 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 have found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome.

“Warren Petersen knows all this. He’s known it for years. He spread false stories about 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 investigation. It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in the service of lunatics 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 that experts said was marred by bias and flawed methodology. She explored bizarre conspiracy theories, such as taking the time to check the presence of bamboo fibers on ballots to see if they had been secretly shipped from Asia.

The audit concluded without providing evidence to support former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen — and in fact found that Biden received 360 more votes than were reported in the certified results for Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

Cyber ​​Ninjas also admitted that there were “no fundamental differences” between manual counting of ballots and the official count.

Previous reviews of 2.1 million ballots conducted by nonpartisan professionals who followed state law found no significant problem with the 2020 election in Maricopa County, which was run then and now by Republicans. Biden won the district by 45,000 votes and went on to win Arizona by 10,500 votes.

Federal officials took different approaches to obtaining election records in the two states. The Georgia case involved a judicially approved search warrant that required the FBI to state that there was probable cause to believe a crime had been committed. In Arizona, the FBI relied on subpoenas, a law enforcement maneuver that does not require judicial approval or for prosecutors to confirm probable cause for a crime.

The investigations into the 2020 election come as the Justice Department has clashed with a number of states, including some Republican-controlled states, over access to detailed voter data that includes names, dates of birth, addresses and partial Social Security numbers. Election officials expressed concerns that providing the information would violate state and federal data privacy laws, and that it could be used to remove people from state voter rolls.

Arizona is among the states that the Justice Department has sued to obtain voter information. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, suggested that at least some Maricopa County voter files were among the records Petersen provided to the FBI. In a statement on Monday, Fontes said his office was examining legal options “to secure personal voter information in the 2020 data that was shared. We view this latest action as a move by the US Department of Justice to undermine the legal process.”

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.