Federal investigators last week sought and obtained records relating to the 2020 election in Arizona, the Republican leader of the state Senate said Monday.
“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,” state Senate President Warren Petersen said in a post on X. “The FBI has the records. Any other report is fake news.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News.
Petersen’s post was in response to a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump, in which he shared a report from the right-wing outlet Just The News that stated the FBI was secretly investigating the 2020 election in Arizona.
The development signals that the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election — which Trump falsely claims he won — extends beyond Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI raided an elections hub in search of records and ballots earlier this year. Fulton and Maricopa counties are both solidly Democratic areas in key battleground states.
Unlike in Fulton County, though, the 2020 ballots cast and counted in Maricopa County were destroyed in accordance with the state's records retention laws.
The Maricopa County Elections Department told NBC News on Monday that they had not received a subpoena “but will cooperate if that were to occur.”
Petersen’s social media post indicates that the FBI is seeking records compiled in the course of a controversial audit by an outside group called the Cyber Ninjas, which was hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate to conduct what they described as an “audit” of the 2020 election, including a hand-count of ballots. Petersen oversaw the Cyber Ninjas audit alongside Karen Fann, who was the state Senate president at the time.
The messy, conspiracy-laden investigation in Arizona concluded that President Joe Biden had won the 2020 election in the state, and the company that ran the review shut down amid an expensive public records fight with a local newspaper, The Arizona Republic.
Those records highlighted problems with the investigation and made it clear that conspiracy theories about the election had infused the work.
“Looks like basically our numbers are screwy,” Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan wrote in a Sept. 13, 2021, text message obtained by The Arizona Republic days before they delivered their report to the state Senate.
One document released through the litigation laid out plans to use microscope cameras and shine a “UV-B and UV-A source” on allegedly suspect ballots, for example, though election experts noted the plans failed to mention more likely issues, like how to handle a ballot that voted for more than one candidate for an office.
In January 2022, the Maricopa County's election department released a 93-page rebuttal of the review as well.
“The November 2020 General Election was administered with integrity and the results were accurate and reliable,” the report stated. “This has been proven through statutorily required accuracy tests, court cases, hand counts performed by the political parties, and post-election audits.”
The report also states that “nearly every finding included faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions, and a lack of understanding of federal and state election laws.”
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, slammed the apparent investigation into her state in a statement.
“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," she said.
Ken Bennett, the former Republican secretary of state in Arizona who was the state Senate's on-site liaison to the audit, told NBC News on Monday he had not received a subpoena, though he said he has retained records from the audit at his home.
