The FBI has expanded its criminal investigation into purported irregularities in the 2020 presidential election, issuing a grand jury subpoena for reams of information about voting results in Maricopa County, Arizona, the largest and most influential county in the swing state, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The subpoena was issued in recent days to the Arizona state Senate, which oversaw a sprawling but partisan audit of the vote result that was ordered by Senate Republicans in Maricopa County in the months after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Warren Petersen, the Republican president of the Arizona Senate, confirmed receiving the subpoena in a social media post 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,” he wrote. “The FBI has the records.”
Trump hailed the move to send out the subpoena on social media Monday morning.
Kris Mayes, the Arizona attorney general, in a statement Monday, said that the 2020 election results had already been “certified, litigated and confirmed.”
The subpoena issued to the state Senate appeared to be a way to get around the fact that many of the records from the 2020 election in Maricopa County, including ballots, have already been destroyed under normal election practices, according to two state officials familiar with the matter.
The audit, sponsored by the state Senate and carried out by the company Cyber Ninjas, was a six-month review of the 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest. It was ordered up after supporters of Trump insisted that his narrow loss in the state was the result of fraud.
The circuslike review of the 2020 vote commissioned by Arizona Republicans was derided from the start for its haphazard organizational structure and for not adhering to simple security standards. A report from a bipartisan group of election experts found that the review was based on numbers so unreliable that they appeared to be guesswork rather than tabulations.
After the final report had been delivered, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in Phoenix delivered a detailed four-hour livestreamed rebuttal of all the firm’s claims, showing that all, except one involving 50 votes, were either mistaken, misleading or outright false. A few days later, Cyber Ninjas said it was insolvent and shutting down.