Phoenix — Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen said he complied “late last week” with a federal grand jury subpoena and that “The FBI has the records,” describing the transfer as part of a federal effort tied to 2020 election questions and a disputed audit in Maricopa County.
Petersen, a Republican and president of the state Senate, made the announcement on social media Monday, saying he had handed over records related to a controversial audit that legislative Republicans had ordered in Maricopa County, the largest county in the state and a key presidential battleground.
The FBI’s Phoenix office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Petersen did not reply right away to additional questions. A spokesperson for Senate Republicans said in an email that Petersen “does not have anything to add outside of his X post at this time.”
Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, criticized Petersen’s post, saying that multiple audits, independent investigations and legal challenges related to the 2020 presidential election had found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome. “Warren Petersen knows all of this. He has known it for years,” Mayes said, adding that he “spread false stories of election fraud in 2020” and “remains an unrepentant election denier.”
Mayes also said she viewed the federal effort as something other than a legitimate investigation. “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 in a statement.
Republican lawmakers had commissioned a private firm to review the Maricopa County election as part of their audit, a process that lasted six months in 2021. Experts said that review was marred by bias and a flawed methodology, including time spent checking for bamboo fibers on ballots as part of a broader set of unproven theories.
That audit ended without providing proof to support then-President Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen. According to the report, the audit found that Biden received 360 more votes than the certified results for Maricopa County showed, and the firm, Cyber Ninjas, acknowledged that there were “no substantial differences” between its hand count and the official count.
Other reviews of the approximately 2.1 million ballots by nonpartisan professionals that followed state law found no significant problems in Maricopa County. Biden won the county by about 45,000 votes and later won Arizona by roughly 10,500 votes, based on the certified statewide result.
The federal investigations in Georgia and Arizona have used different legal paths to obtain records. In Georgia, the FBI seized ballots and other election materials from Fulton County after the Justice Department sought a search warrant and a judge approved it, with the affidavit citing grounds that probable cause exists to believe a crime was committed. In Arizona, the AP report said the FBI relied on subpoenas, a process that does not require judicial sign-off.
The move comes as the Justice Department has clashed with states over access to detailed voter data, including names, dates of birth, addresses and partial Social Security numbers. Election officials have said turning over such information could violate state and federal privacy laws and could be used to remove people from voter rolls. Arizona is one of the states the Justice Department has sued to obtain the data.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in a statement Monday that at least some Maricopa County voter files could be among what Petersen provided to the FBI. Fontes said his office was considering legal options “to secure personal voter information in the 2020 data that was shared,” and a spokesperson for the office, Calli Jones, said the office was assessing what had been released. “This could be an end run by the Department of Justice to obtain unredacted voter files,” Jones said.