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, a Democratic stronghold 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 post on social media 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.”

The move by investigators indicated that the Justice Department had added a new state to its efforts to reexamine the 2020 race. That inquiry was first disclosed in January when FBI agents executed a search warrant at an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, removing truckloads of voting records.

Trump has long been fixated on his defeat in 2020. The investigation into supposed irregularities in the race is his latest effort to harness the vast investigative power of federal law enforcement to bolster his baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.

Trump hailed the move to send out the subpoena on social media Monday morning, linking to an article about the demand for records by John Solomon, a reporter for right-wing news outlet Just the News who has close ties to the FBI director, Kash Patel.

“Great!!!” the president wrote. “FBI secretly seizes election records from Arizona’s largest county as voting probe expands.”

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.

Six-Month Comprehensive Audit

The audit, sponsored by the state Senate and carried out by the company Cyber Ninjas, was a comprehensive 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.

In the end, the review was hardly helpful to the Trump campaign, determining in September 2021 that there was no evidence that Trump had been cheated out of victory. Instead, the report found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Trump in the county, a fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.

But while the physical ballots were destroyed after the Cyber Ninjas audit, Maricopa County officials also provided the Senate with 8 terabytes of data, including digital images of ballots, according to election officials at the time. This data was ultimately transferred to a cabin in Montana, according to reporting in The Arizona Republic.

In his article, Solomon appeared to suggest that the subpoena may also have sought some documents connected to the 2024 election, though it remains unclear why the state Senate would have those records. He asserted that one of the legal bases for the subpoena was an unreleased report by congressional staff members who claimed to have observed irregularities in that race at a warehouse in Arizona where blank and filled-out absentee ballots were stored.

The FBI affidavit used to secure the warrant in Fulton County indicated that the inquiry began with a referral by Kurt Olsen, the White House’s director of election security and integrity. It is being overseen by Thomas Albus, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, a longtime member of a conservative legal movement in a state that includes several other pro-Trump lawyers and officials.

The bureau’s search in Fulton County immediately prompted outrage from Democratic officials there, who have repeatedly refuted claims of malfeasance in the 2020 vote count. The officials have taken legal action against the Justice Department, demanding that the voting records seized in January be returned.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Alan Feuer, Nick Corasaniti and Glenn Thrush/Adriana Zehbrauskas
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