Arizona AG Never Released Report on Election Fraud Probe

Arizona's attorney general says her Republican predecessor launched a massive investigation of alleged irregularities in the 2020 election and then sat on the results after investigators found no evidence of widespread fraud. Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, released internal memos on Wednesday, describing them as "deeply unsettling and unacceptable," the Arizona Republic reports. She said a March 2022 summary of investigative findings showed the election "was conducted fairly and accurately by election officials," contrary to the claims of former President Donald Trump and many state Republicans, but then-AG Mark Brnovich never released it.

Brnovich did, however, release an "interim report" in April that claimed his investigation of the election in Maricopa County "revealed serious vulnerabilities that must be addressed and raises questions about the 2020 election in Arizona," though his own investigators said their probe refuted the claims, the AP reports. At the time, Brnovich was running in the Republican primary for a US Senate seat. It wasn't until days before the 2022 midterm elections, months after he lost the primary, that he criticized politicians who had supported Trump's fraud claims, calling them "clowns" engaged in a “giant grift," the Washington Post reports

Mayes tells the Republic that the public was misled. "First and foremost, the people of Arizona had a right to know this before the 2022 election," she says. "This office has a solemn duty to be transparent and honest with the people of Arizona." The report Brnovich didn't release looked into 638 separate complaints about alleged fraud. Only two cases were prosecuted, both involving felons who illegally sought to vote, the Post reports. Investigators spent more than 10,000 hours looking into fraud claims, and Mayes says "diligently investigating every conspiracy theory under the sun distracted this office from its core mission of protecting the people of Arizona from real crime and fraud." (More Mark Brnovich stories.)