AZ Attorney General Opens Probe Into Trump Election Meddling

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The office of Arizona state Attorney General Mark Brnovich has now requested all evidence of potential double voting in the state from Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Hobbs has previously urged Brnovich to launch an investigation into a pressure campaign undertaken by the Trump team to try and get the presidential election outcome in Maricopa County, Arizona, to turn out in their favor. Now, Brnovich’s team has also asked for Hobbs to “please provide any and all records your office possesses related to potential violations of Arizona’s election laws,” which The Arizona Republic identifies as a “reference to the pressure campaign.”

Thus, even though Brnovich’s team is tempering their efforts by also focusing on potential election fraud, they’re apparently investigating the Trump team’s Arizona pressure campaign. The Republic notes that the request for records from Hobbs’s office is “the first public sign that Brnovich… intends to examine public records in the aftermath of The Republic’s reporting, which first detailed the pressure campaign.”

Trump ally Rudy Giuliani and Arizona state GOP chair Kelli Ward were both involved in imposing that pressure. Maricopa County Supervisor Clint Hickman, a Republican who at the time chaired the board on which he served, even received phone calls from the White House switchboard, with an operator seeking to patch him through to the then-president himself, according to voicemail remarks that were left. Hickman has confirmed that he intentionally let the White House go to voicemail, saying on CNN that “all of these people that called me, it wasn’t stonewalling. We were in litigation at all these points… Whatever needed to be said, needed to be said in a courtroom in front of a judge or a jury.”

As for Brnovich’s request for information from Hobbs about potential illegal voting in Arizona during last year’s presidential election, Hobbs’s team “is waiting for a report from a national organization that works with states across the nation to help identify potential incidents of double voting,” as the Republic summarizes remarks from a spokesperson for Hobbs.

Elsewhere in Arizona, Republicans from the Arizona state Senate have been leading an audit of last year’s election results from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, but a review by the Associated Press found that, separate from the so-called audit, county officials had forwarded just one case of potential election fraud to local prosecutors. Just one. Across the entire state as a whole, just four individual cases of election fraud — in a state where well over 3 million ballots were cast last year — had culminated in criminal charges at the time of the report from the Associated Press. The evidence for right-wing claims of systematic fraud is just not there.