More concerns about 2026 elections as FBI gets Arizona's 2020 records
The Trump administration has subpoenaed records related to the 2020 election in Arizona’s biggest county, the state Senate president says. It’s “the latest in a series of steps taken by the president to relitigate an election he lost and bolster the federal government’s authority over elections,” reports Politico.
Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, said in a Monday afternoon social media post that last week he “received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records relating to the Arizona State Senate’s 2020 audit of Maricopa County,” adding that “The FBI has the records.”
Petersen was responding to a post from President Trump on Truth Social calling the development “Great!!!”
“The subpoena opened a new front in the Trump administration’s expanding hunt for evidence that has never surfaced to support the president’s claims of widespread fraud,” says The Washington Post. “The law enforcement steps have alarmed election officials and Democrats who fear that the administration is building an argument for interfering in this year’s midterm elections.”
The move by investigators indicates that the Justice Department has added a new state to its efforts to re-examine the 2020 race, notes The New York Times. That inquiry first was disclosed in January when FBI agents executed a search warrant at an elections office in Fulton County, Ga., removing truckloads of voting records.
Election officials and experts have expressed alarm at the Trump administration’s efforts to reexamine an election that’s been repeatedly scrutinized and the subject of dozens of lawsuits, says The Washington Post. Courts and independent reviews found no widespread voter fraud in 2020 in Arizona, Georgia, or in other swing states.
“I think this is very deliberate,” says Lawrence Norden, vice president of elections at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “I think it’s part of a concerted campaign on the part of the White House to undermine confidence in elections, to challenge results that they don’t like in 2026.”
Richard Hasen, a law professor at UCLA and director of the university’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, says the administration’s efforts could be intended to placate a president who refuses to accept his 2020 loss.
But he says he fears that “these could be test runs for what the federal government might try to do to interfere with the tabulation of ballots in 2026.”
“The fact that these actions appear to be accelerating and appear to be driven in part by election deniers who are now part of the Trump administration should cause anyone who cares about free and fair elections to be gravely concerned,” Hasen says.
“The good news is that there is still time to stop this assault on our democracy, and we know how to do it,” says Marc Elias, who’s been described in The New York Review as “the go-to attorney for legal issues relating to elections, voting rights, and redistricting.”
Elias says:
“Elected officials must stand firm against voter-suppression laws. Blue states must harden their defenses. Democratic campaigns and committees must treat these threats with the same urgency as any advertising or turnout battle. The legal community must be ready to fight on multiple fronts at once. And the media must stop treating this as ordinary partisan politics — it is an authoritarian power grab, and it should be covered as such.
“When our democracy hangs by a thread, and our elections are on the line, we cannot afford to operate as if the same rulebook still applies. The FBI and DOJ are no longer independent institutions; they operate to advance Trump’s partisan agenda.
“I am preparing for the fight ahead. Trump has built an army and weaponized the justice system to secure his power. We are not too late — but the time to stop him is now.”
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