PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona’s Republican Senate President Warren Petersen announced Monday that he provided federal investigators with documents from the 2020 presidential election, marking another development in the Trump administration’s pursuit of the former president’s unsubstantiated claims about the election he lost to Joe Biden.
In a social media statement, Petersen revealed he responded “late last week” to a federal grand jury subpoena requesting documents from the disputed Maricopa County election review that Republican legislators had commissioned.
“The FBI has the records,” Petersen stated.
Petersen declined to provide further details when contacted, with a Republican Senate spokesperson confirming via email that he “does not have anything to add outside of his X post at this time.” The Phoenix FBI field office has not responded to inquiries about the matter.
This development represents the second instance in 2025 where federal agents have collected election materials from key battleground counties that Trump failed to win during his reelection bid. Earlier in January, FBI agents confiscated ballots and additional documents from Georgia’s Fulton County, encompassing Atlanta, following a Justice Department search warrant application. Court documents revealed the warrant was based on longstanding allegations that had undergone extensive investigation without uncovering evidence of significant fraud.
Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes released a sharp rebuke following Petersen’s announcement, emphasizing that numerous audits, independent reviews, and court proceedings regarding the 2020 election discovered no proof of widespread irregularities that would have changed the results.
“Warren Petersen knows all of this. He has known it for years. He spread false stories of election fraud in 2020, and he remains an unrepentant election denier,” Mayes stated. “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.”
Republican legislators contracted a company that conducted a six-month investigation in 2021 seeking fraud evidence from the prior year’s presidential contest, an effort that experts criticized for its partisan approach and questionable methods. The review examined far-fetched theories, including testing ballots for bamboo fibers to determine if they had been illegally imported from Asia.
The investigation concluded without validating former President Trump’s false assertions of election theft — actually determining that Biden had received 360 additional votes beyond what Maricopa County’s certified results showed, including the Phoenix area.
Cyber Ninjas, the contracted firm, also confirmed there were “no substantial differences” between their manual ballot recount and the official tally.
Earlier examinations of the 2.1 million ballots conducted by impartial professionals following state protocols identified no major issues with Maricopa County’s 2020 election administration, which was overseen by Republicans both then and currently. Biden carried the county by 45,000 votes and secured Arizona by 10,500 votes statewide.
Federal authorities employed different approaches to secure election documents in both states. The Georgia situation involved a court-approved search warrant requiring FBI agents to demonstrate probable cause for suspected criminal activity. In Arizona, investigators used subpoenas, a legal tool that doesn’t require judicial approval or prosecutors to establish probable cause for potential crimes.
These 2020 election investigations occur amid Justice Department disputes with various states, including some under Republican leadership, regarding access to comprehensive voter information containing names, birth dates, addresses, and partial Social Security numbers. Election administrators have raised concerns that sharing such data could violate state and federal privacy regulations and potentially enable improper voter registration removals.
