FBI secretly seizes election records from Arizona’s largest county as voting probe expands

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The FBI is expanding its criminal probe into suspected election irregularities, secretly obtaining a large tranche of voting records from Arizona’s largest county with a recent grand jury subpoena, multiple people familiar with the probe told Just the News.

The sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury probe, said FBI agents are receiving terabytes of electronic election data from Maricopa County, about a month after the bureau first disclosed an investigation into election irregularities by raiding a warehouse near Atlanta and seizing ballots from the 2020 election conducted in Fulton County, Georgia’s largest metropolis.

Election irregularities in Arizona and elsewhere

The subpoena comes five years after the GOP-led Arizona state Senate conducted a lengthy investigation into the 2020 election and concluded there were significant irregularities.

On Monday, Arizona State Senate President Warren Petersen confirmed his body received a subpoena for 2020 election records.

“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.  The FBI has the records,” he wrote on X.

People familiar with the FBI investigation told Just the News that the bureau has received data under subpoena for multiple elections including 2020 and 2024.

More recently, the bureau was alerted to a report filed by Republican and Democrat election observers who believed they observed irregularities in November 2024 at a warehouse in Arizona where blank and filled-out absentee ballots were observed in the same location, according to the sources.

Congress has never released the report from the staffers who were sent to observe the 2024 election in Maricopa County, which includes Arizona’s largest city of Phoenix.

But House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil recently hinted at the significance of the report in an interview with the Just the News, No Noise television show.

“We’re digging back through those reports that were submitted by our election observers that were deployed across the country,” Steil said. “This is where working hand in glove with other federal government agencies is so important.

“We have reports documenting instances that occurred in Arizona and across the country, and we are reviewing those in real time and working hand in glove with federal partners to make sure that the law was followed in every jurisdiction in the country,” he added.

FBI likely to expand ballot-related searches elsewhere

The sources said the joint report filed by one GOP and one Democratic observer who were in Maricopa County on election night 2024 included photos of the ballots and storage facility, which they described as heavily guarded and having ballots from multiple states’ elections.

Officials said that report was one of several foundations for the subpoena executed by the FBI in recent days.

Sources said the FBI is likely to execute searches and subpoenas in other states beyond Georgia and Arizona in coming weeks.

The bureau has been coy about the full extent of its probe, but the unsealed affidavit from its raid of Fulton County’s election center made clear the bureau is looking at possible violation of federal laws that require election administrators to follow state laws when sending out and counting ballots.

FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans told the court the bureau has “substantiated” some major irregularities in how votes were counted in Georgia’s largest urban area in the aftermath of the 2020 election and is probing whether those failures were intentional efforts to violate federal election law.

“Some of those allegations have been disproven while some of those allegations have been substantiated, including through admissions by Fulton County,” Evans wrote. “This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws.”

Many of the substantiated allegations in Fulton County were previously reported by Just the News over the last five years based on its review of ballot records.

Audit suggested more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures

Concerns about election counting in Arizona, and specifically Maricopa County, stretch back more than a decade as the state moved to mostly mail-in ballots. In the old days, Democrats were the early complainants.

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