Key Points:

• Federal grand jury subpoenas records from 2020 Arizona election audit

• Senate President Warren Petersen complies with federal subpoena for audit records

• Attorney General Kris Mayes calls the grand jury inquiry “weaponization”

A federal grand jury apparently is looking at the results of a long-ago-debunked “audit” of the 2020 Arizona election.

Senate President Warren Petersen said in a social media post on Monday that he “received and complied with” a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to the Senate audit of Maricopa County results following the 2020 election. That is a race where Joe Biden outpolled Donald Trump.

“The FBI has the records,” Petersen said.

He declined to comment further.

This comes just weeks after the FBI raided Fulton County, Ga. — another state where Trump lost in 2020 — seizing their election records from that year.

Both events come amid ongoing claims by Trump, who lost the 2020 election, that there was extensive fraud. And he has publicly urged his Department of Justice to investigate.

“Great!!!” the president posted on social media in response to the reports of the subpoena in Arizona.

There was no immediate response from the FBI.

But what Trump — or his agency — hopes to get out of it remains unclear.

In fact, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, who reviewed what he got in 2022 from then-Senate President Karen Fann, found the report prepared by Cyber Ninjas as deeply flawed.

Brnovich for example, noted that the report claimed that 282 people who had allegedly died in early October 2020 cast ballots in the November general election.

“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead,” he said. “Many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.”

In fact, the attorney general said, only one of 282 listed voters on that report actually was deceased. The others were not only quite alive but also current voters.

But it wasn’t just what Cyber Ninjas had provided that Brnovich concluded was largely unfounded.

He said his agency’s Election Integrity Unit looked at the names of another 409 allegedly dead voters that came from other sources. And then investigators went through yet another report of 5,943 names, which made no distinction between dead voters and dead registrants.

“Once again, these claims were thoroughly investigated and resulted in only a handful of potential cases,” Brnovich told Fann.

“Some were so absurd the names and birth dates didn’t even match the deceased,” he reported. “And others included dates of death after the election.”

And Brnovich said while his agency has previously prosecuted other instances of dead people voting, even those cases “were ultimately determined to be isolated incidents.”

Of note is that the audit also included a hand count of the 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots. And it found that Biden actually outpolled Trump by an even larger margin than the official tally.

Responding to the reports of a grand jury subpoena, Kris Mayes, the current attorney general, cited the Brnovich investigation into the Cyber Ninjas report. And she said that complaints and allegations submitted to the AG’s office “were also unsupported by factual evidence.”

“Warren Petersen knows all this,” she said. “He has known it for years.”

Mayes also said that Petersen, who is running to be the GOP nominee for attorney general to take her on in November, has been “an unrepentant election denier.” She pointed to a rally he had after the election in 2020 claiming “we certified the vote prematurely.”

Petersen then co-chaired the oversight of the Cyber Ninjas inquiry with Fann.

Mayes also took a shot at the president, saying that what his administration appears to be pursuing is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry.

“It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies,” she said.

The 2022 report by Brnovich was only one of several that concluded that Cyber Ninjas’ findings, which had never conducted an election audit before being hired by Fann, were misleading or outright wrong.

Other claims had since been debunked, including people voting duplicate ballots, machine-filled-in ballots, missing signatures on absentee ballots, and tallying machines linked to the internet.

For example, Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, claimed that the county logged 74,232 more early ballots than the number of requests sent out.

County spokesman Fields Moseley, whose staff worked with the county recorder to research the claims, said in response at the time, there were two problems with that.

First, he said the records show there were 2,364,426 requests for early ballots, with 1,918,024 returned.

“So the claim is not just wrong but completely wrong,” he said.

Aside from that, Moseley pointed out that there are two ways to vote early: with a mail-in ballot or going directly to one of the early voting locations. And in the latter case, people are handed ballots that are prepared there but lumped into the early ballot category.

“So it’s not unusual that we would have more early votes than mail-in ballots sent,” Moseley said.

There even was a lawsuit over a related issue of whether the tabulation machines were properly recording votes when ballots, which had been damaged or had extra marks, had to be redone by hand so they could be fed through counting machines.

In that case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said that a random check of 1,626 of these ballots, ordered by a trial court, found an error rate of as low as 0.37% or as high as 0.55%.

But the justice said that extrapolating that out to the 27,869 ballots that had to be duplicated to be able to be counted would have gained Donald Trump just 103 votes or, at best, 153 votes, “neither of which is sufficient to call the election results into question.”