Arizona Is Now at the Center of Election Investigations

Updated on March 10 at 9:21 p.m. ET.

In mid-February, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fighting to keep her job, she held an election-security event at a Homeland Security Investigations field office in Scottsdale, Arizona. In the past, she said, the state had been an “absolute disaster on elections,” and ensuring the security of election equipment was her responsibility. She also urged Congress to pass President Trump’s voter-ID bill. The message was less surprising than the location. HSI, the agency’s investigative branch, devotes most of its efforts to going after transnational drug cartels and human-trafficking networks, not to securing domestic elections.

A week after the event, Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, Matthew Murphy, told the state attorney general’s office that his office was now probing the 2020 election in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the details of the meeting. A state investigator asked why the government was scrutinizing the results, given that they had already been litigated and investigated. Murphy made clear that he was acting on “direction from D.C.,” the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The HSI investigation in Arizona, which has not previously been reported, comes as the FBI has embarked on a separate election probe in the state. “This is not a joint investigation” with HSI, a person familiar with the FBI investigation told us. HSI headquarters and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice are coordinating the investigation, which is focused on identifying alleged voter-fraud activity and related potential enforcement actions, according to a person familiar with the effort.

The Arizona investigations are part of the Trump administration’s escalating effort to vindicate the president’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Trump narrowly lost the contest in Arizona, and the state has since become a magnet for conspiracy theorists. Early last year, the administration ordered the creation of a small task force within HSI to probe election-fraud claims in other cities, according to a former HSI agent and one current HSI agent who described the assigned personnel as “unenthusiastic.” Last month, HSI investigators reportedly showed up at a high school in Dayton, Ohio, to investigate voter fraud. (HSI’s election work is not wholly without precedent; in 2020, HSI investigators charged 19 foreign nationals with illegally voting in the 2016 election.) HSI is “not able to comment on any active investigations,” said DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis, but is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.” Bis said that HSI is “committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders,” citing cases from the past year where four foreign nationals were charged with voting fraud or unlawful voting.

Yesterday, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, a Trump ally, wrote on X that he had complied with a subpoena he had received last week seeking records related to a widely discredited review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. (That review, despite its questionable methodology, still affirmed Joe Biden’s win.) “The FBI has the records,” Petersen wrote. The attorney general’s office said there was no indication that the two probes were connected: “The FBI never came up in conversations,” Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, told us. (The FBI, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona declined to comment. Petersen declined to comment further through a spokesperson. Murphy did not comment.) State and county election officials were unaware of the probe. “This is chasing conspiracy theories and mythologies and perpetuating the politics of grievance. Donald Trump lost 2020, and he needs to put on his big-boy pants and accept it,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told us. A spokesperson for the county recorder, who splits election duties with a governing board, said the office has not been contacted by federal law enforcement about the probe. A county spokesperson told us that the governing board “will continue to focus on administering safe, secure, and accurate elections in 2026.”

[Read: ‘It’s a five-alarm fire’]

The investigations in Arizona mark the latest attempt by the Trump administration to re-litigate 2020. In January, federal authorities seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. Last year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence opened an examination of voting equipment from Puerto Rico. In recent months, ODNI staff have met with U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country to discuss their inquiry into potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and communication networks. Those efforts appear intended to validate claims that foreign actors could interfere with American elections. An ODNI official told us that the agency “cooperates with various government agencies, including DOJ, to help protect election integrity” in accordance with its statutory authorities. ODNI is not directly involved in the HSI or FBI investigations in Arizona, a source familiar with the matter told us.

Mayes said that her office responded to HSI’s request with public records from the 2020-election investigation that had been conducted by her Republican predecessor, Mark Brnovich. “The Trump administration is engaged in an unserious investigation into an election that took place six years ago based on nothing but conspiracy theories and lies,” she told us in a statement.

Emails that we obtained through a public-records request detail the interactions among Homeland Security investigators and state officials. On February 20, after Murphy met with state authorities, a state special agent sent him an email with the subject line “2020 Election Audit Summary.” Attached to the email was a report that Mayes had released in February 2023, Taylor told us. That report drew on records from her predecessor’s tenure to address a slew of accusations by Republican state lawmakers, MAGA influencers, activists, and others claiming widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The attorney general’s office found that many of the allegations submitted to state authorities were unsupported by evidence, and others amounted to mischaracterizations of the election process. The allegations included assertions that votes had been counted more than once and that large numbers of votes had been cast by deceased people. “The Attorney General’s Office spent 10,000 hours investigating every claim made by election deniers, from bamboo ballots imported from China to Italian spy satellites flipping votes to President Biden,” Mayes’s office said.

Days later, Murphy wanted more information from state investigators about claims in the report that had been listed as “undetermined.” He asked whether any conclusions had been made regarding allegations about ballots that arrived after the legal deadline, “questionable ballots from unknown printers,” or the deletion of election records.

“Just checking in with you,” Murphy wrote to state investigators on March 2. “I have to get a report in by COB today, so was hoping to have some of the materials soon if at all possible.”

On Thursday, state investigators and the attorney general’s criminal-division chief replied to Murphy, sending him a PowerPoint presentation that details a slew of false claims about the election that state investigators had previously debunked. Separately, state officials shared with him more links to their investigative work about the 2020 election.

[Read: ‘The trust has been absolutely destroyed’]

“Thanks for sharing guys much appreciated,” Murphy replied. “Couple of quick follow up questions based on my review and in trying to focus on the few areas we are following up on,” he continued. He again asked whether the investigators had more information about late-arriving ballots and allegations about “questionable ballots.”

The attorney general’s office did not respond to Murphy’s final missive—and has no plans to do so, an official in Mayes’s office told us.

The 2020 election in Maricopa County drew intense scrutiny inside and outside Arizona largely because, as home to more than half of the state’s voters, the county helped deliver the state to Biden by 10,457 votes. Influenced by Trump’s and his MAGA base’s relentless and false claims that the election was rigged against him, the GOP-led state Senate hired contractors to review the election in the county. Election officials and experts assailed the review, done by the security firm Cyber Ninjas—which made claims about the election process that were disputed by state and county election officials—as deeply flawed and partisan. Still, the Cyber Ninjas review is frequently cited by MAGA influencers, state lawmakers, and others in Trump’s orbit as credible evidence of a system that could not be trusted.

Mark Finchem, a Republican state lawmaker and a Trump ally who has long spread misinformation about elections, said during an online media appearance yesterday that a nonprofit he helps lead has been “feeding research” to investigators.

“Quite frankly,” Finchem said, “we’ve advocated that this has been a racketeering case for a long time.”

Arizona’s state- and local-election officials have consistently defended the integrity of their elections amid challenges from candidates of both parties, online conspiracy theorists, and even their own state government. One thing they haven’t had to contend with are investigations of a long-ago election by the federal government, working on behalf of the president. But that’s the world they’re in now—and it will make the task of pulling off a midterm election eight months from now that much trickier.