Behind the FBI’s Maricopa County probe: A debunked ‘audit’ funded by election deniers

When the FBI subpoenaed documents from a legislative audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County, Arizona, it opened another front in President Donald Trump’s attack on free and fair elections.

But the far-right claims of voter fraud in Arizona motivating the FBI probe are based on old, debunked allegations that never stood up to scrutiny, despite repeated investigations and reviews — including one funded by election deniers and conducted by people sympathetic to Trump. 

In fact, that biased probe actually found that former President Joe Biden had a larger vote margin in Maricopa than initially reported. 

And Trump’s renewed attempts to rehash the 2020 vote in Arizona are benefitting from the participation of people who were involved the first time around.

The bureau sought the subpoena just five weeks after it cited claims from notorious election conspiracists to secure a search warrant against an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, for ballots from the 2020 election.

News of the FBI’s move on Maricopa County broke after Warren Petersen, the Republican president of the Arizona Senate, said on social media Monday that he recently received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena from the FBI for documents related to the election audit.

A federal official with knowledge of the subpoena told the Washington Post that the records obtained from Petersen included images of ballots, absentee envelopes, the tally of cast votes and software.

State officials and voting rights organizations strongly condemned the new probe, saying it undermines faith in elections.

The Maricopa backstory

Petersen’s compliance with the subpoena wasn’t surprising. 

After Biden’s victory in Arizona, Petersen, then state senator, regularly promoted conspiracies about the Maricopa County vote, and met with Trump officials who were actively attempting to overturn the state’s election results, such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. 

He was also instrumental in initiating and collecting the election-related materials for the extraordinarily partisan audit.

Petersen, who chaired the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and then-Senate President Karen Fann, subpoenaed Maricopa County officials for 2.1 million ballots cast in the county, election machines and other materials. The county officials challenged the subpoena, arguing that the transfer could violate state law and put voters’ privacy at risk, but a judge ultimately ruled that they must comply. 

After obtaining the materials, Fann and Petersen formally contracted four firms in March 2021 to audit Maricopa County’s federal election results. They did that despite the fact that an audit initiated by Maricopa County but carried out by two independent auditors had concluded just weeks prior that the election was sound.

Fann framed the legislative audit as necessary for bringing “integrity to the election process” and ensuring “the integrity of the vote.” But to lead the audit, she tapped Cyber Ninjas, a small Florida-based cybersecurity firm that had no experience scrutinizing elections and whose leadership was openly biased.

The firm’s CEO, Doug Logan, had spread election misinformation on social media and helped draft an “election fraud facts” report for Republican senators who planned to object to Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Logan also had links to, and regularly communicated with, prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists like former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Trump’s former national security advisor, Mike Flynn, according to documents obtained by American Oversight.

Byrne, who aided Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election, was a key funder of the Cyber Ninjas’ audit. Though the Arizona Senate agreed to pay Cyber Ninja’s $150,000 in state funds, it soon became apparent that the effort would cost far more — and Byrne stepped in as a chief fundraiser. 

Byrne started the group Fund The Audit through his nonprofit political group The America Project and raised $1.7 million for Cyber Ninjas — which included his own money and donations he solicited from far-right supporters, according to the Arizona Mirror. 

“This is an audit like none that has ever been performed,” Byrne said at the time. “This audit is an audit check for all forms of mischief.”

Byrne wasn’t the only far-right conspiracist with deep pockets funding Cyber Ninjas. 

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and renowned election denier who’s currently running for Minnesota governor, said he was funneling money to conservative groups in Arizona who were involved with fundraising for the Cyber Ninjas audit. Other far-right figures who ponied up their own cash to help fund the audit included former Trump lawyer and OANN reporter Christina Bobb and the QAnon-supporting Trump lawyer Lin Wood. 

In total, five groups — including Byrne’s — raised nearly $5.7 million for the Cyber Ninjas audit. 

But the entire effort ended up costing Arizona taxpayers nearly $2.4 million, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice. 

That’s because when Maricopa County officials transferred voting machines to Cyber Ninjas, Katie Hobbs, then the Democratic secretary of state, said it was considered a “cyber incident to critical infrastructure.” She ordered that the county replace all of its election equipment, since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security considered voting machines to be critical infrastructure.

Chaotic failure

The audit started April 23, 2021, but quickly went off the rails. Initially, counters were using blue colored pens during the audit’s hand recount even though blue ink is strictly forbidden from audit procedures because it can be read by tabulators and can spoil ballots.

Based on the counters’ use of blue pens, the audit was temporarily halted by a court order on its first day.

In total, the audit took approximately six months to complete and was marked by a severe lack of transparency and security failures, according to the Brennan Center’s report.

Cyber Ninjas fought to prevent the disclosure of its audit procedures and for weeks attempted to bar non-partisan election security experts from Hobbs’ office from observing the process.

After security experts were permitted to observe the audit, they noted that the Senate and Cyber Ninjas failed to implement basic security measures to protect the integrity of the election materials. Doors of the audit site were unlocked, and at times there was unchecked access to the ballots and other election materials.

Ultimately, in September 2021, the chaotic audit not only affirmed Biden’s win in Maricopa County, but it widened Trump’s loss by finding 360 more votes for Biden than the county had awarded him in the official count.

However, the firm also included an avalanche of unsubstantiated accusations against Maricopa County’s handling of the election, including that voting machines were connected to the internet and that digital voting records were deleted. Maricopa County’s Election Department later meticulously refuted those claims. 

Alongside the Senate audit, Arizona’s then-attorney general, Republican Mark Brnovich, conducted a separate six-month investigation into Maricopa County. 

In an “initial report,”Brnovich said that his office found no proof of fraud in Maricopa County but claimed that it identified “serious vulnerabilities” in the vote. At the time, Brnovich was vying for Trump’s endorsement for his U.S. Senate bid, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

After Brnovich left the office, the Attorney General’s Office revealed that he had suppressed a report prepared by investigators that concluded that none of the allegations of election fraud in Maricopa County had merit.