Washington, DC — Yesterday, Democratic Arizona AG Kris Mayes released documents that show that former GOP AG Mark Brnovich did not release his investigators’ reports that debunked election fraud claims.

The Washington Post first reported on the documents, writing, “Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private.”

“The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his team privately disregarded fact checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence in the 2020 vote as well as in subsequent elections.”

 AP reports, “Thursday’s release is the latest confirmation that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that Biden won the presidency legitimately. Trump continues to repeat his lie that the election was stolen from him as he mounts his third bid for the White House, despite reviews and audits saying otherwise in the battleground states he contested and his own administration officials debunking his claims.”

“Agents from the office of Brnovich, a Republican, had spent over 10,000 hours looking into potential voting irregularities and allegations of illegal voting, Mayes’ office said in a news release. A September summary prepared by the attorney general’s Special Investigations Section showed it had not turned up evidence that backed up the claims,” writes NBC News.

MSNBC also reported, “Naturally, the GOP state attorney general would’ve loved to present evidence in support of Trump’s conspiracy theories, and Brnovich went out of his way to look for anything that might substantiate his party’s ‘big lie.’ But the Arizonan ultimately couldn’t find any evidence because there was no evidence to find.”

“Mayes said the fraud claims were a waste. ‘The ten thousand plus hours spent diligently investigating every conspiracy theory under the sun distracted this office from its core mission of protecting the people of Arizona from real crime and fraud,’ Mayes said in a statement,” writes CBS News.

“The internal draft reports, provided to the Post by current Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes, reveal how Arizona’s top prosecutor publicly supported former President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud, and fomented conspiratorial innuendo regarding his election loss, in spite of the findings of his own investigation,” writes the Rolling Stone.

“Why it matters: The records show Brnovich could have quashed allegations that undermined trust in the election process. […] ‘The people of Arizona had a right to know this information before the 2022 election and county officials deserved to know they’d been cleared of wrongdoing, Mayes told the Post,’” writes Axios.

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