Ariz. attorney general changes stance on presidential election
As false claims of a stolen election took root in 2020, Arizona’s attorney general — a Republican — spoke out on national television. President Donald Trump was projected to lose the swing state, he said on Nov. 11, and “no facts” suggested otherwise.
This month, Mark Brnovich called into a far-right podcast with a different message: His investigation into the vote was turning up “serious concerns.”
“It’s frustrating for all of us because I think we all know what happened in 2020,” the attorney general told the host, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, without explaining what he meant. The podcast titled the segment “AZ AG On Interim Report On Stealing The 2020 Election.”
Many GOP candidates have embraced the former president’s false election claims while seeking a coveted endorsement in their 2022 primary races. But Brnovich, now running for Senate, stands out for his shift over the past year and a half. His Senate campaign has highlighted his ongoing review of the 2020 vote, launched last year in response to a widely ridiculed audit commissioned by state GOP lawmakers.
Critics say Brnovich has caved to conspiracy theorists for political gain in the Republican primary. Calculated choices to keep fanning Trump’s grievances mean more misinformed voters, more distractions for election workers and more questions about who will stick up for democracy in the future, said Tammy Patrick, a former elections official in Arizona’s biggest battleground, Maricopa County.
“If no one is held responsible for lying … or undermining confidence based on their own greed and, you know, desire for power to either be elected or be reelected — if no one is held accountable for those actions, then we are in real trouble right now,” said Patrick, who now works with the nonpartisan group Democracy Fund.
Brnovich’s comments on the election are hardly the most extreme among Arizona’s midterm candidates: He has not called to decertify results and end or dramatically restrict the state’s long tradition of mail-in voting, like prominent GOP contenders for governor and secretary of state. But coming from Arizona’s top legal officer, Brnovich’s words hold particular weight.
In a campaign email this week, Brnovich said his office found nearly a fifth of early ballots in Maricopa County were “transported outside the chain of custody.” In fact, his report found missing information on paperwork but offered no evidence that ballots left the proper hands. On Bannon’s podcast, he claimed the county uses artificial intelligence to verify ballot signatures. In fact, every signature is verified by election staff.
“As his investigators could have told him if he asked,” tweeted Stephen Richer, a top elections official for Maricopa County and a Republican. “Unreal.” Democrat Adrian Fontes — who held Richer’s office in 2020 — said in an interview that Brnovich was emblematic of the GOP and that “political cowardice doesn’t surprise me anymore.”
The attorney general’s office referred most questions to Brnovich’s campaign, which did not respond to requests for comment.
“From his days prosecuting gang and public integrity cases, to his current tenure as Attorney General, Mark Brnovich’s record of upholding the rule of law is beyond reproach,” said Katie Conner, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, in a statement. “Our Office remains dedicated to the integrity of the investigation, not with responding to political or social media chatter.”
She did not respond to a question about whether Brnovich believes Biden fairly won the election.
Brnovich announced his campaign for Senate last summer, as Arizona’s partisan audit was in full swing. “I understand there are a lot of people who are frustrated and have questioned the results of the last election, and to me, that speaks to the need for confidence in the system and the need for election integrity measures,” he told local news station KTAR in July. The five-month spectacle — which election experts called deeply flawed — affirmed Biden’s win in Maricopa County but also provided new fuel for baseless theories.
The GOP-led Arizona Senate enlisted a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas with no prior election-auditing experience and a chief executive who had endorsed claims the 2020 vote was fraudulent. Citing security concerns, Maricopa County leaders said they would have to replace the voting equipment they turned over.
When the state Senate shared a report in September, Brnovich said it raised “serious questions” and began his own review. This month — under growing pressure from the right to show results — he released an interim report that laid out voting “vulnerabilities” but described only isolated cases of fraud.
Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters were unimpressed.
“I don’t like letters,” tweeted far-right Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican. “I like arrests and prosecutions.” Trump weighed in scathingly Monday, saying the attorney general was choosing “noncontroversy” and all but ruling him out for an endorsement.
Soon Blake Masters, one of Brnovich’s opponents in GOP Senate primary, was on War Room, the same podcast where Brnovich had promoted his election investigation.
“I don’t think Brnovich’s heart was in it,” said Masters, a venture capitalist who was part of Trump’s presidential transition team.
He asked why county leaders were not in handcuffs.
Many Republican primary candidates have leaned into false claims about the 2020 election while banking on the support of the president and his loyal followers. In Georgia, Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate David Perdue has amped up his rhetoric this year, falsely claiming that both his Senate race and the presidential race were “stolen.” Around the country, officials who helped run the 2020 election and certify its results have drawn challengers who repeat Trump’s falsehoods.