As his state spent millions of dollars fighting lawsuits and he assigned his state government staff tens of thousands of hours of work to argue those cases–some he brought himself to overturn the elections in which Republicans lost–then-Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich reportedly hid official records and documents that proved the 2020 election was legitimate and conducted without fraud, the Washington Post reports.
In the thousands of hours of their work, Brnovich’s staff created and presented to him a report showing how virtually all the claims of election fraud and large-scale vote fraud were unfounded–a report that Brnovich never released prior to being voted out of office in the 2022 statewide election won by Democrat Kris Mayes against election denier Abraham Hamadeh.
After unfounded claims were made of bamboo ballots and dead voters, the state’s and other organizations’ various investigations found no support for any of the claims made by election denier Donald Trump. In September 2020, his office presented him with a report titled “Election Review Summary” that systemically disproved the assertions made by Trump and his legal team, as well as 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Despite his staff debunking the claims, Brnovich demanded his staff continue to argue about the non-existent corruption in Maricopa County’s elections, telling staff to disregard fact checks done by independent media and outside organizations, but most critically requiring them to ignore the findings of the office’s own lawyers and investigators. He did this despite never formally tried to overturn the results of the election and confirming Trump’s loss in the days after the election.
“The people of Arizona had a right to know this information before the 2022 election,” Mayes said in an interview. “Maricopa County election officials had a right to know that they were cleared of wrongdoing. And every American had a right to know that the 2020 election in Arizona, which in part decided the presidency, was conducted accurately and fairly.”