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As SAVE Act Vote Looms, FBI Expands 2020 Election Probe To Arizona

Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Authored...

The federal government's post-2020 election reckoning has arrived in Arizona. Warren Petersen, the Arizona Senate President, confirmed Monday that federal investigators came knocking — and he answered. 

"Late last week I received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records relating to the Arizona State Senate's 2020 audit of Maricopa County," Petersen wrote on X. "The FBI has the records. Any other report is fake news." 

The records in question trace back to the infamous Cyber Ninjas audit, the Republican-commissioned hand-count of Maricopa County ballots that election experts widely dismissed as partisan theater. Many mainstream media outlets reported that the audit vindicated Joe Biden, when in fact, the audit found that there were “sufficient discrepancies among the different systems that, in conjunction with some of our findings, suggest that the delta between the Presidential candidates is very close to the potential margin of error for the election.” There were 57,734 impacted ballot—which was larger than Biden’s margin of victory in the state, which was just under 10,500.

The Arizona subpoena marks the second known federal probe into 2020 election administration, following the FBI's January raid on a Fulton County, Georgia, election hub, where agents carted off truckloads of voting documentation. 

Multiple U.S. officials told Fox News that the DOJ examined Arizona election data spanning both 2020 and 2024. The White House redirected press inquiries to the FBI, which declined to comment.

While President Donald Trump expressed enthusiasm for the news in a post on Truth Social, Democrats are less than thrilled.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, disputed the investigation's legitimacy.

"What the Trump administration appears to be pursuing now is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry," she claimed.

"It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies." 

The Arizona development lands amid escalating tension over election security heading into the 2026 midterms. 

On Sunday, Trump issued a blunt legislative ultimatum, declaring on Truth Social that he would refuse to sign any bill until the Senate passed the SAVE America Act. "It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE," Trump posted. The legislation would require physical proof of citizenship for federal voter registration, a photo ID to vote, and would restrict mail-in voting to military personnel and a narrow set of extenuating circumstances.

Democrats in Washington, DC, have blasted the legislation as voter suppression, but a Harvard/Harris poll found that 71% of Americans support the bill, including 69% of independents, and 50% of Democrats. 

Poll after poll shows overwhelming support for voter ID laws across the political spectrum. According to the Pew Research Center, 83% of Americans support voter ID requirements, including large majorities of Democrats, independents, whites, blacks, and Latinos. Gallup reports similar findings, with 84% backing voter ID—98% of Republicans, 84% of independents, and even 67% of Democrats. The same survey found that 83% support requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. Rasmussen Reports puts support at 75%, noting that backing for voter ID has steadily increased over the past decade.

While support for the SAVE Act is bipartisan, Democrats in Congress are rabidly opposed to it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly called the SAVE Act “Jim Crow 2.0,” and made unsubstantiated claims that it would “disenfranchise tens of millions of people.”

Schumer also said, "If Trump is saying he won't sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed, then so be it: there will be total gridlock in the Senate. Senate Democrats will not help pass the SAVE Act under any circumstances." 

Unfortunately, the SAVE Act requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been cool to the idea of nuking the procedural rules to enforce a talking filibuster. 

“This particular approach in terms of the process is much more complicated and risky than people are assuming at the moment,” Thune told reporters on Monday. He also warned that trying to implement a talking filibuster without pushing through a formal rules change — which there aren’t enough votes for — could tie up the Senate floor for months.