Mark Brnovich hid the truth from you about Arizona's 2020 election

At long last, the cover-up surrounding Arizona’s 2020 election has been unveiled. And it was, indeed, a conspiracy.

A conspiracy of silence, that is. An outrageous cover-up of the truth.

It seems investigators with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office reported beginning in March 2022 that they could find no evidence of any widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Then-AG Mark Brnovich, who was at the time courting the Republican vote for the U.S. Senate, kept the results of the investigation private.

Instead, he released an interim report the following month, insinuating that something nefarious was afoot – a report that Trump and the conspiracy crowd within the Republican Party used to further promote their claim that Arizona’s election was dirty.

Investigators found no widespread conspiracy

The Washington Post first reported on the previously unreleased records of Brnovich’s yearlong investigation after Attorney General Kris Mayes vowed to make the findings public on Wednesday.

Bottom line: After more than 10,000 hours spent on investigating 430 reports of fraud and suspicious activity, the attorney general’s team of investigators turned up no evidence of any widespread conspiracy.

No bamboo ballots.

No tabulators connected to the internet wherein the vote could be hacked and the results changed.

No evidence of ballot mules moving forth to stuff drop boxes and steal the election from Donald Trump.

Messages reveal:Cyber Ninjas' ties to Trump during election 'audit'

And all those grifters and groups that publicly claimed to have proof of the many supposed ways in which the election was stolen? Nope.

“Some of the more high-profile matters involved Cyber Ninjas Incorporated, True the Vote, Verity Vote, and elected officials,” according to a second previously unreleased report summarizing investigators findings in September, a month after Brnovich lost the election but three months before he left office.

“In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations. The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.”

Rogers, Finchem could provide no proof

As for politicians like Sen. Wendy Rogers and Rep. Mark Finchem, who loudly claimed to have evidence of fraud and decried the stolen election? The ones who capitalized on their fake evidence to raise millions of dollars in donations?

They were silent when the time came to provide their proof to investigators, probably because it’s a crime to make a false report to a law enforcement agency.

“Arizona State Representative Finchem publicly stated he had a source reporting that more than30,000 fraudulent/fictitious votes were registered in Pima County during the general election,” the report said.

“Agents requested to meet with Mr. Finchem to discuss his allegations. During that meeting, Mr. Finchem did not repeat those allegations, specifically stating he did not have any evidence of fraud and he did not wish to take up our time.”

“We requested a meeting with Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers based upon her assertion therewas widespread fraud in the 2020 General Election,” the report said.

“Ms. Rogers refused to meet with us, saying she was waiting to see the ‘perp walk’ of those who committed fraud during the election.”

Brnovich knew claims were unfounded

Brnovich, in a statement to ABC 15, said he was proud of the work done by his investigators, noting they identified several areas that could be improved to “ensure confidence in future elections.”

“While subjected to severe criticism from all sides of the political spectrum during the course of our investigations, we did our due diligence to run all complaints to ground,” he said. “Where we were able to debunk rumors and conspiracies we did so.”

Yeah, you just didn’t tell anybody about it.

Brnovich didn’t explain why he never released his investigators’ March 2022 findings. Or why, despite those findings, he continued to insinuate there was a problem with the 2020 election during his Senate campaign. Or why he never came clean even after his defeat in the August primary.

But then, really, what could he say -- other than that when it came to protecting the state or protecting his fading political prospects, he chose the latter.

On April 6, 2022, Brnovich released an interim report, claiming the investigation had found “serious vulnerabilities” in Arizona’s electoral process.

“We have reached the conclusion that the 2020 election in Maricopa County revealed serious vulnerabilities that must be addressed and raises questions about the 2020 election in Arizona,” he wrote, in a letter to then-Senate President Karen Fann.

“It is frustrating. It’s frustrating to all of us," he said a day or so later on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “Because I think we all know what happened in 2020.”

He certainly knew.

Yet he falsely suggested wrongdoing

A month earlier, on March 8, 2022, his investigators prepared a 24-page report stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded.

Brnovich did finally admit, a day before the August primary, that claims by the Cyber Ninjas and others that hundreds of dead voters had cast ballots in Arizona’s election were bogus.

But as to all the other claims – the ones used by the election denial crowd to soak up donations from outraged voters – Brnovich remained silent.

As state and county election officials received death threats from across the country, Brnovich remained silent.

Even after he lost the primary, he remained silent about the findings of his investigators.

Count Maricopa County’s elected officials among the disgusted, as they and their elections workers remain under attack.

“(Brnovich) and his leadership team concealed a report that proved the November 2020 election was conducted fairly, lawfully and accurately,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Clint Hickman said, in a statement on Wednesday.

“Not only did he ignore his own investigators in issuing a different ‘interim report,’ he falsely suggested wrongdoing by Maricopa County, never correcting the record and blatantly never sharing the team’s final report with the public.”

What a disgusting end to Brnovich's career

What a disgusting and disappointing end to the political career of a man who, once upon a time, was probably the Republicans’ best hope of defeating Sen. Mark Kelly.

Brnovich, after all, was the first statewide official to declare that Joe Biden legitimately won Arizona.

“It came down to: People split their ticket,” a matter-of-fact Brnovich told Fox Business’ Neil Cavuto on Nov. 11, 2020, as Arizona politicians all around him were diving for cover. “People voted for Republicans down ballot, and they didn’t vote for President Trump or Martha McSally. So, that’s the reality.”

Then Brnovich decided to run for the Senate and, apparently, from the truth.

Now we know the truth.

Out of the hundreds of complaints and allegations about voter fraud, the AG’s office prosecuted precisely five people for individual instances of wrongdoing.

So, this should end the conspiracy, right?

The report found no graveyard full of dead voters. No double voting.

No mules lugging large numbers of bogus ballots to the post office or drop boxes, though they did find instances in which Maricopa County failed to properly record retrieval times from drop boxes.

No computer hackers swapping votes from Trump to Biden. No improper procedures employed in Maricopa County’s validation of early ballot signatures. No information deleted by county elections officials and hidden from the Cyber Ninjas.

No “kinetic artifacts” showing that ballots were bogus. No satellites under the control of the Italian military, employed to throw the race to Biden.

“These allegations were not supported by any factual evidence when researched by our office,” the lead investigator wrote, in a Sept. 19 report summarizing the investigation.

A report that was never released to the public.

So that’s the end of it, right?

This report should, once and for all, put an end to the shrieking voices of Arizona’s many opportunistic politicians, the ones who have spent more than two years charging that corrupt election officials denied their beloved president his due.

The ones who have collected millions upon millions of dollars on the false claim that we have no “election integrity.”

Rogers and Finchem, Kari Lake and Kelli Ward and Sonny Borrelli and the whole sad stable of elections deniers will be, forthwith, issuing apologies for their outrageous slander of the state and its elections workers, right?

This really should put an end to it, right?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Mark Brnovich hid the truth about Arizona's 2020 election from you