Maricopa County Board of Supervisors rejects subpoenas issued by Arizona State Senate in scathing letter

PHOENIX - The Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors has issued his response to a new round of subpoenas issued by Republicans in the Arizona State Senate in connection with a controversial audit into the 2020 election.

The subpoenas, issued on July 26, came days after Trump spoke to thousands of supporters in downtown Phoenix, using the Senate’s review to make a number of debunked claims to bolster his false narrative that President Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.

The latest subpoena demands that the county turn over the envelopes from all mail-in ballots or images of them, network routers and traffic logs, detailed voter registration records with change histories, and records related security breaches of election systems.

Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann and Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen are also demanding that Dominion give their contractors administrator-level access to all tabulators used in Maricopa County.

The auditors have fought for months to get ahold of security tokens needed to access internal configurations of precinct-based tabulators. Dominion has refused to provide that access, saying it will only cooperate with companies certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

"Releasing Dominion’s intellectual property to an unaccredited, biased, and plainly unreliable actor such as Cyber Ninjas would be reckless, causing irreparable damage to the commercial interests of the company and the election security interests of the country," said a statement from the company issued in May. "No company should be compelled to participate in such an irresponsible act."

Dominion did cooperate with two accredited firms hired by the county earlier this year, both of which found no problems with the election.

County Officials say they will not comply with new subpoenas

Maricopa County officials say some of what the Senate requested can be answered via public records requests, but the Senate's ask for routers, network data, and passwords for Dominion voting machines is being met with a flat out "no."

"On the passwords they've asked for, we told them before we don't have those passwords. We still don't have those passwords. It's kind of odd they asked for them because they gave us back those machines last week," said Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates.

The mostly Republican Board of Supervisors met in a closed-door executive session to discuss the new subpoenas. The requests for routers and passwords was already denied earlier this year, when the audit was in its earliest stages.

"We provided them more than enough information to determine if they were hooked up to the internet," said Gates. "If we were to provide those routers to them and they got into the wrong hands, that would provide a blueprint to would-be hackers to hack into our system, putting law enforcement activities and operations at risk."

This could wind up back in court, and the State Senate could take another vote to try and hold the supervisors in contempt, but that would be a tall task because they're not in legislative session right now.

We have reached out to Fann, but she has yet to respond

Board of Supervisors Chairman rejects subpoenas in scathing letter

Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers issued a scathing response to the new subpoenas.

"The Board has real work to do and little time to entertain this adventure in never-never land," read a portion of the letter.

Sellers wrote, in the letter, that if the State Senate has not figured out that the election in Maricopa County was free, fair, and accurate, he is not sure if they ever will, and that the audit is not finished because the Senate hired "people who have no experience and little understanding of how professional elections are run."

"There was no fraud, there wasn't an injection of ballots from Asia, nor was there a satellite that beamed votes into our election equipment," read a portion of the letter.

The letter ended with a call by Sellers on the Senators to release their report, and "be prepared to defend any accusations of misdeeds in court."

Controversial audit marked by various controversies

The audit started back in April, and is conducted by Cyber Ninjas. Reports by the Associated Press described the firm as ‘untested’ and 'little-known," with a CEO who had tweeted support for conspiracy theories claiming Republican Donald Trump, and not Democrat Joe Biden, had won Maricopa County and Arizona.

Doug Logan, 42, in December had tweeted and retweeted references to the conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked to switch votes from Trump. "The parallels between the statistical analysis of Venezuela and this year’s election are astonishing," Logan tweeted, with a #StoptheSteal hashtag that referenced the pro-Trump movement seeking to overturn the election.

At one point, auditors were checking for bamboo fibers to test a theory that tens of thousands of fake ballots were shipped from Asia. A onetime treasure hunter who claims to have invented a new method to automatically spot ballot fraud says his technology is being used in the review.

Fann says the audit is only meant to see whether improvements are needed to state election laws, but the audit has long been associated with the so-called "Stop The Steal" movement, and Trump has predicted it will uncover evidence to support his discredited theories of fraud.

Meanwhile, the AP has reported that Pro-Trump groups have raised more than $5.7 million for the audit, which is much more than the $150,000 contributed by the State Senate.

Logan, according to the AP, ended months of silence about who was paying for it and how much it cost. Among those leading the fundraising groups are Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor; Sydney Powell, his attorney who filed a number of baseless lawsuits challenging election results; Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of Overstock.com; and correspondents from the pro-Trump One America News Network.

The Associated Press (AP) contributed to this report.