Mark Brnovich looked like a highly credible U.S. Senate candidate ahead of the 2022 election cycle. The Arizona Republican had already won two statewide elections, becoming the state attorney general, and he appeared well positioned for the Senate race.
There was, however, one major problem: Donald Trump spent months routinely condemning Brnovich for failing to produce evidence of 2020 election fraud.
Naturally, the GOP state attorney general would’ve loved to present evidence in support of Trump’s conspiracy theories, and Brnovich went out of his way to look for anything that might substantiate his party’s “big lie.” But the Arizonan ultimately couldn’t find any evidence because there was no evidence to find.
As it turns out, however, there’s apparently a bit more to this story than we previously realized. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that when Brnovich’s team concluded that GOP fraud claims were unfounded, he kept the findings hidden from public view, and when his office “systematically refuted accusations of widespread fraud and made clear that none of the complaining parties … had presented any evidence to support their claims,” the Republican, using his power as Arizona’s top prosecutor, buried these facts, too.
We know now this thanks to documents released by Brnovich’s successor: Arizona’s new Democratic state attorney general, Kris Mayes. From the Post’s article, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News:
The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his administration privately disregarded fact-checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence not just in the 2020 vote but in subsequent elections.
For Trump, the scandal was that Brnovich wouldn’t go along with his lies. For the reality-based community, the actual scandal was that Brnovich knew the whole truth but buried it. There is a degree of irony to the circumstances: House Republicans recently created a select subcommittee to investigate the “weaponization” of government, with a special emphasis on the alleged politicization of law enforcement. As it turns out, GOP lawmakers are in luck: Between former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and Arizona’s former state attorney general, there are plenty of recent examples of powerful prosecutors abusing their offices. The question, of course, is whether the Republicans’ “weaponization” panel will care about these examples — and I think we all know the answer.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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