Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich called claims of election fraud in the 2020 election “horses—” during a new interview and said he conducted a thorough investigation in the aftermath of the election that disproved such claims in his state.
“Most of it’s horses— and I’ve been trying to scrape it off my shoes for the last year,” Brnovich told Scott Pelley on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview aired Sunday. “We, as prosecutors, deal in facts and evidence. And I’m not like the clowns that throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.”
The Republican attorney general said former President Trump called him after the 2020 election and told him that if he claimed the election was fraudulent, he’d be a “superstar.”
“I said, ‘Mr. President, I didn’t become attorney general to be a star,'” Brnovich told Pelley. “I brought my star with me, and I don’t need anybody, whether it’s a former president or any other person, validating what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”
Arizona indicted just 12 defendants in cases related to voter fraud for the 2020 election in a state that President Biden won by more than 10,000 votes.
Some of the most prominent supporters of Trump’s claims of widespread fraud are among the 2020 election deniers running for office in the state In the upcoming midterm elections.
Those include Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona’s secretary of state, and Kari Lake, the state’s GOP gubernatorial nominee.
If they win, both would hold powerful positions overseeing future election processes in Arizona.
Finchem, an Arizona state lawmaker, told Pelley on “60 Minutes” that voter fraud was rampant in the 2020 election, without citing any evidence.
He called it a “defect in the system” and accused Brnovich of hiding “mountains of evidence.”
Arizona was a battleground state in the 2020 election and state officials were pressured by Trump allies to overturn the results in favor of the former president.
But Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) eventually certified the 2020 election for Biden, angering Trump and his allies.
An audit last year in Maricopa County found Biden won the county — home to more than 60 percent of the state’s votes — by a wider margin than he had before, cementing his victory and disproving the claims of widespread fraud.
Brnovich said on “60 Minutes” he extensively investigated the claims of fraud over the past two years and has found nothing to support Trump’s version of events.
“There was no one in this country that wanted to find evidence of fraud more than I did, but I thought it was important to systematically go through and say, ‘no this is the facts, this is the evidence,'” Brnovich said. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but when you’re an actual prosecutor, when you’re the actual government, there’s a higher obligation. You can’t afford to be sloppy.”