Kris Mayes has your texts

If you're a fake elector or texted one ... Grijalva, The Next Generation ... And please rapture us out of here.

If you exchanged texts, emails, or social media direct messages with any of the so-called “fake electors” from late 2020 to early 2021, then the Arizona Attorney General’s Office has a copy of them.

Search warrants and accompanying affidavits of probable cause show that AG investigators convinced a judge to sign at least 46 search warrants (that we were able to find and see) to collect the communications and cloud data of the 18 defendants.

Attorneys for Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, counted even more. The attorneys say the state executed 54 searches “covering more than 78 email addresses, 22 phone numbers, and 17 social media identities that were stored with at least 14 different service providers ….”

Either way, that’s a lot of search warrants.

And as the cases against “fake electors” unravel in Arizona and across the nation, it’s worth looking at how we got here and what went wrong.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Kreamer allowed the cases to proceed based on the AG’s affidavits of probable cause, even though those affidavits were largely recycled for each search.

The Fourth Amendment requires that probable cause to search someone or their things must be “supported by Oath or affirmation,” which is the affidavit that lays out the facts and evidence in writing for the judge to weigh.

Affidavits can read like gripping crime dramas, whether it is the narrative of a grisly murder or a high-stakes fraud scheme. However, investigators usually do the legwork themselves to gather the facts and evidence for the affidavits.

The electors’ affidavit was different.

It was an amalgamation of information that was already publicly known and came from news reports, social media posts, “fake electors” cases in other states, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6th Attacks and the 2023 indictment of President Donald Trump.

Attorney General spokesman Richie Taylor said investigators used those sources for research, “but facts were gathered as part of the Attorney General’s independent investigation into the alleged crimes.”

Taylor said the investigators conducted an independent investigation, interviewed witnesses and changed the affidavits as the case progressed.

Meadows’ attorney challenged a warrant that searched his iCloud drive, which other defendants joined, but the court hasn’t held a hearing yet. It may be a while before that happens.

Right now, there is effectively no case pending against Arizona’s “fake electors” because the state lost an appeal on Monday to a trial court’s decision for a grand jury do-over. Prosecutors still have several avenues to revive and continue the case. But it’ll probably be a while before we know what legal path they plan to pursue.

As far as the searches, we don’t know yet what evidence they uncovered. But the massive number of warrants and the breadth of the searches show the lengths to which the state went to find communications to implicate the defendants in the alleged conspiracy and other offenses.

The warrants

A court document filed early on shows a list of 33 “Case Names,” which included all of the people who were eventually indicted, former lawmaker Kelly Townsend, and several state and national Trump campaign employees. The list also included Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who attended a December 2020 hearing on election fraud in Maricopa County, some law firm paralegals and Phoenix-area attorneys who were copied on emails with one of the defendants. Not to mention Phoenix-based attorney Jack Wilenchik, who was not indicted.

Wilenchik, who was representing the Arizona Republican Party in 2020, was the first subject of a search warrant.

On Aug. 31, 2023, the state sought emails he sent from Nov. 14, 2020, to January 7, 2021. The search was based on one damning email he sent to Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn that was leaked to the New York Times and published more than a year before the state executed its first search warrant.

“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” he wrote.

In a follow-up email, the lawyer suggested “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes.” And he added a smiley emoji.

The affidavit for the warrant said that the emails Wilenchik sent to Epshteyn and Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, all of which were already public, show Wilenchik “played a larger role in the organization of the pro-Trump electors in Arizona” and that giving the state access to his email account would reveal the level of his involvement.

Over the next few months, the state served warrants on providers to get text messages and emails from accounts belonging to Kelli Ward, Jake Hoffman, and Greg Safsten.

In the days leading up to the announcement of the indictment, Mayes served a set of warrants on Twitter to get direct messages and tweets belonging to several of the defendants. The AG also served warrants on The Trump Organization in Florida, the Trump campaign headquarters in Virginia, and several political consultants.

It was in the weeks after the indictment that the state started serving providers with warrants for cloud information, which prompted the judge overseeing the search warrants, Kreamer, to call in the prosecutor and investigator because of his concern about the breadth of the search.

“I just get a little concerned when I’m hearing ‘Cloud’ and I’m thinking, okay, what’s in my phone, everything that might not be relevant, I’m a little worried about,” Kreamer, a 2007 appointee of former Gov. Janet Napolitano, said.

In that May 7, 2024, hearing, the investigator said in court he couldn’t testify that he knows what is captured in the cloud.

Assistant Attorney General Krista Wood said the office needed access to cloud data because the texts and emails were sent four years earlier, and even if the state were to seize phones, the information they were looking for might not be there.

Meadows’ attorney, Anne Chapman, alleged in court papers that Kreamer stepped out of his role in that hearing as a “neutral and detached arbiter of probable cause” and helped the state draft language for the warrant.

The state returned two days later with new language to satisfy Kreamer.

Chapman argued the warrants were illegally broad and flimsily backed up. Still, Apple turned over Meadows’ photo library, FaceTime logs, Find My Friends data, iCloud drive information and iCloud reminders.

“The information produced to the State includes the account holders’ personal photos, frequent flier numbers, and password information,” Chapman wrote.

The attorney also took issue with all of the searches being “based on the same set of facts presented in a single omnibus affidavit.”

“The State’s undeniable pattern in using identical facts in affidavit after affidavit, and warrant after warrant, obviously bears on the constitutionality of the search,” Chapman wrote.

The state argued that the search of Meadows’ data was legal and sufficiently narrow — and he didn’t have standing to challenge the warrant because he didn’t claim ownership of the phones or data in the iCloud account.

But the warrants reached far beyond Meadows. Eleven Arizona residents had their inboxes and message threads swept up.

These are people who live on political gossip and strategy, trading messages every day with reporters, lawmakers, donors — and sometimes just friends.

And if you were on the other end of those conversations, investigators have your data, too.

Grijalva (the sequel): As expected, Adelita Grijalva is set to take over the Southern Arizona congressional seat once held by her late father, Raúl, after receiving more than 68% of the vote in yesterday’s special election against Republican Daniel Butierez. If you played our “Know your Grijalva” quiz yesterday and are dying for some answers, you can find them here. (And stickers are coming! Give us a few days.)

Littering for liberty: Attendees of Charlie Kirk’s memorial at the State Farm Stadium on Sunday left behind heaps of trash in the parking lot, the Republic’s Lauren De Young and Shawn Raymundo report. Glendale’s sanitation department filled two garbage trucks with the trash and cleared it out before the memorial ended, and some attendees blamed the “no bag” policy and lack of trash cans. Meanwhile, some Arizona rabbis are calling out Tucker Carlson for using antisemitic tropes during his eulogy at the memorial, the Republic’s Jose R. Gonzalez reports. Jewish leaders say comparing Kirk’s assassination to the crucifixion of Jesus, as Carlson did, is a “dog whistle.”

Walled off: Construction crews put up about 250 feet of new border wall in Santa Cruz County last week in the first segment of the new 27-mile wall that could dramatically reduce wildlife crossings, the Star’s Emily Bregel reports. Conservationist groups are suing over Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem issuing a waiver to exempt the project from standard environmental reviews, but in the meantime, workers razed grasslands to make staging areas and dug wells to make concrete at the site.

Repeals and roadblocks: Glendale’s City Council repealed its ordinances banning panhandling after three residents filed a lawsuit claiming the rule violates their First Amendment rights, Glendale Independent’s Richard Smith reports. Meanwhile, Glendale’s massive resort project no longer has an opening date scheduled after voters approved rezoning the area, but not a companion measure for a general plan amendment, per the Republic’s Michael Salerno.

Receipts on repeat: U.S. House Democrats made a $3 million ad buy targeting vulnerable Republicans over tariffs, Medicaid cuts and the looming government shutdown, per Politico. One of the ads targets Arizona’s U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani for voting “to let Trump make tariffs even worse” and “to make healthcare even more expensive.”

Click this button to buy an attack ad against corporate media.

In other, other news

Advocates warn that predatory law firms are trying to cash in after the federal government renewed RECA, which compensates uranium miners and people who lived downwind from nuclear test sites and developed cancer (Gabriel Pietrorazio / KJZZ) … Arizona’s Department of Forestry and Fire Management wants permanent funding for wildfire suppression after blowing through its $3 million annual allocation within 45 days last fiscal year (Jakob Thorington / Arizona Capitol Times) … Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Thomas Galvin announced a new advisory panel to bring pro hockey back to Arizona, led by Andrea Doan, wife of former Coyotes player Shane Doan (Jack Janes / Cronkite News) … “I Voted” stickers came from a group of Arizona Realtors’ zeal to increase voter turnout for a sales tax election to fund freeways (Mary Jo Pitzl / the Republic).

We spend a lot of time writing about all the dumbass ideas that come out of our state Legislature.

But occasionally, our lawmakers have good ideas, too!

Here’s one — it’s coming online on Friday alongside most of the other 265 bills that Gov. Katie Hobbs signed into law this year.

Speaking of new laws taking effect this week, Skywolf, our legislative tracking software, is doing a series of webinars you can pop into to hear about how it can help you track bills and make sense of the madness at the Capitol.

• On Thursday, we’ll show you a workflow designed specifically for policy professionals working at municipalities.

• On Friday, we’ve got a webinar designed specifically for associations.

If you’re not on RaptureTok, you probably missed the news that the end times are scheduled for today. Or maybe tomorrow.

A South African pastor’s prophecy that the second coming of Jesus will happen on either Sept. 23 or 24 gained massive traction, and the internet has been trolling accordingly.

If this really is our last newsletter, at least we got to enjoy the memes.