Posted on 08/06/2026 6:37:59 AM PDT by Red Badger
Arizona's largest county suffered a significant breach of its election data in the days before the 2020 presidential election when a self-described hacker foiled security and obtained 633,000 voter registration files but the Biden Justice Department and local prosecutors declined to bring charges even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the White House.
The scraping of Maricopa County's voter registration files was the most flagged security incident in a cyberintrusion log kept by U.S. spy agencies in the days around the Nov. 3, 2020 election, and it caused an extensive FBI investigation that led agents to a home in Fountain Hills, Ariz., the memos show.
The man the FBI confronted admitted he wrote a computer script to exploit the county voter systems security and scraped the files, which included 930 with "sensitive voter information like domestic violence victims, judges and law enforcement officers," according to the FBI case files declassified and made public by President Donald Trump's White House Government Transparency Task Force.
FBI Director Kash Patel sent a letter to that task force this week stating the bureau spent "significant resources" but could not get the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Arizona Attorney’s Office or the Pinal County, Arizona Attorney’s Office to bring charges despite an admission from the alleged hacker.
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2026-08/FBI_Letter.pdf
FBI_Letter.pdf
The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the alleged hacker on July 12, 2021, under the Biden Administration, according to the FBI. The newly released memos do not state when the other prosecutorial agencies made similar decisions not to bring charges, but the full case was officially closed in 2023.
Just one day before the Nov. 3 election, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office submitted a tip through the Arizona Counterterrorism Intelligence Center that there had been “an attempt to scrape voter registration information,” according to one FBI summary.
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2026-08/FBI_Opening_Doc.pdf
FBI_Opening_Doc.pdf
According to that memo, an unidentified intruder gained access to voter registration data on the recorder’s website by using a “Powershell script” that exploited a weakness in security. More than 633,000 voter records were exfiltrated between Oct. 21, 2020, and Nov. 2, 2020, the memos state.
According to Microsoft, "a PowerShell script is a plain text file saved with a .ps1 extension that contains a sequence of commands (called cmdlets), variables, and logic to automate tasks."
Voter registration files do not include ballots, and there's no evidence votes were changed in the incident, But the U.S. intelligence community has been warning since 2020 that if bad actors gained access to such files they could hamper the ability of voters to cast ballots in the future. China has obtained about 220 million such files, documents released last month by President Donald Trump show.
The Maricopa County incident appeared frequently in the Intelligence Community’s cyber instruction logs in the days leading up to and on the day of the presidential election. Those logs were also made public, with redactions for sensitive information, by the White House. They show that by 7:15 AM on Election Day, the Intelligence Community knew that the Maricopa intrusion had scooped up non-public information.
At the time, Maricopa County election officials said that the suspect accessed the website where people could register to vote, but could not pierce the server where the county’s voter registration files are actually stored. The county also said that the only information obtained on individual voters were voter registration numbers, but this is contradicted by the FBI, which identified more than 900 voter records that contained private information, like domestic violence victim status.
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2026-08/Intel_Cyber_Logs_2020.pdf
Intel_Cyber_Logs_2020.pdf
The FBI traced the intrusion to a Fountain Hills, Ariz., home and agents were dispatched several days after the election to interview the subject and execute a search warrant on the premises.
The man was forthcoming, telling federal agents exactly how he discovered the vulnerability in the Maricopa County Recorder’s website and how he wrote a computer script to exploit it, according to an FD-302 memorializing the interview. An FD-302 is the official FBI form used by special agents to write down a summary of an interview with a witness, suspect, or informant.
The suspect, who described himself as a “hacker or tinkerer,” told the agents that he first discovered the vulnerabilities in Maricopa’s website about two months earlier, in September 2020. “He noticed his voter ID appeared in the URL” after entering his own voter information and “tested the vulnerability by entering several seven-digit numbers into the URL path resulting in access to different voter registration information,” the agents wrote.
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2026-08/FBI_302.pdf
FBI_302.pdf
The man said that after discovering the vulnerability, he developed a “PowerShell script” that he ran from the beginning of October until around November 2, 2020, the day before the election. At that point, Maricopa County had detected the intrusions and “fixed their firewall,” according to the FBI memo.
The man estimated he obtained between 1 million and 2 million voter files.
The FBI agents noted that the suspect eventually “realized the gravity of the situation and became scared,” knowing that “he would get a visit from [law enforcement].” Though he considered telling the media about his actions, he decided to keep his breach a secret and scrubbed his hard drives and deleted files from his Google Cloud, according to the FBI-302.
The same day of the interview, FBI agents executed a search warrant on the suspect’s home. The search was publicly reported by Forbes in December 2020. The Arizona Daily Independent also reported that a home was targeted by FBI agents seeking evidence of a cyberattack on a then-unnamed organization.
The agents reportedly seized eight hard drives, three computers, and a bag of USB sticks.
Forbes reported that a man who lived at the address was previously investigated by police in 2011 when he lived in Wisconsin. While working as the IT administrator for the City of Ashland, local police questioned him over a series of spoof emails sent out ahead of a local election.
After both federal and state prosecutorial agencies declined to bring charges using the FBI’s findings, the investigative team requested that the bureau close the case in May 2023, nearly three years after the intrusions were first detected, an additional FBI memo shows. The agents cited the declinations to justify closing the file.
FBI_Case_Closure.pdf
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2026-08/FBI_Case_Closure.pdf
Editor's Note: John Solomon is on leave as Editor-in-Chief of Just the News while working as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force as an unpaid special government employee. Part of this story was written for the White House website, which allows any media outlets to publish the contents. Any additional reporting was conducted separately by Just the News staff.
Hobbs and her ganksters (I like to spell it that way) got away with it and that's that.
But there hasn’t been one conviction of voter fraud?? /s
Move along, nothing to see here!!
Proposed deal: “Show us exactly how you did it. Try to repeat it. If it works, you have uncovered a major weakness, and we can have the elections people fix the problem. No prosecution at all.”
Elections people: “No way. Don’t touch or change anything. We like it that way.”
D-hacker Jobbing for the DNC? Fer sure not a registered Republican or he would be cooling his heels for a decade or so in a state or Federal Prison.
“could not get the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Arizona Attorney’s Office or the Pinal County, Arizona Attorney’s Office to bring charges”
This is a nationwide problem of the legal establishment culture. Repeatedly I would bring hard evidence to both Republican and Democrat county, state and federal attorneys.
They would give lame excuses:
“Everybody does it” well in IL MANY did it, but not everybody.
“it wouldn’t change the outcome of the election”. That’s like saying attempted murder is OK if the victim survives and is not dead.
Ok, but The breach involved voter registration data, not ballots, vote tallies, tabulation systems, or ballot‑marking devices. Is there any evidence that BALLOTS were tampered with?
The breach was serious from a cybersecurity and privacy standpoint, but I want to know what available evidence shows a pathway by which votes could have been changed or manipulated.
All sources explicitly state that ballots were not affected and no vote totals were altered. To understand the risk, it helps to distinguish voter registration systems from ballot systems.
Well, it might.
Here's one thing I think the Democrats did during the 2020 election: First, they got the voter registration roles and then they looked to find the many, many people who are registered but rarely, if ever, vote. Then they filled out mail-in ballots for Biden. If one of these people decided to actually vote, the only thing that happens is that their ballot is considered provisional knowing full well a real investigation would not be done.
See my Post #9.
“Then they filled out mail-in ballots for Biden.”
An accusation, allegation. Where is the proof?
The defect in our side is that we make allegations but seldom do the hard, tedious investigative work to prove the allegations. In GA there were many types of vote fraud. One type of vote fraud was investigated and proved that 3,000 of the 12,000 vote difference between Trump and Biden was fraud.
For the many other types of vote fraud in GA ,including mail-in our side did no serious investigation to seek evidence and proof.
In 2020 I lived in the far SW corner of East Point, Fulton County, GA. I received an unsolicited mail in ballot. A former resident of my house, and a former resident of the vacant house next door also received unsolicited mail-in ballots. Shortly after the mail carrier’s delivery, a nice woman knocked on my door and offered to take care of the mail-in ballot for me and help me be a good citizen. I declined. The mail-in ballots of the 2 “movers” disappeared. Was the nice lady a “vote harvester”? Prove it. Nobody did the investigative work to prove it.
Right...I’ve known that states share that data with the parties and maybe NGO’s too. How else would anyone know that Talarico was registered to vote at his parents’ house?
Post #9 raises a good point.
Yes, I wrote that it was just a theory. There's no proof because it's not provable, and the Democrats know it.
I read about a study in Philadelphia (?) after the 2020 election. A watchdog group had a list of who voted and a list of people who were registered but rarely, if ever voted. So, they went physically to the address of some of these who rarely vote and just asked them if they had voted. Not who they voted for, just did they vote? They found that about 80% of them said they had not voted.
I have some data where I compared the 2008 votes for Obama vs. the 2020 votes for Biden comparing the total votes and the number of counties won by each candidate. It shows that it was virtually impossible for the vote count to be accurate. Because the numbers are waaaaaaay out of whack, it's not really proof, but it's enough for an honest thinking person to doubt the results.
Your story points to my theory being correct, but as you said, it's not proof.
“it’s not provable” Later you describe an example of how they proved it.
In IL, both in Chicago inner city, suburbs and and downstate Normal I proved vote fraud. It is a tedious task. It can be done. There are many types of vote fraud. Some types are easier to prove than others.
For me, the easiest was the stealing of Libertarian Party votes for the 2 major parties. I saw in the precinct by precinct results that there were no LP votes in precincts that I knew had hard core LP activists who by official records, had voted in that election. I went to those hardcore LP activists and had them sign affidavits that they had voted for the LP candidate. That is proof.
I speculate that the easiest vote fraud to prove in GA 2020 would be getting affadavits of those who announced publicly that they were voting 3d party. There was no secret ballot with them. Yet their precincts registered no votes for the 3d party candidate, no votes for write-in of which there are always some. In Nov2020 both major party candidates were unpopular. There were many 3d party voters... not that they agreed with the 3d party...but in protest of the candidates of the2 major parties. That is always the biggest share of 3d party votes.
Also easy to prove is that the DEAD did not vote and someone must have voted on their behalf. Of course, the next step is to prove who was that “vote harvester”.
It takes more effort to prove that votes of movers, minors 16-17, non-citizens, vacant houses, vacant lots were fraud.
In Il I have done that to prove vote fraud in the dozens, but not in the hundreds or thousands.
It is time consuming. The best defense is a good offense ... a good ground game before the election. If competing ground games both know in advance the specific voters and who is dead, a minor, a non-citizen, etc then each side is inhibited from tring to get away with somethhing.
When I was in Chicago 26th ward in 1964-76 (the area where Nixon votes had allegedly been stolen in 1960) I knocked on every door in 5 precincts every year, sometimes for politics, sometimes for the Alinsky community organization, many for insurance investigations. I knew casually thousands of people by name. I was in Vietnam 66-67. When I returned and would walk down the street, many people would say “Hi Bob. I haven’t seen you in a while. Where have you been?”
I increased the goo-goo vote in those precincts. But more importantly, I greatly reduced the vote fraud for the corrupt machine. Ogilvie, Kucharski, Carey, Woods, eta won in Cook County because people like me reduced the vote fraud for the Democrat. The same way for my protoge who ran Jane Byrne’s winning campaign for Chicago Mayor.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.