Trump releases declassified files showing 600K Arizona voter records hacked before 2020 election

WASHINGTON, DC: This week, President Trump’s White House declassified FBI documents showing a hacker pulled more than 600,000 voter registration files from Maricopa County, Arizona, just before the 2020 election.

The administration points to this breach as proof of a bigger problem; officials didn't do enough to protect election systems or hold anyone accountable. The documents reveal something surprising: even after the hacker admitted what he did, both federal and state prosecutors chose not to press charges.

How did investigators track down the suspect?

The scraping of Maricopa County's voter registration files was the most flagged security incident in a cyberintrusion log kept by US 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.

FBI records show the intruder found a security flaw in Maricopa County’s voter registration website.

He spotted his own voter ID number in the site’s web address, got curious, and started plugging in other numbers to see if he could pull up more voters’ records.

Using a PowerShell script he’d written himself, he automated the process. The FBI tracked him down to a house in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

When agents showed up and questioned him, he called himself a “hacker or tinkerer” and admitted running the script, according to the FD-302 interview summary.

He guessed he had pulled between one and two million voter files before the county caught on and shored up its firewall. Agents searched his house and took eight hard drives, three computers, and a bag full of USB sticks, but by then, he’d already wiped his drives and cleared out his cloud storage.

FBI Director Kash Patel sent a letter to that task force this week stating the bureau spent "significant resources" but could not get the US 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.

Prosecutors declined to bring charges

The US 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.  

Voter registration files do not include ballots, and there's no evidence votes were changed in the incident.

But the US 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.