New indictment

Arizona AG to seek new indictment in Trump 2020 election case

The state Supreme Court blocked prosecutors from reviving their initial case.

By Kyle Cheney

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes plans to seek a new indictment against allies of President Donald Trump who aided his quest to overturn the 2020 election, her office said Thursday after the state’s high court shot down an effort to revive her sprawling first indictment against them.

“The Arizona Attorney General’s Office will return this case to the grand jury,” Mayes spokesperson Richie Taylor said. “We decline to comment further at this time.”

The announcement by Mayes, a Democrat, came moments after the Arizona Supreme Court publicly revealed a June 2 decision to deny Mayes’ bid to revive the case against some of Trump’s top allies, which was dismissed over a judge’s finding that there was a defect in the grand jury indictment.

The brief, unexplained decision closed the book on a two-year-old case that threatened some of Trump’s closest allies, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman and nearly a dozen GOP activists who falsely claimed to be legitimate presidential electors despite Trump’s defeat in the state. Trump himself was named by the unusually aggressive grand jury as an unindicted co-conspirator.

The judge overseeing the case tossed it last year after finding that Mayes’ prosecutors failed to present the original grand jury with the precise text of the law that Trump’s allies were accused of seeking to violate. In November, Mayes asked the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse the lower-court rulings.

The charges alleged that Trump and his allies conspired to corrupt the election results in Arizona and disenfranchise millions of voters in the state. The charges included fraud and forgery that culminated in the transmission of a slate of false presidential electors to Congress in an effort supervised by key members of the Trump campaign.

A similar indictment in Georgia — in which Trump was also criminally charged — fell apart after the case’s original prosecutor, Fani Willis, was disqualified. And a criminal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith was dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election. A case against Michigan’s false electors was dropped after a judge found that the individual electors were merely pawns used in a larger scheme.

Two criminal cases targeting the false elector scheme in Nevada and Wisconsin remain pending.