The White House has released a series of newly declassified documents related to the 2020 election, including records detailing a cyber intrusion involving the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Arizona that exposed hundreds of thousands of voter records and prompted an FBI investigation.
According to a letter from FBI Director Kash Patel to the White House Task Force on Government Transparency, a hacker obtained approximately 633,000 Maricopa County voter records.
The documents state that the data included information on 930 voters that was not publicly available, including records involving domestic abuse victims.
The newly released material also includes information from a November 2020 FBI interview with an individual whose name has been redacted.
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During that interview, the individual reportedly told investigators he believed he had extracted between 1 million and 2 million files, representing approximately four gigabytes of data.
According to the interview summary, the individual said the information was obtained by using a PowerShell script to exploit the Maricopa County Recorder’s website.
The documents state that Maricopa County reported the intrusion through the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center on Nov. 2, 2020.
By Election Day on Nov. 3, information about the incident had been circulated among federal election security officials.
The records also describe efforts by the suspect to destroy evidence before federal agents executed a search warrant.
According to the documents, the subject attempted to remove both locally stored and remotely stored copies of the data before the FBI carried out its search.
In a separate interview with investigators, the suspect reportedly acknowledged anticipating contact from law enforcement and described deleting evidence beforehand.
According to the released records, the individual told the FBI that he knew law enforcement would likely visit him, prompting him to delete and reformat his hard drives and erase data stored in Google Cloud.
The interview summary indicates the suspect acknowledged destroying evidence while also appearing to recognize that a crime had been committed.
Despite the investigation, the documents state that prosecutors declined to pursue criminal charges.
According to the records, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and the Pinal County Attorney’s Office all declined to prosecute the suspect despite the existence of evidence and what the documents describe as a confession.
The case appears to correspond with a December 2020 incident previously reported by The Gateway Pundit involving an FBI search of the home of Elliot Kerwin, then a 56-year-old information technology specialist.
At the time, Forbes reported that federal investigators were seeking evidence related to “a cyberattack on an unnamed organization and stolen voter data.”
Although the newly declassified documents do not identify Kerwin by name, one report appears to describe an incident involving a residence in Fountain Hills, Arizona, a town located within Maricopa County.
Following the FBI search in 2020, questions remained about the extent of the intrusion into Maricopa County’s voter registration infrastructure.
Public reporting at the time stated there had been no access to election management systems or vote tabulation systems and that the voter information obtained consisted of publicly available records.
The newly declassified documents indicate that investigators concluded approximately 633,000 voter records were obtained, including 930 records containing information that was not publicly available.
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The release of the documents has also prompted renewed attention to how government agencies communicated about election security during and after the 2020 election.
According to the records, federal election security officials were aware before Election Day that an intruder had exploited a Maricopa County website and obtained hundreds of thousands of voter records.
The source material states that no contemporaneous public acknowledgement of this specific incident by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been identified.
Following the 2020 election, then-CISA Director Chris Krebs stated that the election was “the most secure in American history.”
The newly released records do not state that election systems or vote tabulation equipment were compromised, nor do they conclude that election results were altered.
Instead, the documents focus on the cyber intrusion into voter registration records, the subsequent FBI investigation, the suspect’s reported destruction of evidence, and the decisions by multiple prosecutorial offices not to pursue criminal charges.
The release has renewed questions surrounding the public disclosure of the breach, including why an incident involving approximately 633,000 voter records, including hundreds of non-public records, did not receive broader public attention at the time and why the suspect identified in the investigation ultimately was not prosecuted, according to the source material.
