The Big Story Here

In 2020, then Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich commissioned a report on potential voting irregularities in the Presidential election.

Brnovich got the report in March, 2022, but suppressed the report until through the end of his term, and continued to make allegations of voter fraud until after after he lost the primary for the US Senate that year, then he started calling out election conspiracy theorists as, "Clowns."

The significance to this is not in the release of the documents.  We have always known that there is no, "There," "There," but that he decided to wait until after he had lost his bid to be the party nominee.

Clearly the calculus here was that he felt that it was essential for him to make baseless accusations of voter fraud to remain viable in a Republican primary.

This does not say good things about the current state of the Republican body politic, because it shows a perception that lying about election results is perceived by the (relatively) sane members of the Republican party, feel compelled to toe this bat-sh%$ insane party line.

Even if this is not the reality of today's Republican Party (I think that it is) it does not matter, because it is perceptions, and not behaviors, that drive the actions of political actors:

Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general, Mark Brnovich, launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time.

Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private.

In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat — released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.

His office then compiled an “Election Review Summary” in September that systematically refuted accusations of widespread fraud and made clear that none of the complaining parties — from state lawmakers to self-styled “election integrity” groups — had presented any evidence to support their claims. Brnovich left office last month without releasing the summary.

………

Brnovich quickly affirmed then-President Donald Trump’s loss in Arizona in November 2020, angering fellow Republicans. And he went on to resist Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote. Yet he flirted with claims of fraud as he courted GOP support over the subsequent two years, trumpeting his interim report on a far-right radio show and saying, “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020.” It was only in the final days before this past November’s midterm election, several months after Brnovich had lost his Senate primary, that he began to denounce politicians who denied Trump’s defeat, calling them “clowns” engaged in a “giant grift.”

………

By September 2022, a year into the inquiry, the special investigations section had received 638 election-related complaints and deemed 430 of them worthy of investigation. Of those, just 22 cases were submitted for prosecutorial review; two cases involving felons who illegally sought to vote were prosecuted, leading to convictions.

Brnovich never broadcast the full findings, declining to close the books on suspicions raised by an interim report with characterizations directly rebutted by his own office.

This is not something that is going to be fixed by appealing to the, "Norms Fairy," or by trying to find moderate Republicans, who might exist, but are more closeted than a gay general in the US Marine Corps in 1997.

To quote Robert Graves, "They must be struck into the dust, struck down again as they rise. Struck again while they lie groaning, while their wounds still pain them; they will respect the hand that dealt them."