Arizona prosecutors seek access to trove of Trump allies’ emails, texts

The Arizona prosecutors who charged some of President-elect Donald Trump’s top allies for their roles in his effort to subvert the 2020 election have obtained — but not yet reviewed — a large cache of their emails, texts and phone records.

Recent court filings show that Attorney General Kris Mayes’ team obtained search warrants months ago for data from the Google and Apple iCloud accounts of close Trump allies such as Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn. The data covers the three-month period between Nov. 1, 2020, and Feb. 1, 2021.

But a court order prohibits prosecutors from combing through the material until each defendant has a chance to review it and screen out irrelevant information. And in the meantime, Meadows has asked the judge in the case to scrap the data altogether, claiming the state’s search warrant was overly invasive and lacked evidence of his connection to the alleged conspiracy.

Arizona prosecutors are continuing to advance one of the only remaining significant criminal cases arising from Trump’s 2020 gambit to stay in power. And the fight over the data shows the prospect that significant details of that effort may still remain shielded from public view. A grand jury convened by Mayes, a Democrat, in April indicted 18 Trump allies related to the 2020 plot. The grand jury identified Trump as a co-conspirator in the case but opted against charging him, partly at the urging of prosecutors.

The broader case against Trump’s allies is continuing to advance even as Trump prepares to take office and has largely succeeded in sidelining the cases in which he was criminally charged. But it hit a snag last month when the judge, Bruce Cohen, stepped aside after he was found to have called on colleagues to defend Vice President Kamala Harris from personal attacks made by her political adversaries.

Cohen’s successor Judge Sam Myers has since taken over the case. Notably, he recently pushed back a deadline, at Meadows’ request, for efforts to challenge the grand jury proceedings, which could signal a slowdown for a case already expected to linger into 2026.

The fight over the search warrants has been playing out quietly in court documents for the last few weeks and has provided new insights about the case Arizona intends to present against the Trump aides and allies — including 11 Arizona Republicans who falsely claimed to be legitimate presidential electors.

According to the records, prosecutors issued 10 search warrants to tech companies in April and May for data related to the 18 defendants charged in the case, including Google, Apple and X. Those warrants, issued just days after the indictment itself was made public, sought emails, texts, call records, contact lists and geolocation data.

The state obtained a voluminous cache of data in response by September and began curating it to share with the defendants.

Last month, Meadows asked Myers to suppress the evidence, saying the warrant lacked evidence that he committed crimes, was written too broadly and resulted in the production of reams of personal data like photos, password information and FaceTime logs.

Prosecutors rejected those claims, saying the search warrant was tailored to only the three months in which the alleged crimes occurred and limited to potential evidence of crimes. If the companies produced too much information in response to those warrants, they said, defendants could screen it out before investigators review it.

The battle over the search warrants also forced the reveal of new details about the case. For example, prosecutors told the judge who issued the search warrant that “Meadows had confided in a staff member in early November [2020] that Trump had lost the election. Nevertheless, Trump wanted to keep fighting the election results, and Meadows wanted to help Trump.”

Meadows argued that the notion of “helping Trump” was too vague to support the search warrant and provided “no information about the staff member’s identity, how the State obtained the information about Meadows’s purported statement to the staffer, the reliability of the staffer … or whether the State made any attempt to verify the staffer’s report.”

In their response, prosecutors said the evidence came from “a witness known to investigators (not an anonymous informant offering a tip)” who “stated that Meadows had said he ‘wanted to help Trump,’ despite knowing Trump had lost the election.”

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