Newly unearthed emails suggest a top election official in Arizona’s biggest county egged on and helped coordinate with the Trump administration’s authoritarian meddling in Arizona’s election processes.
Election-focused news outlet VoteBeat reported Wednesday on emails from 2025 that have raised questions about the role Maricopa County recorder Justin Heap has played in the Trump’s administration’s baseless probe into debunked claims of fraud in Arizona’s 2020 election results.
The emails, obtained by watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with Votebeat, show Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap signaling support for the Trump administration’s investigation into his own county’s elections. The county, home to Phoenix, is a key election battleground. The records also suggest that Heap, a Republican, met with Arizona’s top federal prosecutor just before the DOJ informed the county it was looking into its past elections, raising questions about his level of coordination with federal law enforcement officials.
VoteBeat cited emails from Heap’s assistant scheduling a meeting with U.S. Attorney Timothy Courchaine last August. The outlet also cited emails Heap sent to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who has used the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to undermine voting rights, to express his support for the department’s investigation into Maricopa County’s elections.
“We share your goal of safeguarding election integrity and transparency, and we will continue to work with all relevant stakeholders to ensure that no records are lost, compromised, or destroyed,” Heap told Dhillon in one email.
Neither Heap nor his office responded to VoteBeat’s request for comment.
During his 2024 campaign, Heap tried to downplay questions about his election denialism. States Newsroom reported at the time that Heap “won’t say if Arizona’s elections were fair, but he’s voted like an election denier.” That Heap’s campaign received support from conservative youth group Turning Point USA suggested conservatives saw him as a likely ally in the effort to interfere in Maricopa County’s electoral process.
Earlier this year, Heap joined a bunch of Republican election-deniers at then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s Feb. 13 Arizona press conference, during which she spoke about her department’s goal of ensuring “we have the right people voting.”
Republicans have yet to make public any evidence whatsoever to indicate Arizona’s elections were marred by impropriety of any sort. And not for lack of trying. Even the Republican-backed “audit” of Arizona’s 2020 election results debunked the GOP’s claims of election fraud.
The new reporting from VoteBeat underscores Heap’s role as a willing, even eager, participant in the administration’s election meddling.
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