After another failed scramble to prove President Donald Trump’s claims that China interfered in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, White House task force leader and right-wing media personality John Solomon is now attempting to retry a Maricopa County, Arizona, election website hacking case that was investigated, reported on, and closed years ago. NBC News reported that the case was highlighted by the White House yet “did not offer any evidence that any election was stolen or affected by widespread fraud.”

Solomon has been leading the effort declassifying intelligence documents the Trump administration is using to claim the U.S. election system is not secure. On July 16, Trump delivered a much-hyped primetime speech fearmongering about what those documents had uncovered. Afterward, Lawfare wrote that the speech “was most notable for what it did not contain: evidence that any malign activity affected the result. Much of what he described was already known. None of it showed that votes were changed, fraudulent ballots were counted, or the election was stolen. None of it showed that intelligence officials had concealed such evidence."

On August 6, Solomon published a story to his website, Just The News, on a “hack” of the Maricopa County voter records just before the 2020 election, writing that the Department of Justice under then-President Joe Biden had failed to prosecute the alleged hacker “even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the White House.”

MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson summarized the story during an interview with Solomon, saying, “More than 600,000 voter files ripped off Arizona site in 2020 by hacker — the DOJ caught him, the hacker confessed, and then nothing happened.”

While speaking with Johnson, Solomon spun up hypothetical scenarios of election interference that did not occur in 2020, suggesting “a foreign power or a bad actor” could alter voter registration data or cast fraudulent absentee ballots. Solomon also claimed that “until Donald Trump finally made it public, we were kept in the dark” about voter files being hacked.

In an interview with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Solomon spun the story further claiming it was proof “that great, giant sugar pill we were force-fed at the end of the November 2020 election that we had just endured the most secure election in U.S. history … was absolutely not true.” Solomon told Bannon “Today, we learned that in Maricopa County — where we were told don’t look here, nothing to see in Maricopa County — on the eve of the election, the United States intelligence community … detected a major breach in Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona. It indicated that 600,000-plus voter files were stolen by a hacker.”

“There were some concerns that those hacks may have gone through foreign locations,” Solomon continued. “The FBI jumped on the case — the FBI proved exactly what the intelligence community believed happened.”

In reality, the case was reported by the media in 2021, after Trump began spreading false claims about the Arizona election results — including suggesting “the election server was hacked” and “the voting system was breached.”

FactCheck.org explained that “the county said there was no hack, and it isn’t possible for hackers to change votes because the ballot tabulation equipment is a ‘closed air gapped system,’ meaning it isn’t connected to the internet.” The July 2021 report also shared a Maricopa County social media post that claimed, “The event in question involved an individual inappropriately accessing and downloading publicly available info. The website is in no way connected to the Election Management System.”

That same month, the Arizona Daily Star reported that a subcontractor working on the state Senate's audit of Arizona's election administration spoke about “problems” that were “related to a breach of the voter registration system the county itself reported,” claiming “that shows that at least one element of the county’s election system had been ‘hacked.’” The article went on to explain that “county election officials said all that was accessed was a site where people could register to vote, not the actual server where voter registration records are stored. All that anyone obtained was someone’s voter registration number, with no access to personal information, they said.” (The audit ultimately confirmed Biden’s victory in Maricopa County and “found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.”)

The FBI's official record when the case was closed in 2023, which was uploaded by Solomon’s Just the News, stated:

The FBI concluded that “investigators did not find indications of a domestic or foreign influence on [the individual]'s actions,” and the investigation was closed after “federal, state, and local prosecuting offices” all declined the case.

Even Solomon's own story noted that “voter registration files do not include ballots, and there's no evidence votes were changed in the incident,” before creating hypothetical scenarios that “if bad actors gained access to such files they could hamper the ability of voters to cast ballots in the future.”

Despite Solomon's claims that “today, we learned” about this supposed election interference, his latest story looks like just another desperate rehashing of old information to fearmonger about the upcoming midterms.