The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday denied a prosecutor’s appeal and kept in place an order sending the state’s fake elector case back to a grand jury, extending another delay in the long-running election interference prosecution.
The ruling affects the case against 18 defendants, including President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes said her office will again present the case in its entirety to a grand jury, but did not say when that would happen.
The appeal centered on a Phoenix judge’s May finding that the first grand jury was not shown the text of the Electoral Count Act, a law defense lawyers said mattered to how alternate slates of electors could be treated if an election was disputed. That law was amended in 2022 to make clear that a state may put forward only one slate of electors and that the governor signs off.
The procedural fight has slowed a case filed nearly three and a half years after Arizona voters gave Joe Biden a 10,457-vote win in 2020. The matter has seen a dozen dismissal requests, a late-2024 recusal by the first judge after an email surfaced in which he urged other judges to speak out against attacks on Kamala Harris’ campaign, and no movement at the trial court level since mid-May 2025.
Of the 18 defendants, two were former Trump aides, five were lawyers working for Trump and 11 were Republicans who submitted a document falsely claiming Trump won Arizona. Three defendants have resolved their cases, including one who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, while the rest have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges.
Williams, Giuliani’s attorney, called the case meritless and said Mr. Giuliani has done nothing wrong. The state’s next presentation to a grand jury now becomes the key question, because the ruling leaves the prosecution alive but sends it back to the same procedural hurdle that slowed it in the first place.
The Arizona case is one of several fake elector prosecutions still moving in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, even as similar cases in Michigan and Georgia were dismissed and a federal election case was dropped late in 2024. For Mayes, the Supreme Court ruling preserves the case; for the defense, it keeps alive the argument that the charge was built on a flawed grand jury record.
