The Arizona Supreme Court declined on June 4, 2026, to hear a prosecutor’s challenge to an order requiring the state’s 2020 presidential elector case against Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani and other defendants to go back before a grand jury.
The decision was another obstacle for Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, but her office said it would not abandon the prosecution. Instead, prosecutors intend to present the complete case again to a grand jury.
The dispute arose from a May ruling by a lower-court judge in Phoenix. That judge found that the original grand jury had not been given the text of the Electoral Count Act, the 19th-century federal law governing the certification of presidential elections. Defendants had invoked that statute as part of their defense, making its omission relevant to the lower court’s decision to return the matter.
Defense lawyers argued that the law permitted competing elector slates to be delivered to Congress when election results were contested. The statute was amended in 2022 to state that a state may submit only one slate and that the governor approves it. the cited account does not report a final judicial determination accepting the defendants’ interpretation of the law as it stood in 2020.
The prosecution concerns Meadows, who served as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, and others in connection with Arizona’s 2020 presidential result. Joe Biden won the state by 10,457 votes.
Case remains active despite setback
The state Supreme Court’s action left the lower-court order intact rather than ending the case outright. Mayes’s office said its response would be to start the grand-jury presentation again in full, preserving its effort to continue the prosecution through the state courts. There had been no movement at the trial-court level since the middle of May, according to the Associated Press account carried by The Guardian.
Arizona’s proceeding forms part of a diminishing group of cases related to the effort to use alternate elector slates after the 2020 election. Similar state cases in Michigan and Georgia had been dismissed by courts. A special prosecutor also dropped a federal case in late 2024 that had charged Trump with conspiring to overturn the election.
Cases associated with the elector plan nevertheless remained in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin as of the June 4 decision. The status of proceedings elsewhere does not determine the Arizona case, but it places the state Supreme Court’s refusal within a broader series of legal setbacks and unresolved prosecutions arising from the same election period.
For the Arizona attorney general’s office, the immediate consequence is procedural: prosecutors must return to a grand jury and provide a fresh presentation rather than proceed on the original one. For the defendants, the ruling preserves the lower court’s conclusion that the first grand jury did not receive material that should have been placed before it. Any renewed case will therefore depend on the new grand-jury process announced by Mayes’s office.
