Arizona Sheriff Chris Nanos fires back at claims hes blocking FBI from key evidence in Nancy Guthrie case

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos fired back on claims that he withheld essential physical evidence from the FBI in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie.“Not even close to the truth,” Nanos told NBC Tucson affiliate KVOA on Thursday.The second-term Democrat pressed that he had been cooperating with his federal counterparts after Reuters revealed that evidence found in the high-profile investigation was being sent to a private DNA laboratory in Florida instead of the FBI’s national crime lab in Quantico, Va.“Actually, the FBI just wanted to send the one or two they found by the crime scene, closest to it – mile, mile and a half ..

.I said ‘No, why do that? Let’s just send them all to where all the DNA exist, all the profiles and the markers exist.’ They agreed, makes sense.” Nanos told the outlet.

Nanos also noted gloves discovered by FBI investigators — and exclusively reported by The Post — may not be as important to the case as previously believed after multiple were picked up on the side of the road near the Catalina Foothills home of “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie’s mother.“We don’t even know the true value of these gloves,” he said, noting there were “quite a number of them.”The garment seemingly resembled the gloves that a masked individual was wearing after being captured on video outside Nancy Guthrie’s home the night she disappeared on Feb.1.

Federal investigators reportedly wanted to examine the evidence themselves instead of handing it over to Nanos’ teams.“The FBI asked Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for physical evidence in the case, including a glove and DNA from the home of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, to be processed at the FBI’s national crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, but Nanos has insisted instead on using a private lab in Florida,” an anonymous law enforcement source told Fox News Digital.The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has spent approximately $200,000 to send evidence from Arizo...