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Cyber Ninjas forced to turn over 39,000 emails; as suspected, the 'audit' was a sham from the start [1]
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Date: 2023-06-07
I wrote my share of diaries in 2021 when the Maricopa County “audit” that was intended to prove 2020 election fraud in Arizona was underway. A lot of the stories were bonkers crazy, but it was not a joke. Among other things critics wondered: 1) Why was Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company with no election recount experience, hired to conduct the audit? and 2) What was the connection between Cyber Ninjas and officials in the Trump administration?
This week The Arizona Republic has been publishing a series of articles based on more than 39,000 emails that Cyber Ninjas’ CEO Doug Logan tried to keep from the public for more than two years. So much of the audit itself was secret, with reputable reporters banned from the scene while One America News Network was given carte blanche. Media outlets argued that the audit was funded in part by taxpayers’ dollars, and therefore the public has a right to know how this bumbling catastrophe came about, who was involved, what the audit actually found, and what it didn’t reveal. (As we now know, it found that Biden won Maricopa County by even more votes.)
Initially thousands of communications were turned over to the media, all but the 39,000 that Logan held onto for years—until, that is, the courts said he can’t. He eventually released most of them, but not in a way most people could decipher: “Logan has released the texts in haphazard, nonsequential batches and in different formats, so threads were broken and not easily searchable.” It took data pros a long time to untangle what they called “intentional obfuscation.”
It’s not hard to see why Logan did not want the emails released. The first story yesterday made it clear that Cyber Ninjas didn’t know WTF they were doing, and any “findings” they announced were fiction, which is what most reputable audit firms said at the time.
Logan’s texts offer the first direct evidence that the Senate’s hand-picked auditor could not aggregate the results of his own “audit.” And they appear to bolster critics who long have maintained Logan "made up" numbers and lacked the ability or methodology to make any credible findings.
Another story today sheds light on Doug Logan’s role in the Stop the Steal movement well before he was hired to run the Arizona audit.
Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan already was part of a coordinated effort to overturn 2020 election results in several swing states when he was tapped to lead the Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit,” records show.
Well before Logan began the Arizona audit, he was in contact with major deniers like MyPillowGuy, Lin Wood, Michael Flynn, and QAnon nutter Ron Watkins—working not only in Arizona but in Georgia and Michigan as well. Logan remains part of a criminal investigation in Michigan for breaking into voting machines. I would not be surprised to learn that he’s part of DA Fani Willis’s investigation in Georgia either.
The new emails also reveal that Senate President Karen Fann hired the inexperienced Cyber Ninjas because she “felt comfortable” with Logan (read: she liked his previous Stop the Steal work), even though firms with recount experience applied for the job, and even though “she cannot recall any of Logan’s references or why she selected his firm.” Sen. Fann’s star has faded fast (“everything Trump touches dies”) and she will not seek reelection. The same is true of Cyber Ninjas, which went bankrupt and folded.
Most importantly, while Sen. Fann and others maintained all along that the audit was not partisan and was not intended to help Trump, the emails show Doug Logan was in contact with Stop the Steal leaders and members of Trump’s orbit from the start. Like the fake electors scheme, the countless lawsuits, the Giuliani-Powell traveling circus, and the Jan. 6 insurrection itself, the Maricopa County audit was simply another tool in Trump’s 2020 election overthrow scheme.
I can see AG Kris Mayes’s office from my window. I’m guessing she might be interested in this outright fraud.
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