Cyber Ninjas (and others) should be investigated

Former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley is calling for an investigation into the Cyber Ninjas’ Doug Logan.

This, for whatever it is Logan is hiding from the public about his audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election.

Logan was ordered by the courts to turn over all text messages, emails and other documents related to his audit of the election, in response to a lawsuit filed by The Arizona Republic.  

That was on Aug. 24, 2021.

Romley wants an investigation of Logan

Yet nearly two years later, Logan still hasn’t released thousands of those public records, many of them his own exchanges with Trump’s closest allies and with “Stop the Steal” organizers.

Not even a court-ordered $50,000-a-day fine has motivated him to turn over the records that would shed light on what was really going on behind the scenes inside what Republicans dubbed “America’s audit.”

An audit that confirmed Joe Biden won Arizona, by the way. And yet it became Exhibit A in Trump’s insistence that he was robbed and in the GOP’s insistence that Arizona’s elections are dirty.

Romley, a Republican and longtime county attorney, is calling for a criminal investigation.

“The most obvious case is the failure to obey court orders,” Romley told The Republic’s Robert Anglen. “But the text messages themselves raise the specter that there could be corruption here.”

Good, but what about Karen Fann’s role?

Logan is not the only one who should be investigated.

Consider Karen Fann. She’s the former Senate president who hired Logan, calling him “well qualified” for the job.

We now know, both in his experience and in his performance, that he wasn’t qualified to audit Fann’s dry cleaning bill, much less the 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County’s election.

The records thus far released show Logan was deeply embedded in the drive to throw the election to Donald Trump.

That he was working with Trump’s allies to get the defeated president a second term both before he was selected to do the audit and as he spun our UV-lighted 5G-photographed ballots into a false narrative that something nefarious happened here.

And that Fann was consulting with at least one Trump ally before hiring Logan to conduct the $150,000 audit that has thus far cost Arizona taxpayers more than $5 million.

She won’t turn over records, either

So how is it, really, that Fann came to hire a clearly unqualified partisan — one who was spreading conspiracy theories on social media — to conduct an “unbiased, independent” audit of Maricopa County’s vote?

Indeed, why insist on an audit at all when every pre-and post-election test and audit required by state law turned up precisely no evidence that there was a problem?

Fann has said she can’t recall how she came to hire Logan or name any of the references he used to get the job.

Text messages now show she was talking to retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist who vouched for Logan.

Fann also has refused to turn over thousands of records of her own exchanges that might shed light on how and why she came to be auditing Maricopa County’s vote, and how and why on earth she hired the Cyber Ninjas to do the job.

She’s claiming “legislative privilege” — as if such a thing should allow her to keep secrets about a nationally publicized, botched audit that challenged the fairness and accuracy of a presidential election.

And what about Arizona’s fake electors?

Speaking of challenges to a presidential election, is anybody investigating Arizona’s fake electors?

While Trump and his allies were pressuring legislative leaders to overturn the results of the presidential election, 11 Republicans — including state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, former party chairwoman Kelli Ward and Tyler Bowyer, a top executive with Turning Point USA who also sits on the Republican National Committee — were busy on another front.

Declaring themselves Arizona’s “duly elected and qualified electors”.

They met on Dec. 14, 2020, at state Republican Party headquarters, where they each signed their names, casting Arizona’s votes for a man Arizona didn’t elect and submitting the paperwork to Congress.

In the emails:Cyber Ninjas touch on irony, deceit, challenge coins

In Arizona, a presidential elector must, by law, follow the will of the voters.

Arizona’s fake electors instead followed the will of Trump and his attorney, John Eastman, who schemed up the plot to overthrow a democratically elected president.

In a two-page memo, Eastman detailed his step-by-step plan for how Arizona and six other states would submit “dual” sets of electors, allowing then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election or at least throw it into Congress, where Republicans could then declare Trump the winner.

They can run, but they shouldn’t hide

The Justice Department is investigating some of the seven states’ fake electors but there’s no indication that any of the Arizona phonies are among them though have been subpoenaed.

Hoffman actually made a beeline for a senators-only stairwell when The Republic’s Ryan Randazzo tried to ask him about it.

A spokesman for Attorney General Kris Mayes has said only that the investigation “is ongoing.”

I’m hoping that means there is one … .

Or several, to root out just what happened here where a scheme was clearly afoot to steal Arizona’s election.

Fake electors like Hoffman can run. But they shouldn’t be able to hide.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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