The Founder and CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the cybersecurity firm tapped by the Arizona State Senate to audit Maricopa County’s 2020 presidential election tallies, told The Star News Network his company shut down because the Republican-controlled State Senate did not fulfill its contractual obligations to the firm.
“At the end of the day, this is the call of Senator Fann,” said Doug Logan, speaking of Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann. Logan told employees in early December that the company would close its doors unless the State Senate fulfilled its contractual obligations.
“What I’ve been told by her, and other people is that legal counsel was recommended, this was done, and all legal counsel agreed, and therefore she didn’t have much option, so I don’t know if I want to single her out, but the fact of the matter is I was put out of business because the Senate did not execute their contract,” he said.
Among the issues that led to his decision to shut down operations was Fann’s failure to pay $100,000 it is owed from its contract with the State Senate, along with Logan’s refusal to comply with a public records request that would have exposed his employees and their private communications, he said.
“The Senate put me out of business,” said the CEO who founded the cybersecurity firm in 2013 and moved to Sarasota, Florida, to grow it.
“We were put out of business because of the Senate failing to meet their obligations,” he said.
“It’s also true that we lost $2.1 million on the audit, and we were $1.9 million in debt to different creditors, but we had worked with most of those creditors in order to set forth the plan going forward,” he said. “They weren’t making unreasonable demands, he said.
“My employees, including myself, we were all laid off from Cyber Ninjas as effective January; January 1st was the last day,” he said.
“There were public records requests that were put through at different points in time in this stuff, and we were pretty adamant with the Senate. We’re like: ‘We’ll turn over whatever you need, as long as you’re going to redact the names of the individuals who worked in the audit, because we’re not allowed them to be doxed – I’m not going to allow their names to be out there, to be part of social credit score,” he said.
“I promised them I’d do the best to keep their names private, and so I want to redact them, and the Senate basically refused on that,” he said.
“These lawsuits went on for a period of time because of the disagreements with those lawsuits, that in my contract, there was a provision that said that they would indemnify me from any legal action that was direct result of my work,” he said.
Logan said he also resisted the requests from media outlets, approved by what he described as a leftwing judge, which would have given the outlets private information about his company, he said.
“Our work was an audit; we created an audit report,” he said.
“Our tally sheets, sure, those are in scope,” he said. “We’ll turn those over. Digital copies of that, no problem. Surveillance video from the tables, livestream video, no problem. We’ll turn over copies of the ballot images. We’ll turn over everything. We already had turned over all the data associated with every last thing we did in our report.”
“We’ll turn over everything that a decision was made off of, not a problem, that makes logical sense. It’s a reasonable thing; people want to see we’ll do that,” he said. “When you start saying that I have to give personal communications with all these different people, I’m not a public entity, and we continued to fight that.”
He complied with all production requests that did not breach his company’s private information or the names of his workers and volunteers, he said.
Logan’s last communications with Fann
Logan said Republican State Sen. Wendy Rogers, unlike her leader in the State Senate, was unfailingly supportive.
“Wendy Rogers is great,” he said.
“Wendy Rogers used to come into the audit and sit down and talk to me for an hour or sometimes more,” he said. “She was a great help. She was one of the ones who wanted to actively know what was going on, was interested in it, and spent the time to find out. There weren’t a lot of senators that ever showed up to check on things, let alone to hear what was going on.”
Logan said his last interaction with Arizona Senate’s president was one-way.
“I texted her, I think it was January 3rd, and in that communication, I was like: ‘Hey?’ I told her that we’re going out of business and that it was the result of some of the stuff the Senate had done,” the West Hartford, Connecticut, native said.
“I was hopeful that maybe it might spur her to do something about it; instead, she’d actually had her Signal messages to auto-delete messages from me, and she turned that off after that message,” he said.
“The last time I talked with her was somewhere around Thanksgiving; I think a little bit after there. And again, I was asking her why she wasn’t paying, and she gave me her reasons for that.”
One reason why Fann refused to pay off Cyber Ninjas was the theory that if the invoices were paid, the State Senate would then be liable for the company’s other debts, he said.
“That’s what’s been said to me,” he said.
“They thought they could get away with it. I don’t understand how this is the case, but Senator Fann and others have basically said that if they paid me in full, they may somehow be obligated to pay the deficit of $2 million that I owe to other people,” he said.
Logan said this was not the case at all, and it was just another excuse to stiff the company.
“I don’t know any legal premise where that would be the case,” he said. “It doesn’t make any logical sense. There’s no reason why my contracts would make the Senate obligated for anything.”
The CEO said after his conversations with his creditors, all of them were committed to keeping the company afloat as an ongoing concern, but the legal uncertainty and the lingering $100,000 owed convinced him it was time to close shop.
Fann also refused to cover Cyber Ninjas indemnity clause, which was also part of the agreement, which stated that any discovery requests would not be at the company’s expense, he said. “It says it cannot be at any cost to the company, which this has cost time and everything.”
Logan said it was disingenuous for people to suggest that the reason Fann did not pay the company was that he refused to comply with records requests.
In addition to text messages, the media outlets requested all communications on secure messaging services, such as Signal and WhatsApp and Twitter direct messages, he said.
“The net result is that we have a precedent where, theoretically, anyone that ever did any government work could have to reveal all sorts of things on their personal cell phone and all sorts of communications,” he said.
“There isn’t a good explanation for it. The indemnity clause, they’re saying they’re not paying it because I didn’t go with what they wanted me to do initially because I wouldn’t just blanketly turn everything over and allow all the participants’ names to be doxed,” he said.
Logan: Cyber Ninjas found more than 22,000 Arizona ballots without proper provenance
“Our findings included that there were original reports that 23,344 ballots that were mailed to an address that someone no longer lived at, but somehow they were cast on their behalf,” Logan said.
“When we drilled in that number to rebut some of the stuff the county had said, it dawned on me that some of those were military voters,” he said. “They could’ve cast votes, even though they never physically got their ballot, so when we take those out, it’s actually 22,000. It’s an even 22,000, but anyway, you look at it, that’s more than the margin of victory in the state.”
Arizona’s final official count for the 2020 presidential election had former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., with 1,672,143 votes, and President Donald J. Trump with 1,661,686 votes, showing Biden winning the state by 10,457 votes.
Logan said there was no concrete source for the 22,000 ballots because the voters were no longer at their address.
Although he said there could be cases where someone stopped by their old residence and picked up a mail-in ballot, ballots cannot be legally forwarded to another address in Arizona. “I have a hard time believing that’s an explanation for 10,000, 12,000 of them. Right? It would be a small percentage of them.”
He said the audit did not identify individuals whose ballots were not tied to their legitimate residence.
Logan said he expected Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich to act on this finding and either validate it or knock it down because the audit was a project of the State Senate, not the executive branch.
“From my standpoint in all of this, I know everyone was looking at the audits done – immediately we should have arrests,” he said. “We are not the executive branch. We’re not doing a criminal investigation, so anyway, we looked at it when we finished the audit, we needed to hand it off to have it the done by the proper branch.”
Ironically, Logan said the work of Cyber Ninjas on the audit was validated by the Democrats’ top elections attorney, Mark Elias.
“He hired 70 attorneys to try to stop our audit,” he said.
“If Mark Elias can hire 70 attorneys and they can’t come up with an excuse to stop our audit, we clearly did some things right,” he said.
“We were very careful in the way we did everything because if we did anything a little wrong; they were going to shut us down,” he said. “They were looking for an excuse to. They were given the narrative as if they were going to, but they couldn’t because we were actually doing things correctly.”
Logan: I have no regrets for taking on the audit
Logan said he owes it to his workers to prevent them from being targeted because they were part of the audit.
“There were a lot of really highly qualified and amazing individuals that worked the audit,” he said.
“We had people that ran their own business that were taking time off,” he said. “We had a couple that came in and was working the third shift in the middle of the night and having someone come watch their kids so they could come and contribute time to the audit to make it happen. Really, God provided every last person I needed when I needed them.”
“Obviously, I was way too optimistic; it’s probably my nature; I’m always optimistic,” Logan said.
“My goal was to find out what really happened, what the truth is,” he said.
“I really wanted to know, I wanted to know what the deal was out here, and I felt like when 47 percent of Americans believe an election was rigged, it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, our democracy is failing, and that will hurt the Republic,” he said.
“There needed to be an audit to restore confidence, and so naive or whatever, I walked into it thinking: ‘If do this audit, I can hopefully, in some way, unite our country – I’ll either find all the pure evidence and prove that fraud happened, or I’ll go through and maybe I’ll find it didn’t happen,’” he said.
“I didn’t think that was likely, but it’s possible, and in any case, I’ll be able to provide the credibility and everything for everyone to be on the same page,” Logan said.
“My faith is very important to me, and I wasn’t going to manipulate anything,” he said. “I just wanted to know what was real.
Every day, Logan said, he taught up to three classes for the volunteers and workers, and every morning he would give them a 15-minute pep talk.
“I tried to do an interaction and tell everyone, and say: ‘Look, our importance is to be beyond reproach. We’re just looking for the truth. If you’re honest, you’re here. We’re glad you’re here. We don’t care what party you are.’”
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Neil W. McCabe is the national political editor of The Star News Network. Send him news tips: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @neilwmccabe2.
Photo “Doug Logan” by C12 Groups of Southwest Florida. Photo “Karen Fann” by Arizona State Legislature. Background Photo “Board Meeting” by Cyber Ninjas.
