Fitz: The Cyber Ninja Saga, Part 4

Crossposted with permission from David Fitzsimmons’ excellent SubStack ‘Arizona’s Progressive Voice’. Why aren’t you paying subscriber, already?

Trump’s boy, Doug Logan, “Patriot Doug”, Doug the fine Christian father of twelve, had failed to find any voter fraud in Maricopa County in the 2020 election. In fact, just the opposite. Biden had won by more votes than originally thought.

The Lord works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

For lo, Trump was pleased. To the superficial observer and the conspiracy gobblers Doug’s Ninja dimwits had stoked sufficient suspicions about the election process to please the coup plotting master con man in Mar-a-Lago. Enough smoke was generated by his “Cyber Ninja” circus of MAGA minions, to seed seditious doubt about our noble and formerly esteemed democratic institutions to feed Kari Lake’s persistent babbling lunacy and to nourish the Big Lie to the point where it still thrives in the primeval swamp of the anti-democratic authoritarian MAGA Republican base, the sneering snakepit of resentment and racial animus that threatens the sanctity of this perilous upcoming national election. Will the lessons of the Cyber Ninjas and Logan’s breaching of voting machines be used in the upcoming election to steal the vote? Will the MAGA republicans who conspired in this conspiracy of dunces face justice? Will Arizona’s fake MAGA republican electors face the same justice many of the January 6th traitors have received in courtrooms across this nation? Will Trump, the reprobate ringmaster of Logan’s circus, steal back the White House in 2024?

I remain optimistic. 

Simply because Trump’s despicable villainy appeals to too many Americans, I am confident the heroes who stood up when it came time to, pardon the balloting metaphor, be counted, will defeat the forces of this fraudulent farce.

Nearly two-years ago, in January of 2022 Logan closed his carnival forever and laid off his employees.

The belly-up death of Logan’s “Cyber Ninjas” firm took place just before a judge issued an order finding the company in contempt of court and began imposing a fine of $50,000 a day because “Patriot Doug” had failed to respect the rule of law and produce the public records requested by The Arizona Republic. 

Sic semper tyrannis. Thus always to tyrants.

Logan whimpered he didn’t shutter the shop because of the fines. It was because of “cash flow” issues. Must have been stressful when you have a wife and 12 mouths to feed.

According to a Politico story way back at the beginning of this farce, when Arizona’s Senate of seditious lap dogs, our elected dolts, first invited the ninjas to conduct the audit many of the Republican stalwarts back in Logan’s home state of Florida mocked Arizona’s choice. David “DJ” Johnson, the former executive director of the Florida Republican Party was said to have wryly observed, “They’re ninjas. When they snap their fingers, they just disappear. They need to get a special stone to do it, the absentee ballot stone. Once they have that stone, they can just fade into the wind.”

Two-years later they would fade into the wind, carried off into history in an Arizona dust storm.

Democracies are often preserved and protected from grasping tyrannical forces by the efforts of several democratic institutions and ordinary citizens. In this case it was a combination of Arizona’s Press, Courts, public interest groups, a group of selfless attorneys and finally several brave Republican public servants who fought back against Trump, his lapdog Logan and Arizona’s drooling pack of scurrilous anti-American lawbreaking lawmakers.

Permit me to praise them.

Heroes like the organization “American Oversight”.  How can you not admire their mission, described in their website banner: “Uncovering the facts, Holding government accountable”. Simple, yet profoundly important to a Republic’s survival.

It was American Oversight’s lawsuit against the duplicitous fraud farming Arizona Senate, that led to multiple court rulings compelling the “Cyber Ninjas” to finally disclose their humiliating, embarrassing public records to the public. Here’s a link to their site: https://www.americanoversight.org/

Count among the heroes in this sorry saga the dogged “Arizona Republic” news organization which spent a fortune on the two-year long legal battle, fighting like a pit bull, to get the communications and public records from the harebrained Republican state senators who hired the Cyber Ninjas to “audit” Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots in 2021. Here the cliche “Watchdog of Democracy” resonates.

And in this perilous time when news deserts are growing and newspapers are dying the press could not be more essential to our nation’s survival.

The tenacious “Arizona Republic” reporters Ryan Randazzo, Jen Fifield and Robert Angle, Yvonne Sanchez, Ronald Hansen are heroic patriots. Notepad wielding, keyboard tapping, phone ringing, door knocking news hounds whose inexhaustible thirst for the facts served the health of our Republic.

These days Jen Fifield is a reporter for the esteemed “Votebeat”, a non-partisan source for the most respected local reporting on elections and voting that I know. Fifield is an experienced and respected elections and voting expert who you will want to follow in this nerve-wracking election year. Find Jen’s work here:  Votebeat Fifield

In this contest between the forces of light and darkness, take note it is in darkness where, as the Washington Post credo says, democracy dies, 

And then there are the heroes in white shirts and ties. The civil servants who did their jobs. Patriots like the elected bureaucrats of Maricopa County who served the citizens of their county with honor in the middle of an epic shitstorm. Individuals like the Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Jack Sellers, an archetypal old-school Republican. And his fellow board member, Supervisor Clint Hickman, another sane Republican. And then there is the man who took more heat from the rabid MAGA lynch mob than anyone else, Maricopa County Recorder Steven Richer, the Republican civil servant who supervised the office responsible for the ballot count in Maricopa County. They all endured hatred, insults, terror, malevolent harassment, and heinous threats for simply doing their jobs and respecting the law and the truth. 

The Arizona Republic published an opinion piece by Richer that highlighted the difference between the audit rules his office played by and the nonsensical audit rules the Ninjas made up as they went along and why citizens should be skeptical of their “findings”. I commend that article to you here: Cyber Ninjas play by an alarmingly different set of election audit rules

Richer was fearless when it came to inviting the irrational wrath of the Trump mob simply by speaking the truth. Fearless.

The saga of the rise and fall of the Cyber Ninjas is a story of how our democracy works when faced with corrosive thuggish villainy. It is a story of the systems our wise Founders create to protect and enforce the rule of law in our republic.

Time and again we saw Arizona’s Courts enforce the rule of law. The judges who enforced the rule of law and the legal advocates who argued for the rule of law behaved heroically in this near mythic saga of good governance versus evil intent.

Maricopa Superior Court Judge John Hannah found the foot-dragging Cyber Ninjas in contempt of his order compelling the Ninjas, to turn over its emails, text messages and documents sought by The Arizona Republic. Trump’s “Enemy of the People”, the much-maligned press, was determined to prove that Trump, the seditious mobster in Chief, was the enemy of the People’s democracy.

Judge Hannah hit the Cyber Ninjas with sanctions of $50,000 a day in January of 2022 for not coming out of the darkness and standing in the light. Fann, the partisan pandering liar from Prescott, caved and asked the Cyber Ninjas and the three other contractors she had hand-picked to turn over the public records that they preferred to keep hidden from the People behind their backs.

In this saga there were heroic bands like the law firm of Ballard Spahr, which provided Phoenix Newspapers Inc. with their legal services for pocket change and the satisfaction of reminding “Patriot Doug” and his cyber fools why the First Amendment was the first one the Revolutionaries penned into our Bill of Rights.

And so Logan folded up his carnival tent, claimed that “other bills” were just too much and desperately hoped to avoid paying the legal penalties.  Poor Doug had passed the hat all summer long begging his fellow crooks for cash, who, save for easy marks like Mr. Overstock, shrugged their shoulders after being tapped gain and again for coin to fund the effort. A “fraudit” costs a lot of money these days.

“The court is not going to accept the assertion that Cyber Ninjas is an empty shell and that nobody is responsible for seeing that it complies,” Hannah said.

Wish I’d been there to see Logan’s hapless lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, the Arizona Republican Party’s attorney, there in Hannah’s court when he begged to be released from the case. “I’m trying to work here and make a living.”

Then, according to Press reports, “in an awkward exchange” Wilenchik accused the judge of smiling when he complained about the decision. 

One must love Hannah’s response. “I’m smiling because I’m thinking of the accusations against me that you made in the motion to recuse me for cause that you did not appeal.” Wllienchik had claimed Hannah was biased against conservatives because he was a Democrat. “I smile every time I think about it because I’m not a Democrat.”

This “Arizona Mirror” story catalogues Willenchik’s continued  devotion to lost causes, “An Arizona appellate court ruled that the Arizona Republican Party and its lawyers must pay the attorneys’ fees for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office in a lawsuit that challenged how Maricopa County audited ballots in the 2020 election and sought to stop the county from certifying Donald Trump’s loss.” His firm was asked to pay $18,237.59 to the Secretary of State’s Office and to cover the cost of his fruitless appeal. Here is a link to that deligthful “Arizona Mirror” story: AZGOP must pay Secretary of State’s legal fees for ‘bad-faith’ 2020 election 

Across America, state by state, county by county, more than 60 judges, including many who were Trump appointed judges, or appointed by other Republican presidents, found that, drumroll, please, based on the facts, the evidence, here in the real world, that there was no voter fraud. None. Zilch. Nada. At least in this universe.

Meanwhile the fraud hatched at Tomotely Plantation, the fraud that fed the beast that attacked our national’s Capitol on January 6th, the fraud that was amplified inside the Arizona Veterans Colosseum, by Logan, and his lunkheads, persists and haunts our nation to this day.

And there are the villains who remain among us in broad daylight here in sunny Arizona. 

Villains such as the MAGA Republican Fake Electors who are under investigation by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. Anthony Kern is one such fake elector who actually serves in the Arizona State Senate. “There’s no such thing as fake electors,” Kern said. “If it was illegal, we wouldn’t have done it.” Brilliant defense, genius. Fake elector and State Senator Anthony Kern, a MAGA blockhead who thinks legislators like himself and not you, the people, should pick the President, is both, less sentient than a fern and the current Judiciary Committee Chairman in our state Senate.

Mayes hopes to complete her investigation by March which should produce embarrassing headlines for the MAGA mob, including the former Queen of the MAGAland Party, Kelli Ward, and her husband, Michael Ward, Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Republican from Queen Creek and others.

So many heroes. Like veteran Cochise County Election Director Lisa Marra who eventually resigned after standing up to the Big lie backing bozos within her own county’s government, clowns inspired by the Cyber Ninjas who demanded a hand recount of the votes in their shire. 

Hopefully Mayes will get around to investigating the Cyber Ninja caper because as comical as the scheme appears it was a deadly serious seditious enterprise, a malicious attack on our democracy. If Logan’s crew are jokers, then they have the sinister aroma of Joaquin Phoenix’s terrifying and malevolent “Joker”.

Let us hope villains like former State Senator, Karen Fann, the Senate President who invited the big lie machine into our state will be welcomed by historians into the history books as the conniving liar she was. Along with her accomplice, Warren Petersen, the young smiling chuckle head who remains Arizona’s MAGA Senate President, who persists in regurgitating the MAGA line on behalf of the fine MAGA citizens of MAGA Gilbert, Arizona.

Another significant villain in this saga stands out for his tardiness. He just couldn’t seem to wrap up his “investigation” of the politically embarrassing cyber ninja saga until after the election of 2022.  Attorney General Mark Brnovich, the MAGA Bluto lookalike, engaged in foot-dragging which was summarized neatly in this “Arizona Republic” story: Brnovich’s office, “investigated the 2020 election and found no evidence of fraud, but his office withheld that information, and it wasn’t released until 2023. The omission allowed concerns about election interference to fester.”

Fester is the perfect word for the impact of this tale of election interference. It suggests images of toxic pus, a political putrefaction, a repugnant suppurating ulcer on democracy. And that was the legacy of Mark Brnovich.

And then there is Logan. The good Christian dad turned election denying cyber detective. The ringmaster of Arizona’s carnival of Inspector Clouseaus. His Cyber Ninjas are long gone. Defunct. But not the legacy of his so-called “audit”, political theater that served as the most salient ray of hope for finding the fraud that would embolden Donald Trump’s supporters, the ticks who continue to cling to the rotten carcass of that dead beaten horse, the farcical fiction that widespread fraud by Chinese commies and Venezuelans and jews and sinister deep state sorcerers using bamboo papers and other witchcraft cost him his soiled presidency in 2020. The inane contagion of conspiracy theories were spread on the social media accounts of Logan and his Cyber Ninjas before the posts were stricken. 

Odds are good he’ll find consulting work in this upcoming election, aiding the election deniers in waiting. If he isn’t under investigation. In Georgia. Or in Arizona. Or in other states. Who knows what Sidney Powell may say now that she’s flipped. Or what Arizona’s fake electors may say when they are bound to flip. Poltroons. On the bright side Logan’s Sarasota mortgage is paid for.

Let us return to the prologue, where we found Logan interviewed by a Christian influencer.

“With us today is Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, who was hired by Arizona’s Senate Republican leaders to conduct a non-partisan audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County. Doug, do you believe you were called by God to conduct this audit?”

“Yes, I do, Kris, and I urge all your prayer warriors to pray that Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich finds the courage to take his investigation to the next step.”

Brnovich took his investigation to the next step. And the Cyber Ninjas with him. Off a cliff into a canyon of humiliation. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

And now as Logan might say, let us all humbly bow our heads and pray that Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes finds the courage to take her investigation to the next step.