With Trump, it's always worse than you even thought

Leaked text messages reveal that operatives for Donald Trump allegedly discussed using breached voter data in Georgia to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

[...]

Two men working for the former president in January 2021 also allegedly talked about the possibility of the data being used in an attempt to decertify the state’s pivotal Senate runoffs.

[...]

[T]he messages were exchanged two weeks after the operatives allegedly breached the voting machine in Georgia’s Coffee County.

“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” wrote Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia.

[...]

“We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Mr. Penrose allegedly wrote.

[...]

The message was allegedly written on 19 January and sent to Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the company that led the Republican-demanded audit of 2020 presidential election ballots in Arizona.

[...]

The scheme to breach voting machines in Coffee County, and the role of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, are being investigated as part of a 2020 election probe by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Sources told CNN that her office is considering potential racketeering charges against multiple defendants in the case.

The breach of voting systems in Coffee County is also under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

  MSN

Remember that breach of the voting machinery? So much has happened and is happening around Trump's attempt at a coup that it's hard to keep it all in mind.

The Georgia State Elections Board revealed Wednesday that the board has asked the FBI to participate in an ongoing criminal investigation into the voting system breach in Coffee County.

[...]

SullivanStrickler, which court documents show was hired by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, previously said in a statement to CNN that it was “directed by attorneys to contact county election officials to obtain access to certain data” in Georgia and also “directed by attorneys to distribute that data to certain individuals.”

[...]

The Georgia elections board also revealed it is investigating communications between local election officials in a second Georgia county and SullivanStrickler – the same cybersecurity firm hired by attorneys working for former President Donald Trump to access voting systems in Coffee County in January 2021.

The board has received documents that include an “unexecuted engagement agreement” for SullivanStrickler to forensically image voting systems in Spalding County, Georgia, Duffey said.

The move represents an escalation by state investigators in Georgia, raising new questions about whether the same group of individuals involved in the Coffee County breach sought access to voting systems in other parts of the state as well.

  CNN

[F]ormer prosecutor Michael Zeldin claimed multiple laws at the state and federal level may have been broken.

As CNN reported on Friday, "The plot to breach voting systems in Coffee County, coordinated by members of Trump’s legal team including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, is part of a broader criminal investigation into 2020 election interference led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis," before adding, "Willis’ office is weighing a potential racketeering case against multiple defendants and is actively deciding who to bring charges against.

  MSN

So many to pick from.

UPDATE 04/23/2023:

I don't know about the others, but I'm pretty sure Eric Herschmann is cooperating, judging from his damning testimony to the 1/6 committee.

Shut 'er down

Cyber Ninjas, a firm hired by the Arizona state Senate to conduct a review of Maricopa County’s election results, on Thursday announced that it is shutting down after a county government report slammed the firm and a judge ordered it to pay $50,000 a day in fines.

Sam Levine, a reporter for The Guardian, first reported the news of Cyber Ninjas closing down on Thursday, tweeting that CEO “Doug Logan and the rest of the employees have been let go and Cyber Ninjas is being shut down.”

The news followed a Thursday order that Cyber Ninjas turn over public records to The Arizona Republic, including emails and text messages, to comply with an August ruling — or face $50,000 in fines per day.

The firm was hired to conduct an audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County following former President Trump's claims the election was stolen from him.

Maricopa County released a report this month, arguing Cyber Ninjas made 22 misleading claims, 41 inaccurate claims and 13 claims that were false.

  The Hill

I think if we'd just taken the name of the company into consideration, we could have always known they were bullshit.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Arizona "audit" is over and Trump was spinning to the bitter end

In a statement issued through his leadership PAC, Save America, the former president called the audit report, which is slated for release Friday afternoon, a political bombshell that “has uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD.”

“Huge findings in Arizona! However, the Fake News Media is already trying to ‘call it’ again for Biden before actually looking at the facts—just like they did in November!” Trump said, invoking once again his baseless claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

“This is a major criminal event and should be investigated by the Attorney General immediately,” he added. “The Senate’s final report will be released today at 4:00PM ET. I have heard it is far different than that being reported by the Fake News Media.”

[...]

“This is not even the whole state of Arizona, but only Maricopa County. It would only get worse!” Trump said. “There is fraud and cheating in Arizona and it must be criminally investigated! More is coming out in the hearing today.”

  The Hill

So let's have a look at that ridiculous "audit", shall we?

The Arizona Senate on Friday heard testimony from the firm it hired to conduct a so-called audit of more than 2 million votes cast in Maricopa County during the 2020 elections, the latest in a cavalcade of election disinformation spread at the behest of former President Trump.

The audit has cost Arizona taxpayers and private donors millions of dollars, and even some of the Republicans who voted to authorize it in the first place began to raise concerns over its handling by Cyber Ninjas, the firm at the heart of the audit.

“They wasted nearly $6 million to tell us what we already knew, meanwhile exacerbating an already unhealthy political environment,” state Sen. Paul Boyer (R), an audit opponent, told The Hill in a text message.

  The Hill

As always, the winners are the scammers.

The main event of the so-called audit was a hand recount of the roughly 2,089,000 ballots voters in Maricopa County cast in 2020.

Those ballots broke for President Biden by a 45,000-vote margin, about four times his winning margin statewide, making him the first Democrat to carry Arizona since former President Clinton.

In the words of the auditors themselves: “[T]here were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvass results for the County.

[...]

In fact, the Cyber Ninjas-led team found Biden’s margin of victory in Maricopa County was 360 votes wider than the official canvass had been.

[...]

The hand recount, a multistep process that included manual data entry from volunteers who were not professionally trained by election administrators, found 2,088,569 votes in the presidential contest and 2,088,396 votes in the Senate race — a difference of 175 ballots.

It’s not a statistically massive difference, but it is a difference. In its first data point, Cyber Ninjas showed its count was marred by human error.

Of course, they couldn't let the affair stand at a total loss...

The Cyber Ninjas report includes several recommended areas that the firm suggests warrant further scrutiny, broken down by level of severity — critical, high, medium, low and unknown (or, in its term, “informational”).

The top priority — one that Trump seized on even before the final report came out — is mail-in ballots cast from a voter’s prior address. The Cyber Ninjas report suggests 23,344 ballots were cast by voters who no longer live at the address at which they are registered.

“Phantom voters!” Trump said in a context-free statement released Friday.

But election analysts and experts said that figure is meaningless without more context. Cyber Ninjas matched voters with commercial data, rather than official data maintained by county elections office. Those who cast ballots but now live in different areas may have moved since the election, or moved out of a parent’s house around Election Day.

Just over 1 percent of voters who cast a ballot in the 2020 elections may have moved since — a figure well within the normal range of the share of people who change residences in a given year.

Garrett Archer, a former top aide in the Arizona secretary of state’s office who now reports for Phoenix’s ABC affiliate, told The Hill that the official data maintained by the county would have answered questions raised by the commercial data — but that Cyber Ninjas did not take that step.

[...]

In its report, Cyber Ninjas dedicates a 158-word paragraph to a description of how ink bleeding through paper might affect a ballot — but really, only the last eight words of that paragraph matter: “No images that were reviewed met these conditions.”

[...]

Cyber Ninjas dedicates a section of its report to the paper on which ballots were printed. Its conclusion: Election administrators used different paper weights. Not a word about bamboo.

“The large number of papers utilized during this election and the lack of official reporting about what paper stocks were utilized made it difficult to identify any potential counterfeit ballots. Standardization on these details would more greatly facilitate future audits,” the report says.

[...]

“The purpose of this audit was to overturn the result of Arizona’s presidential election, prove fraud and expose flaws in our election system. The audit went 0-3,” said Mike Noble, a Phoenix-based pollster and political strategist. “Its one potential true impact is the lasting damage to our trust in our electoral process.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Oh, for fuck's sake...

Oh my

His company is not big enough to continue without him???

UPDATE:  Cyber Ninjas has five members.  Two others are also sick.

GOP insanity is a virus

The chair of the Wisconsin state Assembly's elections committee said Thursday she was subpoenaing 2020 election materials including physical ballots and voting machines from two large counties, in an attempt to bring an Arizona-style review of the 2020 election to another state.

Republican state Rep. Janel Brandtjen said she would be issuing subpoenas for “election materials” from Milwakuee and Brown counties. President Joe Biden carried Milwaukee County by a steep margin en route to narrowly winning the state. Former President Donald Trump carried Brown County, which is home to Green Bay, by about 7 percentage points.

[...]

It isn’t yet clear if the subpoenas are valid, however. The state Assembly passed a resolution in March directing Brandtjen's committee to investigate the election.

  Politico

Why the Trump county? To pretend to be fair and balanced?

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice recently issued a sharp warning to states trying to carry out post-election ballot reviews or audits. In a memo, the department highlighted that state and local governments that allow ballots from federal elections to be mishandled would be breaking federal law.

“Election audits are exceedingly rare. But the Department is concerned that some jurisdictions conducting them may be using, or proposing to use, procedures that risk violating the Civil Rights Act,” read the memo, which was issued last week.

[...]

Election administrators and election security experts, as well as the Republican election official and county supervisors in Maricopa [county, Arizona], nearly universally deride the process as an amateurish fishing expedition rooted in Trump's baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election. The Arizona review has also been engulfed in problems recently, as it stretches for months past its original intended completion date.

Also, the "audit" - while not providing any evidence of widespread fraud is costing upwards of $6 million. Apparently, almost all of that is "being overwhelmingly funded by groups promoting false narratives about the election". 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's about time

UPDATE:

2022 may not be a good year for the GOP in Arizona

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Arizona fraudit is off the rails

An unsupervised driver transported copies of ballot data in a truck to a cabin in the community of Bigfork in northwest Montana, several media outlets reported.

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The audit of 2.1 million votes in Maricopa County is hugely controversial. The audit was ordered by state Senate Republicans, and only involves races won by Democrats. The partisan review by the Cyber Ninjas company, which has no experience with elections, is headed by conspiracy theorist Doug Logan, a promoter of the “Big Lie” that the election was rigged. He posted messages months ago that “hundreds of thousands” of new votes would inevitably be found for Donald Trump.

[...]

In one off-the-rails operation, Cyber Ninjas operatives are seeking evidence of bamboo fibers in ballots as proof that China interfered with the election. One of the auditors actually appears on the same ballots he’s reviewing as both a failed GOP candidate and an elector for Trump.

Election officials have warned that large numbers of the unsecured ballots may already have been altered or trashed, and are now completely unreliable — and that manipulation of voting machines has rendered them unusable for future elections.

[...]

Arizona Republic journalist Jen Fifield discovered that the cabin now holding the records is the residence of Ben Cotton, founder of digital company CyFIR, which is a subcontractor of the company running the recount. CyFIR’s parent company, Cyber Technologies, also run by Cotton, appears to have the same address in the Montana woods, which was tracked down by CNN this week.

[...]

The Arizona vote was certified more than six months ago by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey after several recounts failed to find any irregularities.

  HuffPo

This is going to be a nightmare for months, if not years, to come.

Also...

In recent weeks, GOP lawmakers from at least 16 states have flocked to Phoenix for a first-hand look at a controversial, partisan "audit" of the 2020 vote in Arizona's largest county.

The visits look to be a harbinger for similar exercises yet-to-come in those other states -- and a potential revenue stream for, among others, the Arizona effort's main contractor: Cyber Ninjas.

[...]

Though the Florida-based cybersecurity firm has existed in some form since at least 2014, before last November's election, it hadn't done election auditing.

[...]

Go to the address for Cyber Ninjas' Legal Department, listed on its audit contract with the Arizona Senate, and you'll wind up at a rented mailbox in a UPS Store in Sarasota, Florida.

[...]

Cyber Ninjas exists mostly in virtual reality, with its chief executive, Doug Logan, also serving as, well, pretty much everything.

On recent calls to the company's automated answer line, pressing "3" for sales led to the answering message for Logan. So did pressing "4" for human resources. And pressing "5" for purchasing. And "6" for the general mailbox.

[...]

Logan himself has strenuously avoided speaking to reporters since taking part in an April 22 press conference just before the audit began. At that conference, he refused to answer questions about how he'd repeated and amplified various debunked election-fraud conspiracy theories on social media, such as this retweet unearthed by the Arizona Mirror, for example: "I'm tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. It happened, it's real, and people better get wise fast." He'd also provided, in a Michigan election lawsuit, an affidavit alleging vulnerabilities in one county's system for tallying votes; state and county officials disagreed, identified a slew of problems with the analysis. And Logan repeated disproven claims in a paper he wrote for Republican US senators objecting to Congress's Jan. 6 certification of President Joe Biden's election win.

But Logan, and the Arizona Senate's audit liaison, Ken Bennett, argued at that press conference that Logan's own opinions don't matter, and that people should trust in the integrity of the audit process he's overseeing.

[...]

"It's hard to say anything bad about the guy. He's a lovely person. He's just nuts now," said Tony Summerlin, who has been friends with Logan for 15 years, and said he helped him win a cybersecurity contract with the Federal Communications Commission five years ago.

[...]

Logan and his company have a trail of positive reviews posted on his LinkedIn page for cybersecurity consulting work in the private sector. He and Cyber Ninjas also received a three-year, $101,000 federal cybersecurity contract with the Federal Communications Commission in 2016, and subsequently, Summerlin said, worked for the Universal Services Administrative Company, a private-public partnership under the FCC that provides broadband services to underserved communities and schools, among other work. None of that previous consulting appears to have any ties to election-related matters.

In April 2020, Cyber Ninjas received a Covid assistance loan for $98,322, saying in its application it then had five employees.

Logan, in materials for a cybersecurity conference in Chicago last November, described himself as a father of 11 children and a "Follower of Jesus Christ."

[...]

[W]ithin days of Trump's election loss, Logan was messaging Ron Watkins. The recent HBO documentary "Q: Into the Storm," pointed to Watkins as either being "Q" or at least a key promulgator of the QAnon conspiracy theories that helped animate many of those who stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6.

Watkins is the former administrator of the internet message-board website 8chan, now 8kun, effectively QAnon's home base.

In a series of archived tweets from a now-deleted account between Nov. 12 and December, first reported by The Daily Beast, Logan messaged Watkins, "I'd love to chat if you have a chance;" asked Watkins for links to "original source documents;" and tagged Watkins on his exchanges with attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who filed numerous lawsuits challenging Biden's victory and baselessly claiming electoral fraud.

Wood also told a reporter for Talking Points Memo that Logan had visited his home in South Carolina to meet with others "working on the investigation into election fraud."

[...]

Summerlin said Logan recently contacted him to ask for his help, saying that the Universal Service Administrative Company had terminated Cyber Ninjas' contract. Neither Logan nor the USAC responded to questions from CNN about the alleged contract termination.

"He said, 'it's wrong they're terminating me,'" Summerlin said. "I said, 'don't be an idiot, of course they're terminating your ass, you work at will.' I said, 'if you get a government contract any time after this, I'll be amazed."

  CNN

Or, on the other hand, he may get lots of red state government work. Republicans have lost their damned minds. We can stop pretending our elections are any less of a sham than any third world country.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Arizona's elections officials have had all they can stand

Read the entire thread.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.