On Tuesday, the Arizona Senate released a set of records, previously held by former Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, related to the sham “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.  

The files provide new details about the work of Cyber Ninjas and its subcontractors WakeTSI and CyFir, as well as that of prominent election-conspiracy promoters who were also involved. The records are available here.

Late last week, Logan’s attorneys notified American Oversight that they would be turning over the records to the Arizona Senate. Multiple court rulings had found that the documents held by Cyber Ninjas, which Logan had sought to withhold from release, were public records. Phoenix Newspapers Inc. the parent company of the Arizona Republic, also filed a lawsuit over similar public records requests; that lawsuit was consolidated with American Oversight’s in January.

The Senate had originally authorized $150,000 for the “audit,” but costs quickly ballooned to the millions, much of it later raised through private groups. The records released on Tuesday include a number of contract agreements from May and June 2021, revealing that senior leaders of the effort knew early on that the partisan review’s costs would far exceed its public funding. They also reveal new information about the work of election conspiracy theorists Jovan Hutton Pulitzer and Shiva Ayyadurai.

American Oversight’s review of the records revealed:

• A subcontract for conspiracy theorist Jovan Pulitzer (whose business is referred to as “423 Catkins Maize LLC” in the documents) with Cyber Ninjas was signed on May 6, 2021, for $210,000 — which Pulitzer said was a “deep discounting” from an original cost of $2.1 million. This appears to be the first time we’ve seen the details of Pulitzer’s terms of payment spelled out.
• On May 12, 2021 — just a few weeks after the “audit” began — StratTech, the company that took over for Wake TSI in leading the hand count of ballots, estimated its costs to be $1.5 million. 
• According to statements of work from May 2021, among the employees retained by Wake TSI to conduct “ballot counting” was someone named Mike Roman — the same name as that of the director of Election Day operations for former President Trump’s 2020 campaign who also served as an executive with the America Project’s “Fund the Audit” group.
• Other Wake hirees include attorney Scott Sigman (who communicated with Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell on “audit” payments, as revealed in records we previously obtained); Heather Honey (the owner of Haystack Investigations, which also worked on the review); and Andre McCoy (whose name appeared on the “alternate” electoral certificate submitted by Trump supporters in Pennsylvania). 

More information on our investigation into the Arizona “audit” is available here. All court filings related to the case against Cyber Ninjas and the Senate can be found here.

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