I'm Ryan Randazzo. And I'm Robert Anglin.
We're reporters for the Arizona Republic and we have been
investigating the so-called audit of the 2020 Maricopa County election.
Two years ago, The Republic sued the State Senate and
a Florida company called Cyber Ninjas.
We were attempting to access all of the communications related
to that effort.
We had two years of court victories,
and after a series of those,
Cyber Ninja CEO Doug Logan finally began to turn over
records to us,
Thousands of them. However, often times he would redact or
black out the comments that he made to other people
during the audit.
So we were unable to read those messages,
but because of an error,
what we call a digital backdoor,
we've been able to retrieve those messages.
And you don't have to be a member of the
Deep State.
You don't have to work for the NSA.
You don't even have to be a cyber ninja to
see them.
Ryan is going to show you how easy it is.
So what we're looking at here is called the Reading
Room.
This is where the state Senate has put all of
the records they turned over to us.
In this case, you can see that these are text
messages between Cyber Ninja CEO Doug Logan and Michigan attorney
Stephanie Lambert,
who's under criminal investigation for her attempts to overturn the
2020 election.
However, when you open these messages,
what you often find are these large black boxes.
In this case, you can see that Doug Logan texted
with her on June
23rd, 2021 as the audit was taking place
and Lambert responded. But you can't see the content of
their messages until now.
If you put the the same message into Adobe Acrobat,
you're able to delete the black box that's there.
In this case, we had a black box that looked
like this.
We simply delete it and you can see that those
two were talking about former President Donald Trump.
Here's Logan. Pretty sure we can get this in front
of 45,
Lambert responds. Yes, Logan responds.
The sooner the better. I think Trump is ready to
blast them.
In this case, they were talking about their efforts to
overturn the election in Michigan,
another swing state like Arizona.
In this case, Lambert was warning Logan that he could
be accused of sedition by lumping him into a group
of people with the January 6th protesters.
If we remove this redaction,
we can see that Logan was asking his attorney if
he could avoid complying with the judge's order to turn
over his records if he would just dissolve his company.
Logan in many cases, tried to claim that these communications
were privileged attorney-client communication.
But Lambert had no official role in the audit.
She did not represent Logan during the audit.
I want to make it clear that these are public
records.
A court has ordered Logan to turn these over.
In fact, the judges fined his company
$50,000 a day for failing to do so.
These records are public records,
and you have a right to see them and to
understand why the audit cost taxpayers 5 and a half
million dollars.