Donald Trump’s allies in Arizona have undertaken an audit of the 2020 election, handing the process to a little-known firm called Cyber Ninjas. The Washington Post reports Trump has become “fixated” on the work of the Ninjas. “He talks about it constantly,” says one aide, who notes that the former president asks for updates multiple times a day and at one point carried on for 45 minutes on the subject.
The Cyber Ninjas are a little-known cybersecurity firm. Although it has no record of working in election security, its qualifications appear to derive from its management’s enthusiasm for the wildest forms of Trumpist conspiracy theory. “I’m tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. It happened, it’s real, and people better get wise fast,” wrote Cyber Ninjas founder Doug Logan at one point. “The parallels between the statistical analysis of Venezuela and this year’s election are astonishing,” he claimed at another. (This seems to refer to the belief among some of the most unhinged members of Trump’s legal team that the election was stolen by an algorithm designed by a wide array of left-wing actors, including the deceased Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.)
The Cyber Ninjas somewhat oddly refused to share their plan for recounting the Arizona ballots. However, documents that the firm “filed accidentally with the Maricopa County Clerk of Court” detail its proposal, reports an Arizona television station, and include a contingency plan to repel an attack by antifa. (One of the worst mistakes a ninja can make is mistakenly filing documents that reveal their secret plans.)
Given that antifa’s most recent public activity was a postelection march to smash windows at the Democratic Party office in Portland while chanting “Fuck Joe Biden,” the group does not seem to have an especially strong investment in the legitimacy of the president’s election in Arizona. On the other hand, it can’t hurt to be prepared for antifa to strike where it is least expected, and the logistical difficulties of a fight between two groups that may both be clad in black pajamas perhaps require special care.
The firm seems very committed to the ninja ethos, at least according to its website:
“I think it’s going to be incredible. I think it’s going to be eye-opening,” Trump told Dan Bongino in a podcast interview this week. “Because I have no question we won Arizona. We had rallies, we had such enthusiasm like nobody’s ever seen anything like it. And then all of a sudden, we lose. People couldn’t believe it.”
If anybody can produce a result to confirm that, it would be the Cyber Ninjas.
