The head of the “Cyber Ninjas,” the group commissioned to carry out an ultra-partisan, comically inept “audit” of 2020 votes in Maricopa County, Arizona, is also starring in a documentary claiming the CIA helped rig the elections for Joe Biden, according to Arizona reporters who attended a screening.
Cyber Ninjas is a previously little-known firm that Republicans in the Arizona Senate contracted to do an extensive recount of votes in Maricopa County. There’s no evidence of any fraud there, as confirmed by local election officials’ own audit, and the exercise has mainly taken the form of increasingly ludicrous attempts to prove Trump actually won the county with nonsensical techniques like searching for Chinese bamboo in paper composition or attempting to invalidate ballots that were folded in certain ways. Cyber Ninjas failed in court to shield its process for conducting the audit from public scrutiny. (The whole thing is a farce, as the election results are certified and won’t change.) The company’s CEO, Doug Logan, is an outspoken conspiracy theorist who believes Biden somehow stole the election.
The Arizona Republic reports that The Deep Rig, a film that asserts shadow operatives within the U.S. government stole victory from Trump, premiered at Dream City Church in Phoenix on Saturday. For most of its runtime, it features Logan as an “anonymous technical expert.” But get this—there’s a shocking reveal! The Republic wrote that the crowd, which paid $25 for tickets, broke out in applause when the movie finally reveals the identity of its expert:
Toward the end of the movie, Logan’s identity was revealed, to loud cheers from the approximately 500 people who bought $25 tickets to attend. Others downloaded the movie online for $45.
Logan said in the film, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.”
Christ.
At various points in the film, the AZ Mirror reported, Logan claimed that the CIA or other intelligence agencies may be involved in promoting “disinformation” about the elections, and claims technical expertise in voting machines. The Deep Rig reiterates easily debunked, hoax claims from a firm called Allied Security Operations Group that a county in Michigan used voting machines that were “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.” At several points, the film reportedly makes overt references to QAnon, the conspiracy theory which asserts Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities are behind a globe-spanning cabal of pedophile Satanists.
The Deep Rig is just the latest entry in what has effectively become an entire genre of films catering to Trump revanchists who refuse to believe that he lost his re-election bid without the intervention of some nefarious cabal, be it Democrats, the Chinese government, or even the Italian military. The first one to take off was MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s Absolute Proof, a stream of hallucinatory drivel that baselessly asserted an election tech manufacturer allowed Chinese hackers to flip votes for Biden and which is now one of the factors in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, has been giving Lindell a run for his money in the race for top home furnishings magnate to bilk the most money out of pro-Trump donors. He wrote the original book version of The Deep Rig and says all profits from the film will go to fund the audit.
According to the Arizona Republic, Byrne said that the producers had difficulty finding any other venue to stream the film but that anyone willing to pay $1 a seat (for $500 minimum) could host their own viewing. He added, “This has been priced so patriots can make money. What we want is people to do this a lot around the country.” (The AZ Mirror estimated minimum revenue from the 2,500 people who paid $45 to stream the film at $115,000).
The director of the film, Roger R. Richards, made a film in 2018 claiming that extraterrestrials were behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, according to Business Insider.
That Logan would appear in the film despite overseeing the audit should come as no surprise whatsoever. While he’s consistently insisted that the outcome of the audit will be fair, the Arizona Republic reported he’s openly acknowledged his bias towards the predetermined conclusion Trump lost the elections because of fraud. Logan has previously stated he believes Trump, who lost the state of Arizona to Biden by a margin of nearly 10,500 votes, actually won the state by 200,000 votes, and the audit has never been much more than a nakedly partisan attempt to throw out as many votes as possible to reach that desired outcome. In May, the Justice Department warned Republican leadership in the Arizona Senate that Cyber Ninjas may be violating federal voting and civil rights laws.
The Associated Press reported as of last week that Cyber Ninjas, which is far behind on its original timeline for the audit, has finally finished counting and photographing 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County. But former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, a Republican, told the news agency that they still had to subject data from voting machines and servers to additional evaluation and Cyber Ninjas might not issue a report until Labor Day.