CEO of Arizona audit contractor Cyber Ninjas appears in movie about U.S. election fraud
Ryan Randazzo
The CEO of the company leading Arizona's audit of the 2020 Maricopa County general election appears in a new movie called "The Deep Rig" that asserts the U.S. election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
Doug Logan, the CEO of the Florida-based cybersecurity company Cyber Ninjas, initially was shown as an anonymous technical expert in the film, which premiered Saturday at Dream City Church in north Phoenix. Trump stopped at the church in June 2020 amid multiple campaign stops in Arizona.
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.”
The entire premise of "The Deep Rig" is that the U.S. election was compromised. That's despite numerous election challenges dismissed in courts across the country and post-election audits completed in Maricopa County. The film relies on theories that have been rehashed for months, including that a voting-machine company conspired to shift the election to Joe Biden.
Logan has not spoken with news reporters since the audit launched on April 23 and has not publicly reported on its progress. The audit's findings are expected to come out in late July or early August, Randy Pullen, an audit spokesperson, has told The Arizona Republic.
Logan has previously said the results of the audit were not predetermined. But before Republicans in the Arizona Senate hired Logan to conduct the audit he had shared conspiracy theories about the election being fraudulent on a now deleted Twitter account.
As a result, he has had to answer questions about his objectivity.
"The big question should not be, ‘am I biased’" Logan said in a statement in April, "but ‘Will this audit be transparent, truthful and accurate?’ The answer to the latter question is a resounding ‘Yes.’”
Later in April, as the recently completed hand count of the county's nearly 2.1 million ballots was about to get underway, he said, “If we go through here and we don’t find any fraud, I’m going to be ecstatic. I’m going to love that. And I want to be able to tell people about it. If we go through here and find fraud, I want to fix it.”
In the film, Logan said there is risk in participating in the audit. “But if you view it as this would be the end of our democracy, too many people lost their lives preserving what we have now to not put everything in, to do what we can to save it now," he said.
"I’ve had so many people come to me and say 'Hey Doug, you need to get out of that," Logan said. "You can’t be involved in that. You know, what about your family? What about this?' And my answer is, what if nobody stands up? You know, what if nobody else fills this gap? How can I shirk it off on someone else? I know stuff and I can do something about it and by golly, I’m not going to let our country be lost on my watch. So I’ll do what I can do.”
Logan also was involved in efforts to try to prove there was election fraud in Antrim County, Michigan. A judge dismissed the fraud claims there.
Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who on a right-wing news network in December raised the possibility of Trump using the military to rerun elections in swing states, appears in the film, as does his brother Joe.
Joe Flynn said in the film that once Trump pardoned his brother, "we rolled right into the election fraud work, and I got deeply involved in that."
Patrick Byrne, the founder and former CEO of Overstock.com who appears in the film based on a book he wrote, spoke to the audience afterward, along with others involved in the production.
"This is a government takeover of the United States," Byrne said in the film.
Byrne has said he is raising money for Arizona's audit. The Arizona Senate launched the audit of Maricopa County ballots with $150,000 in taxpayer money. Despite public records requests to the Senate and Cyber Ninjas by The Republic and other news organizations, no information has been released about other funding.
Byrne said that the film struggled to find any locations that would host a screening besides the church, but that anyone could pay him $1 per seat to host a screening at their home, office or church, with a $500 minimum. He said they could charge what they like and pocket the profits.
"This has been priced so patriots can make money," Byrne said. "What we want is people to do this a lot around the country."
Lawmakers attending Saturday's filming included Rep. Mark Finchem, R-Oro Valley and Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City.
Reach reporter Ryan Randazzo at ryan.randazzo@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4331. Follow him on Twitter @UtilityReporter.