The founder and CEO of the Sarasota, Florida, based Cyber Ninjas told The Star News Network that politically-motivated reporters let their bias taint their coverage of his company’s audit of the ballots from the 2020 presidential voting held in Maricopa County, Arizona.
One of the frustrating parts of his effort to be open and transparent with the public was the constant twisting of facts and events by journalists, who were opposed to the audit from the very beginning, despite their protestations that they were objective, said Doug Logan, the Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina, graduate, who founded the company in 2013.
Cyber Ninjas was chosen by the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate to conduct the audit after Logan made a presentation to state Senate President Karen Fann, said Logan.
“They have such a severely hard time seeing what their bias is,” he said. “I do believe they legitimately thought then I was a bad guy–well, there’s some people that just didn’t care–some people are like: ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re going to take this guy out.’”
This was especially true of Arizona Republic reporter Jen A. Fifield, he said.
Response from Cyber Ninjas' Doug Logan's spokesperson when I asked why his attorney referred to him as 'former CEO' in court this morning.
"All employees have been let go and the company is being closed."
— Jen Fifield (@JenAFifield) January 6, 2022
“On the first day, she came in, and before we had a single ballot out there, she noticed there were blue pens on the table, and she freaked out about it and told me, and I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, you’re right. Blue pens shouldn’t be out there. We made a mistake.'”
He said that blue pens were a problem because Arizona voters marked their ballots with blue ink.
“I got them off the floor within 10 minutes,” he said.
“There was not a ballot out yet, so before the ballots were out, we immediately had someone off at the store buying – I think it was green pens,” he said. “They brought back green pens, and we started using those because you can’t have anything that could legitimately use to fill out a ballot on it.”
He said this gave Fifield the opportunity to write her first hit piece.
“She writes this whole nasty article about how we had blue pens out and never mentioned that we fixed it and that we fixed it before a ballot was out,” Logan said.
“That’s why I call her Blue Pen Jen because she freaked out about that,” he said.
I noticed the counters had blue pens. Supposed to only have red when you’re around ballots since ballots can read black and blue ink.
Those blue pens the counters have could potentially be used to mark the ballots.
I pointed this out to Doug Logan with Cyber Ninjas…
— Jen Fifield (@JenAFifield) April 23, 2021
“Jen Fifield actually wrote a very lengthy piece about me, and Zac Anderson partnered that with her, and apparently my PR guy actually talked with him was like: ‘Hey, look, if you still want to talk to political candidates here, you need to be fair,’ and the article wasn’t positive, but it was pretty neutral,” he said.
“I think my favorite part of that article is that she called the local Sarasota Republican Party, and nobody knew who I was,” Logan said.
“Now, Jen is a great individual,” he said. “If you tell her she’s biased, she’ll fight you tooth and nail. She believes that she’s really not, but you’ve seen what she’s written. You’ve seen what she’s said.”
Logan said Fifield signed up to be a volunteer working the audit, and he was still open to letting her join the audit team, as long as she observed the ground rules, did not violate the privacy of the other workers and volunteers, and was sincerely trying to help.
“We weren’t trying to keep reporters out,” he said.
“We were just trying not to get people who were non-committal. We wouldn’t want someone to show up for five minutes, write their nasty story, and go away,” said the Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina, graduate said.
“If you want to be an observer, you come to commit to helping us as being an observer, then go write whatever you’re going to write,” he said. “She was using it to try to get to interviews. We eventually kicked her out.”
Another thorn in Logan’s side was the Arizona Mirror website, a site created and managed by the leftwing Arbella Advisors through its States Newsroom network.
“Arizona Mirror has almost no distribution and is heavily funded by some Democrat individuals, has two full-time staff writers who write all the time,” he said.
“They do all this research, and then everyone else picks up their stories and publishes them elsewhere, so the Arizona Mirror, without a doubt, was targeting us from the beginning,” he said.
– – –
Neil W. McCabe is the national political editor of The Star News Media. Send him news tips at: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @neilwmccabe2.
Photo “Doug Logan” by C12 Groups of Southwest Florida. Background Photo “Board Meeting” by Cyber Ninjas.
