Cyber Ninjas CEO traded nearly 2,000 texts with current Trump lawyer on 'audits,' money

Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan was deep into his so-called “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona, election results when he considered telling workers the ballot review was taking longer than planned and he was running out of money.

He sought help from a confidant of former President Donald Trump. She told Logan not to share that with the dozens of people counting ballots on spinning tables for fear of shutting down the audit.

“This is very nice and sincere. It will definitely leak to the press. I recommend you don’t send it. It could actually invite lawsuits since it’s an admission of breach of contract," Christina Bobb said in a July 3, 2021, text.

"I know it's painful and slow and difficult, but I recommend hanging in there. The audit is not over. If you have to hang around, so do they … for money, I mean. I recommend not making any statements in writing until this is done."

Logan wanted to be honest with the people working for him. “But that's not right,” Logan replied a minute later. “People deserve to know what is going on.”

Newly released text messages show Logan frequently deferred to Bobb, a former conservative television host now working as Trump's lawyer, who advised him on everything from communicating with workers to finessing donors to responding to federal investigators.

The exchange is the latest evidence of deep links between Logan and the Trump allies who instigated the deeply flawed ballot review, pressured Logan to claim election fraud and promoted the endeavor to a national audience.

An ongoing review by The Arizona Republic, part of the Paste BN Network, of thousands of Logan's text messages found he was engaged in a multistate effort to overturn the 2020 election and communicated directly with national figures in the "Stop the Steal" movement, many of whom participated in the audit. Texts also show Logan pleaded for Trump to fund the work.

Logan also admitted that he could not tally the results of the ballot hand count, which was the cornerstone of the Arizona audit. That meant the work of hundreds of workers and volunteers — who spent two months in 2021 at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix reviewing ballots and recording individual votes onto more than 70,000 tally sheets — couldn't be verified.

Bobb was not Logan's lawyer. But she counseled, consoled and cajoled him throughout the ballot review, texts show.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Bobb volunteered to help his legal team challenge the results and was with them until the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to her testimony to the congressional committee that investigated the attack.

Her work at that time included helping coordinate a meeting in Arizona at which Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani suggested the election was compromised. She kept in touch with Trump throughout the Arizona election audit but didn’t officially join the Trump team until April 2022.

Records indicate Logan and Bobb shared nearly 2,000 messages between April 2021 and February 2022 about the audit, and that she was among the people he communicated with most frequently.

The texts, obtained by The Arizona Republic through a public records lawsuit, detailed Bobb's lynchpin role in helping Logan keep the operation going when money dwindled.

She also relayed messages and concerns to and from "45," a reference to Trump, the 45th president of the United States.

"BTW, if you do talk with Trump today; please tell him I said, 'Happy Birthday,'" Logan said in a June 14, 2021, text.

Exactly two weeks later, Bobb sent Logan a far less celebratory message: "Had a detailed discussion with 45 today. We're losing people, Doug. We need a good statement to encourage our base. I'll spare you the details, but we're losing people."

Logan did not respond to The Republic's requests for comment about his conversations with Bobb. He has declined to answer questions about specific texts.

Then-Arizona Senate President Karen Fann hired Logan to review the election for $150,000, which Logan knew was nowhere near sufficient to fund the effort. He planned to raise donations to pay workers and subcontractors, which caused him significant strife, according to his messages.

He told Bobb in texts he thought "coming clean" about the audit's shortfalls would help bring in more money, which was a constant challenge for him.

"Nope. They will think you messed up," Bobb responded, to which Logan replied, "I did mess up."

Logan already had experienced trouble managing payroll for the endeavor before he tried to send the letter that Bobb talked him out of.

In May, when subcontractor Wake TSI left the audit and was replaced by Scottsdale-based Strattech, Logan and audit workers messaged about one particular worker not being paid and having $20,000 in unreimbursed expenses at that point.

Bobb told The Republic in a text on Monday that her advice was not dishonest.

"I may have told him not to send the letter, but that's not lying," said Bobb, who officially joined Trump's legal team after the audit. "I have never advised anyone to lie about anything."

Bobb to Logan: 'You'd be available to audit WI?'

Texts show Bobb and Logan planned to use the Arizona ballot review as a springboard for "audits" nationwide.

Bobb encouraged Logan to help with similar audits in other states, including Wisconsin, where conservative state lawmakers were also raising baseless concerns about the election.

"Janel Brandtjen from WI may call you. I told her we need to square away the funding before launching anything. But once the funding is done, you'd be available to audit WI?" Bobb said to Logan in an Aug. 9, 2021, message.

Like Arizona, Wisconsin is one of several states where Republicans attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump even though he lost the state election.

Before signing on to lead the audit, Logan was involved in efforts to access voting machines in Georgia and Michigan. Authorities in both states are investigating. The Michigan Attorney General's Office in August said Logan and eight others were part of a criminal conspiracy

After her efforts to question election results, Bobb became a central figure in the classified documents investigation and the federal indictment of Trump. She has made the rounds in the media speaking on his behalf.

When federal agents descended on Mar-a-Lago in an Aug. 8 search, Bobb confronted them as a senior lawyer on Trump's legal team. Bobb in 2022 had signed a document affirming that all classified material in the former president's possession had been returned to federal authorities.

Trump pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to 37 felony counts, including willful retention of national defense information and obstruction, at a U.S. District Court hearing in Miami.

Bobb is a former U.S. Marine who worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. She is best known as the former host of "Weekly Briefing" on the far-right One America News Network.

During the spectacle at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, she raised money for the ballot review while broadcasting updates about it.

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Pro-Trump lawyer questioned audit, asked for his money back

Having Bobb control the flow of money to the audit appears to have given her sway over Logan. At one point, after she directed $8,500 his way, Logan told her he was relieved because he now could pay his credit card bill.

At another point, Bobb threatened Logan that he would have to refund a $50,000 donation from pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood because of a rift over the audit.

"WTF is happening with you and Lin Wood?! He just sent me a demand for his donation back. I don't have $50k laying around," Bobb messaged Logan in December 2021, months after he had given his final report to the Arizona Senate confirming Joe Biden's presidential victory in the state.

"I need you to wire me the $50k back then. Lin's demanding it back," she continued, telling Logan he would have to come up with the money.

Wood confirmed his demand in an interview on Monday. He told The Republic he had deep misgivings about Logan and his ability to carry out the recount.

"I had serious concerns about the integrity of the work that was being done at the audit in Arizona," the Atlanta lawyer said. "I had questions about whether Doug Logan was qualified ... I thought he was an IT guy."

Wood said Logan was among "a cadre of characters" who had gathered at his South Carolina plantation properties for several weeks beginning in November 2020 to game out ways to overturn elections in swing states. The meetings were organized by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Mike Flynn, Wood said.

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The $50,000 donation did not come from Wood personally. Nor did it go directly to Logan.

Wood said the money came from a nonprofit he oversaw that at the time was raising money for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager acquitted in the 2020 shooting deaths of two men and the wounding of a third at a Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin.

It was transferred to a nonprofit called Voices and Votes, which Bobb set up to help raise funds for the Arizona audit.

Wood's $50,000 repayment demand set off a flurry of texts between Bobb and Logan. At one point, Logan said he was going to allow Wood to audit his books.

"It's less expensive for him to pay for an audit than for him to sue you or me," Logan said in a Dec. 14, 2021, text. "At the end of the day he would lose in court when the audit comes back clean. As a result it would be stupid for him to pursue this any other way than an audit. He is smart enough to know this."

Bobb told Logan not to engage with Wood. "Honestly. It's not worth engaging with him. I think he has bigger problems. I'm going to get him his money and want to be done with him."

Wood is facing disciplinary investigations that threaten his license to practice law in multiple states, including Arizona, for participating in lawsuits falsely alleging voter fraud.

Wood called the Arizona ballot review "highly suspect" and said he became convinced as it unfolded that it was "orchestrated to fail." He said it was designed to discredit the electoral process and prompt far-right "audits" in other states rather than to explicitly find fraud.

Wood said his concerns have since been validated, which made recovering the $50,000 critical.

"I was thankful I was able to get it back," he said.

Logan: Judge in public records case 'should go to jail'

Logan has fought the release of his text messages for nearly two years. On June 7 and 9, he turned over 30 pages of messages with Bobb and other "Stop the Steal" figures. About 440 of the newly released documents are among thousands that were previously redacted.

Logan is still keeping secret thousands of messages, including 46 he and Bobb exchanged.

The texts he released include ones in which Logan called for the jailing of a Maricopa County Superior Court judge who had ruled against him in the public records case.

"Judge is an ass," Logan said in a Sept. 16, 2021, text to retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, an election denier and conspiracy theorist who helped convince the Arizona Senate to hire Logan for its partisan audit.

"He should go to jail," Logan added.

Then: "It is an absolute abuse of our legal system and a distortion of the law."

Waldron responded with an offer of assistance from "our team," which included lawyer Kurt Olsen and others who were mounting election challenges in Colorado.

Olsen represented Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in her failed challenges to overturn Arizona's 2022 election over unsupported claims of fraud. Olsen also represents MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

"Definitely open to have that discussion," Logan told Waldron. "I guess the big question is if this team would be charging me."

"No," Waldron replied.

The Republic sued the Senate and Cyber Ninjas for records from the work, contending that records of a ballot review ordered by a public body should be available to the public.

More than a year after a judge ordered Logan to turn over his texts and other electronic messages, the record of communications remains incomplete. While Logan has released more than 39,000 messages, he has redacted about 3,000 more in apparent violation of court orders.

Logan has released the texts in haphazard, nonsequential batches and in different formats, so threads were broken and not easily searchable. The messages, released in November, December, February and March, were not organized chronologically or in any other discernable order.

The latest batches are no different, according to a team of independent data analysts called The Audit Guys who built software to untangle and organize the messages.

Logan attempted to justify withholding texts from disclosure by claiming they dealt with issues other than the audit. Those included texts where Bobb pressured him not to cooperate with federal investigators and told him, "Congress sucks."

In a note accompanying the text messages, Logan wrote: "This section deals with Congress not the Arizona audit."

Bobb at the time was trying to dissuade Logan from agreeing to be interviewed by a lawyer with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"Hmmmm. I wouldn't trust him," Bobb told Logan in a July 15, 2021, text. "He should be reaching out to Fann, not you."

Bobb told Logan a letter from the committee lawyer was part of "a Democrat hack job and holds no weight on anything." She called the letter a "media prop" and said Congress sends them out all of the time.

Logan appeared to push back. "He just said he wanted to talk with me related to it. He's theoretically a Republican."

"I would avoid him like the plague," Bobb texted.

Bobb raised funds while working as a media personality

During this time, Bobb was working as a media personality and not officially working for Trump.

Most mainstream professional journalists working for the major news networks, newspapers and websites would never find themselves in Bobb's position of advocating and soliciting for a cause while "reporting" on it.

The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics specifically warns reporters to maintain their independence from sources. Bobb's position as an adviser and conduit for funds allowed her access to Logan around the clock — including at the coliseum, where other reporters were restricted to the press booth — and was a clear violation of that code.

"Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility," the code reads. "Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to news."

In her texts, Bobb pivoted from arranging interviews on OANN with Logan to offering advice. Or warnings.

Logan in October 2021 again was considering cooperating with House Oversight Committee investigators, who had asked him to testify via video. Bobb again told him not to do it.

"What's the worst thing that could happen? They mute me and I hang up?" Logan said in an Oct. 4 text.

"They accuse you of lying under oath and charge you with a crime and arrest you," Bobb shot back. "They are looking for a reason to take you down. Don't give them one."

"Isn't this an opportunity for me to defend myself?" Logan asked.

"Nope," Bobb said.

Logan compared the situation to David and Goliath.

"I'm sick of hiding," he said in a staccato of texts. "What they're doing and trying to do isn't right. Why can't I just tell them that? ... I've got a few rocks in my sling ... bring on the giant! ... :-D."

Bobb told Logan he could fight back in the media.

"You can … on TV. Don't let them put you under oath. I'm telling you, they want to throw you in jail."

Robert Anglen is an investigative reporter for The Republic. Reach him at robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8694. Follow him on Twitter @robertanglen.

Reach reporter Ryan Randazzo at ryan.randazzo@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4331. Follow him on Twitter @UtilityReporter.