The owner of the Cyber Ninjas firm remains under investigation for a plot to overturn 2020 election results in a failed bid to keep Donald Trump in office and maintain the Republican Senate majority.
Doug Logan testified that he and some other Trump supporters tried to identify counties around the country they believed showed abnormalities in voting machines and then filed lawsuits funded by right-wing attorney Sidney Powell's nonprofit, and they gained access to voting systems to obtain forensic images to support their claims, reported the Herald-Tribune.
"This is how I think about it," said attorney David Cross, who deposed Logan and others involved in the plot as part of a civil lawsuit. "If we are going on a skydiving trip and we saw a bunch of bad actors unpack our parachutes, take them all apart and repack them, and then the pilot said, 'Don't worry, your parachute is probably fine, so go ahead and jump,' and you find out in the air, no one would jump."
"This is where we are," Cross continued. "We have lots of people who are widely considered bad actors because of the lies they spread about the 2020 election who had unmitigated access to the election system – not pieces, not disconnected pieces, but the actual system – for the better part of two weeks, and we don't know what they all did. But we do know what they could have done."
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Logan was unable to find counties to allow the group to access their voting systems until late December 2020, when an associate made contact with Coffee County, Georgia, where an election official allowed him and colleague Jeffrey Lenberg to spend hours on Jan. 18 and 19, 2021, scanning over 6,400 ballots, changing dates on computers and reconfiguring settings, according to a lawsuit.
"Here's the plan," Lenberg wrote to Logan, referring to the certification of Democrat Jon Ossoff's win over Sen. David Perdue. "Let's keep this close hold. We only have until Saturday to decide if we're going to use this report to try to decertify the senate runoff election or if we hold it for a bigger movement later."
It's not clear what he meant by "a bigger movement," but Logan's visit is part of a criminal investigation that could eventually lead to charges in Georgia for Trump's effort to overturn his election loss in the state.
"If there were any indication that it wasn't authorized," Logan insisted in a deposition, "I would not have done it."
However, former Coffee County elections supervisor Missy Hampton testified during her own deposition Nov. 11, 2022, that she did not inform anyone at the secretary of state's office that Logan and Lenberg would be given access to the voting systems, and she declined to say why she didn't.
"I take the fifth," Hampton said said.
Hampton said she was not aware that the Jan. 18-19, 2021, visit was related to an effort to decertify Ossoff's election win, and Logan said he didn't recall that being discussed at the time, although he conceded that his work could have been used in ways he hadn't intended.
"I mean, that's always a possibility," Logan said during his deposition.
