WASHINGTON—Cyber Ninjas, the corporate employed to guide a Republican-ordered overview of Maricopa County’s 2020 election outcomes, stated it was shutting down, citing mounting authorized prices and debt amongst different components.
Beforehand a little-known cybersecurity agency, Cyber Ninjas turned a central determine in an uncommon overview of the 2020 presidential outcomes after Democrat
Joe Biden
gained in Arizona’s most populous county. The state’s Republican-controlled Senate ordered the overview and employed Florida-based Cyber Ninjas to guide the method, although Maricopa County officers had already carried out different audits that discovered no issues with the county’s voting system.
The Cyber Ninjas’ report finally confirmed Mr. Biden’s win in Maricopa County.
Rod Thomson,
a spokesman for Cyber Ninjas, stated the corporate was shutting down for a number of causes, together with having $2 million in debt. The agency beforehand stated it had accepted thousands and thousands of {dollars} in non-public donations from supporters of the audit.
“The audit and all the ongoing authorized bills added as much as $2 million greater than was raised,” Mr. Thomson stated in an electronic mail. “The aim was to conduct probably the most complete audit in American historical past, and do it totally and precisely.”
“The countless authorized and character assaults by those that opposed the audit makes Cyber Ninjas as an organization untenable shifting ahead,” he stated.
The corporate has confronted lawsuits over the election overview. An Arizona choose ordered Cyber Ninjas to pay $50,000 a day if the corporate doesn’t hand over public information associated to the overview, in keeping with the Arizona Republic newspaper, which filed a lawsuit demanding the information.
Whereas Cyber Ninjas affirmed that Mr. Biden gained the county, it stated it discovered so-called anomalies within the election. Maricopa County’s Republican-led native authorities has defended its voting system and this week issued a report saying Cyber Ninjas made errors and drew quite a few defective conclusions. Cyber Ninjas had no federal accreditation to audit elections.
Representatives for Cyber Ninjas have defended their work, saying their overview was clear and intensive.
“The excellent report we launched at present definitively exhibits the opposite stuff was all smoke and mirrors, crimson meat for a rabid crowd of election deniers with no foundation in actual fact as a result of the Cyber Ninjas and their subcontractors had no enterprise auditing elections,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman
Invoice Gates
and Recorder
Stephen Richer,
each Republicans, stated in a joint assertion.
Former President
Donald Trump
and his supporters have known as for audits of the 2020 presidential leads to Arizona and elsewhere, as a part of Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him. There isn’t any proof of widespread fraud, and Mr. Trump and his allies misplaced dozens of lawsuits contesting the leads to a number of states.
Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com
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Appeared within the January 8, 2022, print version as ‘Cyber Ninjas Agency Is Shutting Down.’
