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Former Arizona AG Slams Cyber Ninjas 'Grift' In Botched Vote Audit

A former Arizona Republican attorney general attacked the Cyber Ninjas company on Saturday for engineering a vote audit “grift” in the state.

The partisan company, hired by the state’s Republican-run Senate, has confirmed that Joe Bidenwon the presidential election — exactly as state officials determined after a number of recounts shortly after the vote. But Donald Trump continues to rail against what he called the “fake news” reports of the findings.

Former AG Grant Woods said on CNN that he was surprised how “100% incompetent the operation” by the inexperienced company was. But he’s convinced doing a competent job was never really the point.

“They’re in it for the money,” he said. “It is a grift. There’s a lot of grifters we have been exposed to. I was attorney general for years. I dealt with grifters every day. This is how they act.” (Check out the video above.)

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Woods believes Cyber Ninjas will now try the same operation in other states.

“You would think they’d say this didn’t work out, we’ll go home, feel bad about what happened — no, they’re not. They never give up,” Woods said. “They move to the next mark. The next marks are the [other] states.”

Trump is insisting the company found “anomalies” in a number of votes at least “four times” greater than the amount he lost to Biden. But concerns raised in the report prepared by the Cyber Ninjas have already been shot down by election officials as the naive, partisan questions of an inexperienced company with no real knowledge of the ballot process.

For example, the Cyber Ninjas insisted that files had been deleted. None have been deleted, according to election officials, though some are archived, which the company didn’t bother to seek out.

“The Cyber Ninjas’ opinions come from a misuse and misunderstanding of the data provided by the county and are twisted to fit the narrative that something went wrong,” Maricopa County Board Chairman Jack Sellers said in a statement after the company’s three-hour presentation of its report.

He said Senate Republicans allowing the company to raise the questions completely unchallenged in a hearing Friday was “irresponsible and dangerous.”

At the end of the company’s presentation, Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer told The Arizona Republic that he was thinking: “What was the whole point of this?”

Critics complained that the audit — popularly known as the “fraudit” — was so slipshod, with a sloppy chain of custody, that countless ballots could have been dumped or altered.

The operation was suspect from the start. The company is headed by a QAnon conspiracy theorist who was convinced before the operation began that “hundreds of thousands” of votes would be found for Trump. Ballots have been bizarrely examined for traces of bamboo in a bid to prove the Chinese hacked the votes. And truckloads of voter data were spirited away to a cabin in the Montana woods, 1,300 miles from where votes were cast. The audit was supposed to be completed in May.

Strangely, in a message Friday, Trump himself referred to the Cyber Ninjas’ operation as a “fraudit.”

(Photo: Screen Shot/Twitter/Liz Harrington)
(Photo: Screen Shot/Twitter/Liz Harrington)

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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