The Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, the private firm hired by Republicans in Arizona to conduct an audit of the votes in the November 2020 presidential election in highly-Democratic Maricopa County, has rescinded a claim that data files with voting information had been destroyed so they couldn’t complete their audit, the Arizona Republic reports.

It turns out they had ’em all the time, and they just kinda misplaced them.  Oops.

Cyber Ninjas, supposedly a computer security firm, has never conducted an audit of any kind, let alone a recount of a presidential election.  And for some reason, they’re only recounting one race in one county while they–and one of the sponsors of the recount, One America News–claim there was widespread fraud. 

The audit’s “official” Twitter account announced one week ago, “Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit. This is spoilation of evidence!”

But the founder of another firm contracted by Cyber Ninjas to assist in data management had the files all along.  “All of this may be a moot point because subsequently, I have been able to recover all of those deleted files and I have access to that data,” Ben Cotton, founder of CyFir told Republican state senate leaders.

The recount now faces growing outcries for it to stop because it’s damaging the integrity of the election process and the image of the state.  Audit officials have claimed that tens of thousands of ballots were filled out in China, and they’re inspecting ballots for bamboo, believing that bamboo would indicate the paper was made in China.  That, of course, is bullshit.

And there’s also the small issue of the recount having to pack everything up and move out of the arena because the arena had already been booked for high school graduations.