What do the Cyber Ninjas not want us to know?

With just days to go until “the most transparent audit in American history” is set to be released, the Senate’s ninja auditors have gone into hiding.

They’re refusing to turn over public records — documents that will give the public insight on who the auditors were talking to and who they were consulting with as they conducted their “forensic” examination of Maricopa County’s election.

Never mind that the Arizona Court of Appeals has declared the records are public and its word is final, given the Supreme Court’s decision to stay out of it.

Never mind that Senate President Karen Fann – having lost her legal fight to keep the records from the public – has demanded that the ninjas “immediately make available all records within your custody or control, or within the custody or control of your subcontractors or other agents, with a substantial nexus to the audit.”

That’s a hard no from Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, who apparently isn’t beholden to the courts or even to his own (supposed) boss, Fann.

It all leads one to wonder as we await the release of the audit: Just what is it that the auditors don’t want us to know?

The ninjas have told us, time and again, that they were committed to transparency as they performed their examination of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots.

“The reality is that this team is conducting the most transparent audit in American history,” the Cyber Ninjas boldly assured us in mid-May, as the audit team was about to miss its first deadline for finishing the recount.

One would think, then, that those in the business of conducting “the most transparent audit in American history” would have no problem complying with multiple court orders, not to mention the order of the senator supposedly in charge of this audit.

But no.

The Cyber Ninjas are refusing to produce public records needed by the Senate to comply with a Court of Appeals order in an American Oversight lawsuit against Fann and company. And they are refusing to produce public records as directly ordered by a Maricopa County Superior Court judge in a separate lawsuit filed by The Arizona Republic against both the Senate and the ninjas.

In a letter to the Senate’s attorney on Friday, Cyber Ninjas attorney Jack Wilenchik said they will provide “full financial statements” about the audit. But they won’t be providing any records about who was working on the audit or who, outside the Senate, they were talking to about the audit.

Wilenchik said it would not be

“practical, workable, fair or legal” for the company to be forced to turn over that which they continue to believe are private records.

More likely, it would not be conducive to upholding the myth that this audit was a proper examination of the election performed by people qualified to do the work.

Perhaps they’re afraid that we’ll find out that Trump’s first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has his fingerprints all over this audit.

We already know from Senate records that Randy Pullen, a former state GOP chairman who served as the audit’s spokesman, was consulting with Priebus from December on, asking on March 7, “Any suggestions on election audit firms?”

By month’s end, Cyber Ninjas, a tiny Florida cybersecurity firm with no connection to Arizona and no experience auditing elections, got the job.

Perhaps they’re afraid the records will show just how closely Logan was working with Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, who promised “irrefutable evidence of fraud.” And with former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who floated fantastical conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen.

Perhaps they’re afraid we’ll see that the conspiracy theories publicly promoted by Logan — including a retweet of one that said Trump got “200k more votes than previous reported in Arizona” — were just the tip of the iceberg for the guy who was hired to conduct an “unbiased” and “independent” audit.

Or perhaps they’re afraid we’ll see who was there, behind the scenes, working on this audit — that it was conducted for and by a bunch of unqualified crackpots who are bent on proving that Trump was robbed in Arizona and across the country.

It should be a no brainer that the ninjas would produce records. They are, after all, presumably working for Fann, which means their only agenda — again, presumably — is doing the Senate’s bidding.

Besides that, the ninjas have told us, time and again, that they are committed to transparency.

Logan, in his one and only press conference, vowed at the start of this thing to be honest and above board with Arizonans whose ballots were put, literally, into his hands.

“We want a transparent audit to be in place so people can trust the results,” he said in April.

So people can trust the results. On Friday, just a week before those results are due, Logan flatly rejected Fann’s request for documents the courts already have said are public information.

Just think about that ...