DA’s Decision to Drop Charges Against Election Software Firm Challenged by Prosecutor

Days before the 2022 midterm elections, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon brought criminal charges against an executive of an election software company, saying Konnech Corporation’s election worker management software, PollChief, sent data to China.

But after the action attained praise from Donald Trump and other conservatives, the far-left Gascon dropped the charges, and arranged to pay the executive, Eugene Yu, $5 million. He also placed the deputy prosecutor who spearheaded the probe, Eric Neff, on leave for 18 months, implying that he had bungled the case.

Neff has been gagged from discussing the case while he was on leave — an order which has now been lifted with the closure of the investigation into him. In an interview with The Daily Wire, he said his former employer’s claims just don’t add up.

“The official story on my leave they would tell you is to sort out whether I bungled the investigation,” Neff said. “They can’t say that now because they cleared me. Especially after they paid one of the top law firms in the country to investigate me.”

Neff said that after conservatives concerned with election integrity praised Gascon for pressing the case, the far-left DA felt compelled to do the opposite. The New York Times said the case provided “fodder for election deniers” despite the fact that it did not alleged that votes were changed. Yu’s arrest came the day after the New York Times mocked concern about Konnech Corporation as “conspiracy theories.”

Gascon’s backtracking restored the narrative. The LA Times ran the headline for the story pushed to it by three anonymous sources: “L.A. prosecutor put on leave over questionable case sparked by election conspiracy theories.”

Los Angeles went on to pay Yu $5 million, Neff says, “in order to create a media narrative that there was something wrong with the case.” Neff spoke before the board in his personal capacity, asking if the investigations were even complete, and if the county lawyers had read them and were familiar with the facts before approving the settlement. The board approved the payment without any public discussion.

A lawyer for Yu said at the time that the charges were “utterly false” and that in addition to paying $5 million, LA had agreed “to publicly proclaim Mr. Yu’s innocence.” Neff, of course, was still bound by a gag order.

The felony arrest warrant complaint said that although Konnech’s contract with LA required only Americans to have access to the data, “based on evidence recovered from a search warrant executed October 4, 2022,” employees sent personal identifying information of LA election workers to third-party developers based in China.

On August 18, 2022, the papers said, “Luis Nabergoi, project manager for Konnech’s contract with the County of Los Angeles, confirmed via the messaging app DingTalk that any employee for Chinese contractors working on PollChief software had ‘superadministration’ privileges for all PollChief Clients. Mr. Nabergoi described the situation as a ‘huge security issue.’”

Yu’s lawyer, Dean Pamphilis, did not return a request for comment from The Daily Wire asking whether these assertions were false, and how Los Angeles came to be persuaded of their falsity.

Last month, Neff filed his own claim for damages, in which he says that after reviewing evidence that indicated that Konnech’s servers were resolving to a Chinese address, DA investigators “recovered several explosive pieces of evidence,” including statements from an employee who cooperated, and that “it was immediately clear that Konnech’s deception of LA County with regard to its practices with poll worker information was even worse than initially feared. Konnech was sending sensitive PII data to Chinese-owned and operated third-party contractors through Chinese-owned and operated messaging applications.”

Neff’s grievance said that after Trump praised Gascon in October 2022, each manager up to Chief Deputy District Attorney Sharon Woo, the top non-elected prosecutor, reviewed the evidence, and approved the filing of a criminal complaint October 13.

But in November, after the case continued to get attention from those perceived as conservative, management ordered the complaint dismissed, it said. Neff registered his objection in an email, saying that although prosecutors have discretion on what cases to bring, under California law “a prosecutor cannot use political gains as a basis for dismissing a prosecution.” Two days later, he was placed on “administrative leave pending an internal investigation.”

Gascon announced the dismissal of the criminal case publicly on November 9, 2022, saying, “We are concerned about both the pace of the investigation and the potential bias in the presentation and investigation of the evidence… As a result, we have decided to ask the court to dismiss the current case, and alert the public in order to ensure transparency.”

More than a year later, in March 2024, Neff “was informed that the investigation was completed and that no disciplinary actions would be taken against him” — though he was reassigned to a less desirable position.

Gascon’s office did not return a request for comment from The Daily Wire, including which facts in the indictment were wrong, and how it could be that the case was so egregiously wrong that the defendant was paid millions of dollars yet Neff did not do anything warranting punishment. It is rare for prosecutors to pay lawsuit settlements to people who are charged with crimes even if the criminal cases brought against them are flimsy.

In September 2022, Konnech sued the Texas-based group True the Vote, which has made allegations about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, for defamation and computer fraud, and claimed its accusations against Yu stemmed from “racism and xenophobia.” True the Vote said it played a “small role” in the LA case.

In December 2022, Konnech employee Grant Bradley sued Yu and the firm, alleging that he “witnessed customer’s data (specifically poll watcher information) being made accessible to foreign nationals from China,” and that managers instructed him not to worry about it because “everyone” was using Chinese programmers. He also said Yu solicited him to violate campaign finance law by making a donation to a politician for which he would be reimbursed by Yu.

The case was dismissed “with prejudice and without costs or fees” in February 2024, according to court records, suggesting a possible settlement.

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