On Monday, The New York Times published a condescending story about “a group of election deniers” who had gathered “at an invitation-only conference in August at a secret location southeast of Phoenix” and “unspooled a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential outcome.” The story involved Konnech Corp., a small election software company based in Michigan which the group claimed had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party “and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers.”
A copy of Monday’s article can be viewed on archive.com.
The very next day, the company’s CEO, Eugene Yu, 51, was arrested on suspicion of stealing identifying information on hundreds of Los Angeles County poll workers and storing the data on servers located in China, a violation of Konnech’s contract with L.A. County.
The Times reported the story of Yu’s arrest without mention of the hit piece published the day before by the very same writer. The report said Yu had been taken into custody by investigators from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office Bureau of Investigation.
The group whom the Times’ writer refers to as “election deniers,” is led by Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, the founders of True the Vote, an election integrity group based in Houston, Texas. You may recognize their names from Dinesh D’Souza’s movie “2000 Mules.” The documentary, released in May, made the extremely compelling and credible claim that coordinated voter fraud had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
At any rate, a September article published by Substack’s Kanekoa News provides some disturbing background information about the events that led to Yu’s arrest. The title of the piece is “FBI Conceals Chinese Infiltration of U.S. Election Software.”
Konnech’s election software is used to “manage poll workers, poll locations, campaigns, assets, and supplies necessary to run elections in the United States, Canada, and Australia.”
In January 2021, Phillips was working with a cybersecurity analyst who noticed an “oddity in some of the URLs” used by one of Konnech’s software applications. Using software designed to help companies detect cyber breaches, Phillips said, “We began to look at where do these URLs resolve to. We found that most of them resolve to one I.P. address and that I.P. address — the URL resolved in China.”
With this software, Phillips explained, “you can figure out what type of database they are using, their database port, and all the different services offered by ports in this particular application living in China. It turned out that not only did it live there, but they left the database open.”
They discovered the database “stored the personally identifying information of over a million Americans.”
Seeing this to be a “major national security risk,” he and Engelbrecht contacted the FBI. Agents said that Konnech was already “on their radar.” There were “lots of other problems” with the company.
The FBI told Phillips and Engelbrecht “a counter-intelligence op was opened up in January or February of 2021.”
“They engaged us in the operation, they were communicating with us on a regular basis. They were communicating with Catherine regarding communications with the target and this went on for approximately 15 months,” he said. “These were legitimate people who believed that this software posed a national security risk to the United States of America and they were working with us closely to try to stop this from being in place during the midterms.”
But everything changed after Engelbrecht received a call in April 2022 from one of the agents who told her the FBI’s “Washington D.C. headquarters” was now handling the investigation. She told Kanekoa, “There was no more goodwill, there was no more let’s work together, the script had been flipped, and now we were the target. That was a very disturbing call.”
The agent told Engelbrecht, “two women” at headquarters believed she and Phillips were “in the wrong for doing this” and they were trying “to figure out how you guys broke the law to find all of this,” according to Kanekoa.
Now that sounds like the FBI we all know, doesn’t it?
Engelbrecht explained that the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for securing the U.S. election systems’ “critical infrastructure” and that the “president of this company sits on the board of another election company that is one of the founding members of DHS’s election security task force. So you want to talk about the fox in the hen house? It’s all right there.”
She continued, “The same individual who programmed this election mess, PollChief, was also the lead programmer for the Confucius Institute internal comms [communication] mechanism. Meaning how they exchange data between here and China; this same person built the entire app that runs all of these elections across the United States. This is a red Chinese communist op run against the United States by Chinese operatives, and it’s a disaster.”
Finally, she received a call from one of the agents they had worked with earlier who said, “[Y]ou may need to be ready to — his term was to use the nuclear option and go to the press.”
That was when they planned what the New York Times writer called their “invitation-only conference in August at a secret location southeast of Phoenix.”
They invited 200 “researchers, independent journalists, and big thinkers.” Engelbrecht said, “We asked the people in attendance for help, we didn’t know what the FBI’s plans were for us, we didn’t know if we didn’t speak this publicly if we would ever have the chance to, but we felt like our best chance was to share this with people we trusted who had the wherewithal to get the word out.”
Phillips told Kanekoa, “This is some of the best research I have ever seen. The quality of it, the depth of it, we were with a prosecutor the other day and we had an opportunity to share some of this information with them.”
He continued, “There’s likely going to be a grand jury convened here in the next week or so. It’s supported by not just the research that my team OPSEC did for Catherine and True the Vote, but by the research of one of the best research teams I’ve ever seen come together.”
“The data and research all stand on their own.”
At the end of their discussion, Englebrecht told Kanekoa the Eugene Yu/Konnech story was far from over and that it will get bigger. This story appeared on September 8.
It looks like she was right.
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This is so incredibly convoluted, Betsy and I’m already pretty slow on the uptake. I’d love to see more as this develops. I hope you continue to follow up on it. Thank you for all that you do.