On Oct. 4, Konnech CEO Eugene Yu was arrested in Meridian Township in Michigan and held on suspicion of theft of personal identifying information which was stored on servers in communist China.
Yu was charged, not by the FBI, but by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office for allegedly storing the data of county elections workers in violation of Konnech's contract with the county.
Konnech had been the subject of a months-long investigation by the FBI until April when the D.C. headquarters got involved and shifted the focus to conservative election analysts who had been cooperating with the investigation, those analysts said in a live chat.
On Oct. 5, Ingham County (Michigan) Prosecutors Office Unit Chief Nicole Matusko called Yu "a significant flight risk," adding that he has "substantial ties to the country of China" and "maintains relationships with family and friends" there.
Matusko also revealed that when arrested, Yu "was in fact on his way to the airport" without his cellphone, according to a report by The Post Millennial.
"He is a technologically savvy individual, so in our view, leaving his cellphone behind when going on what he said was a business trip to another state is suspicious," Matsuko said.
In Georgia, DeKalb County’s Republican Chairwoman Marci McCarthy has requested that the county Elections Board terminate its contract with Konnech.
“The DeKalb Board of Elections is exposing County taxpayers to extraordinary legal risk and financial liability if they cannot enforce the terms of the contract with Konnech — which guarantees that Konnech stores the data in the Continental United States in a certified Microsoft Azure hosting facility,” McCarthy said in a letter to the five-member board.
“If Personal Identifiable Information (PII) belonging to election staff and poll workers has been or could be transferred to China, as alleged in California, the risk and cost of a class action lawsuit could be devastating to DeKalb County finances. This represents a clear, avoidable, and unnecessary risk to DeKalb County.”
Related: NY Times story on ‘election deniers’ targeting election company falls apart — in one day, October 5, 2022
Prior to Yu's arrest, Georgia Republicans were slammed as “election deniers” and “conspiracy theorists” for expressing concerns about Konnech.
The DeKalb County Elections Board disregarded the concerns and finalized a contract with Konnech.
Kanekoa News on substack.com was among the first to report on a story, which has been largely ignored by legacy media.
In a live chat released in September, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of Truth the Vote discussed their 15-month involvement with what was characterized to them as a “counter-intelligence operation” with the FBI into Konnech.
Phillips noted that when he and Engelbrecht took their information to the FBI, the bureau “said the information was forwarded to their counter-intelligence operation, and a counter-intelligence op was opened up in January or February of 2021.”
Phillips described how he and Engelbrecht played an active role in the FBI’s operation: “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.”
Phillips and Engelbrecht noted that the FBI field office they worked with for those 15 months was “legitimate” and not “political law enforcement.”
“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,” Phillips said. “The focus point was always we needed to remove this software from the election, but taking a step further, there were a lot of other concerns that the bureau had.”
The FBI agents indicated that Konnech had already “been on their radar” and that there were “lots of other problems” with the U.S. election company, including “banking issues” and problems involving the company’s overseas operations in “Australia” and “Canada.”
In April 2022, Engelbrecht received a call from one of the FBI agents, who informed her that the FBI’s “Washington D.C. headquarters” was now involved in the investigation.
Engelbrecht described how everything changed after this call, “There was no more goodwill, there was no more let's work together, the script had been flipped, and now we were the target,” she said. “That was a very disturbing call.”
The agent informed Engelbrecht that “two women” at the FBI’s headquarters believed that Phillips and Engelbrecht were “in the wrong for doing this” and that the D.C. office was now trying “to figure out how you guys broke the law to find all of this.”
Engelbrecht added, “which of course we didn't, but that was kind of their MO [modus operandi], they were going to try to pin something on us, and today you can pick your headlines about how the FBI has done this time and again.”
Phillips said: “The problem is they know about this, and they chose to do nothing. They chose to investigate it, and in the end, they chose to blame us, but this is China. These are Chinese operatives in the United States; these are Chinese citizens who are programming this.”
Engelbrecht and Phillips, who have worked in the election industry for a combined 50 years, described how this was a “complete and total failure” of federal law enforcement, U.S. intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security which is primarily responsible for securing the “critical infrastructure” making up the U.S. election system.
Rasmussen Reports on Oct. 7 posted to Twitter an important compilation of the reporting, much of which has been ignored by legacy media, on Konnech.
The Konnech Election Systems Bombshell: A Thread
Election poll forecasting is rendered useless by election fraud. That’s why we will continue to follow & report on documented threats to fair & honest elections. Let's get started. 1/- — Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) October 7, 2022
Action . . . . Intelligence . . . . Publish
