conspiracy

Eric Neff’s tenure at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office ended after he was placed on administrative leave in 2022 over accusations of misconduct in the prosecution of the CEO of Konnech, a software company that election conspiracy theorists said was in the thrall of the Chinese government.

Now, three years later, Neff is serving as one of the Trump administration’s top election watchdogs.

Late last year , his name began appearing on lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, listed as “acting chief” of the voting section.

Neff’s appointment, first reported by Mother Jones, has prompted renewed scrutiny of his work at the L.A. County district attorney’s office.

The Times interviewed several of Neff’s former colleagues, who revealed new details about claims of misconduct that emerged from the Konnech case, and said they were alarmed that someone with almost no background in federal election law was named to a senior position.

Neff led the 2022 investigation of Konnech, a tiny Michigan company whose software is used by election officials in several major cities. In a criminal complaint, Neff accused the company’s CEO, Eugene Yu, of fraud and embezzlement, alleging the company stored poll worker information on a server based in China, a violation of its contract with the L.A. County registrar’s office.

Six weeks after a complaint was filed, prosecutors dropped the case and launched an investigation into “irregularities” and bias in the way evidence was presented against Konnech, the D.A.’s office said in a 2022 statement.

The county paid Konnech $5 million and joined a motion to find Yu factually innocent as part of a legal settlement.

The internal probe was focused on accusations that Neff misled supervisors at the district attorney’s office about the role of election deniers in his investigation, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the case who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Neff also allegedly withheld information about potential biases in the case from a grand jury, according to the two officials.

In a civil lawsuit filed last year, Neff said the internal review by the D.A.’s office cleared him of wrongdoing. The two officials familiar with the probe who spoke on the condition of anonymity disputed Neff’s characterization of the findings.

A spokesman for Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman declined to comment or provide the results of the investigation into Neff, which the officials said was conducted by an outside law firm that generated a report on the case. Neff’s attorney also did not provide a copy of the report.

A Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment.

Neff’s attorney, Tom Yu — no relation to the Konnech CEO — said his client had no obligation to provide background information about the origins of the case to the grand jury.

Neff’s appointment comes as President Trump continues to remake the DOJ in his own image by appointing political loyalists with no criminal law background as U.S. attorneys in New Jersey and Virginia and seeking prosecutions of his political enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey.

Trump has never recanted his false claim that he won the 2020 election.

When then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón announced the charges against Konnech in 2020, Trump said the progressive prosecutor would become a “National hero on the Right if he got to the bottom of this aspect of the Voting Fraud.”

The Konnech case was centered on contract fraud, not voter fraud or ballot rigging. Six weeks after the charges were filed, the case disintegrated.

The D.A.’s office cited Neff’s over-reliance on evidence provided by True the Vote, the group that pushed the unfounded Chinese government conspiracies about Konnech and also appeared in a film that spread claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Gascón initially denied that True the Vote was involved in the case, but weeks later, a D.A.’s office spokesman said a report from the group’s co-founder, Gregg Phillips, sparked the prosecution. Phillips testified in court in July 2022 that it was Neff who first contacted him about Konnech.

The two officials who spoke to The Times said that Neff withheld True the Vote’s role from high-level D.A.’s office staff, including Gascón, when presenting the case.

Gascón declined an interview request, noting he is named in Neff’s pending lawsuit, which is slated for trial in early 2026.

Neff’s attorney insisted the case against Konnech was solid.

“He was let go because Trump tweeted a statement of ‘Go George Go’,” the attorney said. “That’s why Eugene Yu was let go. Because Gascón was so scared he was going to lose votes.”

Calls and emails to an attorney who previously represented Eugene Yu were not returned.

In his lawsuit, Neff claimed he had evidence that “Konnech used third-party contractors based in China and failed to abide by security procedures” to protect L.A. County poll worker data. The evidence was not attached as an exhibit in the lawsuit.

A DOJ spokesperson declined to describe Neff’s job duties. His name appears on a number of lawsuits filed in recent months against states that have refused to turn over voter registration lists to the Trump administration.

Neff is also involved in a suit filed against the Fulton County clerk’s office in Georgia seeking records related to the 2020 election, records show.

“We will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws,” Asst. Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, the California conservative who now leads the civil rights division, said in a recent statement. “If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”

Dhillon declined to comment through a DOJ spokesman.

The voting section “enforces the civil provisions of the federal laws that protect the right to vote, including the Voting Rights Act,” according to the DOJ’s website.

It does not appear that Neff has any background working on cases related to federal election law. He first became an L.A. County prosecutor in 2013 and spent years handling local crime cases out of the Pomona courthouse. He was promoted and reassigned to the Public Integrity Division, which investigates corruption issues, in 2020, according to his lawsuit.

While there, he handled only two prosecutions related to elections. One was the Konnech case. The other involved allegations of election rigging against a Compton city council member.

In August 2021, Isaac Galvan, a Democrat, was charged with conspiring to commit election fraud after he allegedly worked to direct voters from outside his council district to cast ballots for him. Galvan won the race by just one vote, but was booted from office when a judge determined at least four improper ballots had been cast.

Galvan’s criminal case is still pending; he recently pleaded guilty to charges in a separate corruption and bribery case in federal court. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said there was no overlap between the D.A.’s election rigging case and the bribery case against Galvan. Federal prosecutors are not reviewing the Konnech case, the spokesman said.

Court filings show Neff was involved in Galvan’s L.A. County case, but the prosecution was led by a more senior attorney.

Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School who served in the civil rights division during the Obama administration, said section chiefs normally have decades of experience in the area of law they’re meant to supervise.

“The biggest problem with somebody with Neff’s history is the giant screaming red flag that involves filing a prosecution based on unreliable evidence,” Levitt said. “That’s not something any prosecutor should do.”

Neff’s attorney, Yu, scoffed at the idea that his client was not experienced enough for his new role in the Trump administration, or that he was selected due to his involvement in the Konnech case.

“Eric got the job because he’s qualified to get the job. He didn’t get the job for any other reason. He got the job because he’s an excellent advocate,” Yu said. “I think the Justice Department is very fortunate to have Eric.”

Times Staff Writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

Hong Kong’s highest court has found former media mogul Jimmy Lai guilty of sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign powers. The 78-year-old is known as the territory’s most outspoken critic of Beijing and could face life in prison.

The High Court of Hong Kong has convicted pro-democracy activist and newspaper founder Jimmy Lai on three charges related to accusations that he undermined China’s national security, as part of a widely scrutinised trial.

Lai now faces the possibility of a life sentence in prison.

On Monday morning, a panel of three judges found Lai, 78, guilty of two counts of conspiring with foreign forces to threaten national security and one count of conspiracy to publish seditious material.

Lai had pleaded not guilty to all the charges. He has been in detention since December 2020, when he was arrested in the midst of a series of antigovernment protests that gripped Hong Kong.

The case has been seen as a test of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” principle, which was established after the former British colony was returned to China in 1997.

The principle affirmed that Hong Kong was part of China, but in theory, it allowed the territory to retain its own governance and administrative structure, separate from Beijing.

But activists say that autonomy has been threatened in recent years, as China seeks to assert greater control over Hong Kong. The territory, once seen as a beacon of free speech in Southeast Asia, has seen its protesters, journalists and publishers targeted for arrest and prosecution in recent years.

On Monday, Judge Esther Toh accused Lai of making “constant invitations” to the United States to take action against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ruling Communist Party.

She and her fellow judges, Alex Lee and Susana D’Almada Remedios, issued an 855-page verdict in the case, which described Lai as the “mastermind” of a criminal conspiracy.

“There is no doubt that the first defendant had harboured his resentment and hatred of the PRC for many of his adult years,” Toh told Monday’s packed courtroom.

Human rights groups and media advocacy organisations quickly slammed the verdict as a miscarriage of justice.

“We are outraged that Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s symbol of press freedom, has been found guilty on trumped-up national security charges,” Thibaut Bruttin, the general director of Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement.

“This unlawful conviction only demonstrates the alarming deterioration of media freedom in the territory,” he added.

“Make no mistake: it is not an individual who has been on trial – it is press freedom itself, and with this verdict, that has been shattered.”

Another free-speech organisation, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), also denounced Lai’s conviction, calling it an act of “persecution”.

“The ruling underscores Hong Kong’s utter contempt for press freedom, which is supposed to be protected under the city’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law,” Beh Lih Yi, the group’s Asia-Pacific director, said.

“Jimmy Lai’s only crime is running a newspaper and defending democracy.”

Lai is set to reappear in court on January 12 for a pre-sentencing hearing. It is not yet clear whether he will seek to appeal Monday’s verdict.

The trial against him stretched for 156 days. Lai himself testified for 52 days, arguing that he had not called on the US to impose sanctions or other economic penalties on China, as the prosecution alleged.

The charges he faced came under the 2020 Hong Kong National Security Law, a far-reaching piece of legislation enacted in the midst of the pro-democracy protests of 2019 and 2020.

The law imposed steep penalties for actions deemed to be “subversion” or “secession”, effectively criminalising Hong Kong’s pro-independence movement, as well as any criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party.

As an outspoken critic of the government in Beijing, Lai was quickly charged under the newly imposed law.

His publication, the Apple Daily, published its first edition in 1995, and it became known as Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy newspaper.

During Lai’s trial, prosecutors presented 161 articles from the newspaper as evidence.

In August 2020, less than two months after the national security law came into effect, Lai was arrested for the first time, then released. He was arrested again in December, only to be released and re-arrested a third time. He has remained in custody ever since.

By May 2021, authorities had frozen Apple Daily’s assets. And in June of that year, five Apple Daily executives, including its editor-in-chief, were taken into custody amid a police raid on the newspaper’s headquarters.

The newspaper printed its final edition that month.

Lai’s defence team and family have repeatedly petitioned Hong Kong’s High Court for leniency, citing Lai’s age and health conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure.

World leaders like US President Donald Trump have previously called for Lai’s release.