SAN JOSE — Rep. Mike Honda and his re-election rival Ro Khanna appeared in federal court Tuesday over the incumbent’s lawsuit accusing Khanna’s campaign of illegally accessing Honda’s donor database.
Honda asked a judge to order that Khanna must stop using Honda’s allegedly pilfered donor information to contact them, and destroy any unauthorized Honda files in his possession, with verification by a court-appointed computer expert. His lawsuit last month claimed a former Khanna campaign manager who had worked for a Honda consultant continued accessing Honda donor files after joining Khanna.
Khanna, a Fremont attorney making his second bid for Honda’s seat, has insisted that he was unaware of any campaign staffer accessing Honda files and that he already had independently obtained contact information for the Honda donors his campaign had emailed last fall. He has offered to destroy any records that overlapped with information from Honda’s files.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila had attorneys for both sides meet in his chambers, where they ironed out a deal. Khanna’s side will provide its database of donors for perusal by Honda’s team, who will check it to see what potential names may have been poached. The Khanna campaign had previously offered to share such information, but Honda’s camp said it was important to have a court order as an enforcer of good faith.
Both sides left the courthouse claiming victory.
“I’m really gratified that the process was put into place where we will have Ro Khanna’s campaign turn over all donor information to our attorney,” said Honda as he left the courtroom Tuesday afternoon. “This means he will not be able to pursue our donors through information that came from our own database.”
Khanna said the lack of an injunction, which can be seen as validating claims made in a case, was a major loss for his rival and and the matter was an “abuse of the judicial process” for political means.
“Mike Honda is down in the polls, he lost the primary, and he wants headlines,” Khanna said. “It’s sad that a man who had such dignity is ending his career in this way.”
Honda’s campaign unveiled the lawsuit late last month with a press conference that called Khanna’s ethics into question, alleging he must have known about the electronic files allegedly acquired by then-campaign manager Brian Parvizshahi, who resigned the same afternoon the accusations surfaced.
Honda alleged Khanna’s campaign used those donor files to reach out to his donors about an ongoing House ethics probe over allegations Honda violated rules barring his congressional staff from doing campaign work for him.
Parvizshahi used to work for a consulting company through which he had access to DropBox documents that included Honda campaign donors, and electronic fingerprints indicate that Parvizshahi kept looking at those documents after he left that company more than four years ago and began working for Khanna.
Parvizshahi has downplayed Honda’s charges, with his attorney Renato Mariotti calling it more a matter of curiosity, clicking on pop-up notifications that continued to appear on Parvizshahi’s desktop long after he’d left political consulting firm Arum Group where he’d worked as an intern in May 2012.
Khanna said he had no knowledge of Parvizshahi accessing any databases and that the campaign had not used any material obtained in such a manner. He added that he expected a landslide victory come November.
“I think this backfired for him,” he said. “I don’t think we have a tight race. We’re going to win big and this is going to make that win even bigger.”
Vedant Patel, communications director for the Honda campaign, called Tuesday’s court order a “powerful first step in the process.” He said it’s an example of Khanna “doing whatever it takes, regardless of the truth or the law, in his endless pursuit to become a member of Congress.”
Honda attorney Gautam Dutta said the matter is far from resolved, and they expect an additional response from Khanna’s camp on the charges related to the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by an Oct. 31 deadline — shortly before the Nov. 8 election. He said they may seek compensatory and exemplary damages as well.