SAN JOSE — Congressman Mike Honda, D-San Jose, filed a lawsuit Thursday against re-election opponent Ro Khanna in the hotly contested 17th Congressional District accusing him and his campaign manager of illegally accessing his campaign files.
The lawsuit charges Khanna campaign manager Brian Parvizshahi with violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing a database for a consulting company he’d previously interned with that contained thousands of records of donors to the Honda campaign.
“This material was stolen — it’s theft,” said Honda campaign manager Michael Beckendorf, who compared it to a “modern day Watergate.”
“It’s very serious and a federal crime,” said Beckendorf. “The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been used to send people to prison.”
Khanna said Thursday night that the lawsuit is “baseless and meritless, a total distraction” from Honda’s ethics investigation.
He said his campaign “has not used or had any alleged information coming from the Honda campaign” and added that the emails that he sent to Honda donors were to addresses he’d gleaned from personal contacts.
Khanna said Parvizshahi told him that he’d done nothing wrong and that he “took him for his word.” However, Parvizshahi resigned as campaign manager Thursday afternoon.
“He decided that he did not want to be at the center of a firestorm that is a lawsuit, and thought it would be a distraction,” Khanna said.
Khanna’s campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan added that Khanna and his staff haven’t had a chance to evaluate the Honda campaign’s complaint. But he added: “The fact that Mike Honda went to the press before serving us tells you what this is really about — politics.” He said they are “looking the lawsuit over carefully and will respond when appropriate.”
“By filling this lawsuit with six weeks to go and down in the polls,” Sevugan said, Parvizshahi “believes Mike Honda is trying to distract voters from the ongoing ethics investigation into how he sold special governmental access to his VIP donors after accepting $3 million in PAC contributions. And Brian will not let Mike Honda use him to distract voters from the need for real change.”
According to the suit, Parvizshahi worked for the Arum Group as an intern in May 2012, at which time he was given access to folders containing information about contributors to Honda’s campaigns. He disliked performing “menial tasks,” it said, and “abruptly resigned” on June 8, 2012. Parvizshahi began working for Khanna’s campaign in January 2014, the suit said. Honda has retained the Arum Group’s founder as a consultant since 2005.
The suit said the alleged unauthorized access came to light after 16 campaign contributors contacted Honda’s campaign in October 2015 and said they had received emails from Khanna. The emails suggested that with Honda facing an ongoing ethics investigation, many voters see “the need for change.”
In May, the Arum Group notified Honda’s camp that there had been unauthorized access to the account by Parvizshahi, who left “digital fingerprints” on DropBox files that he had been accessing starting in 2013 and continuing through May, said Gautam Dutta, legal counsel for the Honda campaign.
Dutta said they didn’t file suit earlier because “with these things you have to be very sure what happened.”
Beckendorf repeatedly called Khanna’s contacting Honda supporters through their private email accounts “harassment and intimidation.”
“These are individuals who have no connection to the Khanna campaign,” he said, “and now they’re on watch. They’re being told, ‘I have your info, I am contacting you — personally contacting you.’ That’s in violation of privacy and it is harassment.”
Stephen Wu, an attorney for the Silicon Valley Law Group who specializes in issues involving cybersecurity, said he “would be very concerned” if he faced such accusations.
“There is a case that says once you are terminated from a company, you should be aware that you no longer are allowed to access old files,” he said. According to the lawsuit, Parvizshahi had signed a nondisclosure agreement as an intern stating he was to treat files he was given access to as confidential.
The lawsuit comes as the two candidates — who were neck and neck in the June primary, with Khanna coming out on top by less than two percentage points — head toward a November runoff.
In Khanna’s previous run against the eight-term congressman who previously served in the state Assembly, he came in about 20 percentage points behind in the 2014 primary, but he made considerable gains in the run-up to the general election that year, eventually closing the gap to within 4 percentage points.
Political analysts said the close results in this year’s primary indicated that 75-year-old Honda, who is considered a venerable stalwart of the Democratic Party, had reasons to worry that he may lose his seat come November.
Honda has had an ongoing House ethics investigation hanging over his head, and earlier this month, Parvizshahi posted a video on YouTube in which the congressman dismissed the allegations that his taxpayer-funded office resources were used on his campaign as minor infractions akin to “a teacher parking in another teacher’s parking spot.’’
