How should anyone judge the flap from last week, when U.S. Rep. Mike Honda accused his rival Ro Khanna and Khanna’s campaign manager of illegally accessing Honda campaign files? Is it politics as usual or something more sinister?
There are two ways to gauge this affair, and they spill into one another like the traffic at a busy freeway on-ramp. One is the substance: How serious was the breach, if breach there was? The second is the politics: What impact will it have?
Begin with the substance: Honda charged that Khanna campaign manager Brian Parvizshahi illegally accessed a database of a consulting company for which he had previously interned. That database contained thousands of Honda donor records and emails.
The lawsuit charged that Parvizshahi had left “digital fingerprints’’ on a Dropbox account for the Arum Group, where he worked as an intern in 2012. Parvizshahi has denied wrongdoing, but he stepped down last week as Khanna’s campaign manager.
The issue arose after Khanna sent emails in October 2015 to the private email addresses of at least 16 Honda donors, six of whom were named in the lawsuit. Khanna suggested in those emails that because of an ongoing House ethics investigation of Honda, many voters see “the need for change’’ in the 17th District.
What’s the truth? I tend to think Parvizshahi may well have peeked at the Honda files. I know the legal counsel for the Honda campaign, Gautam Dutta, and he is a reputable attorney who has assembled a lengthy case.
Having said that, you have to ask several more questions: Did Khanna know anything about the alleged breach? Was there another way that his campaign might have gotten the addresses? Is the issue, as Honda campaign manager Michael Beckendorf puts it, “a modern day Watergate’’?
For the record, Khanna says that he did not get the email addresses from Parvizshahi and never saw any internal Honda documents. He promised to disclose the “other personal sources” from which he had gotten them. I have dealt with Khanna for a long time, and I have not caught him lying — though like all politicians, he is adept at casting events in a favorable light.
When I talked with him Monday, Khanna dropped a counter-bombshell: He said he or his campaign had been in previous contact — email and otherwise — with three of the six Honda donors named in the lawsuit. If that’s true, then his email pitch in October 2015 did not come wholly out of the blue. And some of the affidavits gathered by the Honda camp could be mistaken.
So is it Watergate? Hardly. In the first place, Watergate was more than just the break-in at the Democratic National Committee. It came to stand for a whole range of Nixon administration iniquities — the Daniel Ellsberg break-in, the Plumbers, the dirty tricks on opponents.
Nor is it on the same level as the revelation of the Russian-inspired break-in of the Democratic National Committee files this past summer. In the Honda case, a consulting firm did not close down the Dropbox account of a former intern who had left it. This is like leaving your household valuables at the curb.
That leads me to the political dimension of this affair, which is colored, naturally, by your take on the substance. If this is a one- or two-day story, it’s hard to see how it hurts Khanna very much. Yes, his campaign manager had to step down. But nothing ties Khanna directly to a breach.
Finally, a false equivalence is operating here: This is by no means as serious as the House ethics investigation, which said there were grounds for concluding that Honda had violated House rules meant to separate his office from his campaign.
Honda himself was implicated in that: The idea of 1,000 “cranes,’’ favored contributors who would donate $1,000 each, was his. That’s more serious than a covert peek at donor lists that are usually available through the public record.
