I wrote about this in October 2022, when the charges were filed, and then in November 2022, when they were dropped; now here’s this update (NBC Los Angeles [Eric Leonard]):
Los Angeles County will pay [Eugene Yu,] the owner of the Michigan-based election management software company[, Konnech,] $5 million to settle a lawsuit that claims the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office violated his rights when he was arrested and charged in 2022 in a criminal case that was dismissed 37 days later.
“Plaintiffs alleged that Mr. Yu’s arrest and seizure of Konnech’s property were without probable cause and constituted a violation of Mr. Yu’s civil rights, causing harm to Konnech’s business and Mr. Yu’s reputation,” they wrote county attorneys to the Board of Supervisors in a letter urging approval of the settlement….
Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced this in a press conference [in Oct. 2022] that Yu and his company had criminally violated the terms of the company’s $2.6 million contract with Los Angeles County, under which the company provided election logistics software to election officials.
Gascón accused Yu and the company of conspiracy and embezzlement by allegedly storing some poll taker data on servers in China, rather than on servers in the United States, but specified that there was no evidence of voting or that poll data voters had been stored offshore….
For Konnech and Yu’s complaint, see here. My first reaction, I’m sorry to say, was that the prosecutors probably had concrete evidence to support their charges, partly because the prosecution ran counter to what one might have expected politically from Gascón, and partly because in the In my experience, prosecutors usually (though not always) have concrete evidence. But in this case it appears that prosecutors made a mistake; I would love to know more about how this all came about.