The founders of the election integrity group True the Vote were jailed on Oct. 31 by a federal judge for contempt of court.
U.S. marshals detained Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips after a hearing in federal court in Dallas, according to a court docket entry.
Court filings show U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt, the Reagan appointee overseeing a lawsuit against True the Vote, Engelbrecht, and Phillips, ordered the defendants jailed after they refused to share information, including all people who have had or still have possession of any information from Konnech computers.
Konnech is an election management software firm whose CEO was arrested in October for allegedly stealing poll worker data and hosting it on servers in China.
Konnech sued True the Vote prior to the arrest, alleging that the election integrity group and its founders gained unauthorized access to its computers and gained information from them.
In the lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO), Konnech said that the defendants made “completely baseless claims” that Konnech’s CEO and employees were Chinese operatives and that the FBI was investigating Konnech.
“The truth is that Konnech is a U.S. company founded and operated by a U.S. citizen who has no affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party whatsoever,” Konnech said, adding that all of its U.S. customer data “is secured and stored exclusively on protected computers located within the United States.”
That was part of the $2.9 million contract Konnech reached with Los Angeles County, but Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, a Democrat who charged Konnech CEO Eugene Yu, said investigators found that information “was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China.”
True the Vote said Konnech’s claims that they hacked into Konnech servers were false and that they accessed a server in China using a “pre-loaded password that did not even require typing in a password to enter the server.”
