LOS ANGELES – An Arizona man has been sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for breaking federal computer intrusion laws governing the deletion of electronic files after he hacked into computer systems operated by his former employer, an Irvine-based company, and then deleted its website and marketing materials in retaliation for being stripped of some of his job duties.
Nikishna Polequaptewa, 37, of Avondale, Arizona, was sentenced on Monday afternoon by United States District Judge Cormac J. Carney, who also ordered him to pay $53,305 in restitution to his former employer.
Polequaptewa, who was a Garden Grove resident during the criminal conduct, was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2016. After a five-day trial in November 2018, a jury found him guilty of one felony count of unauthorized impairment of the integrity and availability of data, programs, systems, and information.
Beginning in April 2014, Polequaptewa worked at Blue Stone Strategy Group, which provided consulting services to Native American tribal governments throughout the United States. In addition to his consulting responsibilities, Polequaptewa led information technology and marketing at Blue Stone.
After he began falling behind on work, Polequaptewa was relieved of IT and marketing duties in November 2014. Polequaptewa then was assigned to a consulting project in Florida for the Seminole Tribe. While on that project and angry that he had been stripped of his other job duties, Polequaptewa retaliated against Blue Stone by deleted the website and marketing materials that the company had developed over eight years. Polequaptewa’s deletions cost Blue Stone more than $50,000 to restore its system to its state before Polequaptewa’s deletions.
After he resigned from the Florida project in November 2014, Polequaptewa continued to delete Blue Stone files, including client information, Blue Stone work product, and the company’s backup files held by a third-party. Polequaptewa’s final deletion was done by sending a “wipe” command to a Blue Stone desktop computer in Irvine. Polequaptewa’s deletions were first detected when an employee in Irvine saw files being deleted from a Google drive account by Polequaptewa while he was working on the Florida project.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office in Florida and the Irvine Police Department provided assistance.
This case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Vibhav Mittal and Bradley E. Marrett of the Santa Ana Branch Office.
Do you know why I am just going to go wild and sip on a bit of shiraz for this one?
Every single one of these cities were under the authority of the Michigan Emergency Manager Law.
See, I am going to put it like this, just because I know the characters in this particular tale, they are feasting upon their own flesh because these municipal law enforcement jurisdictions have no clue of what is going on because no one told them anything for the simple fact that everyone was under an Emergency Manager, appointed by the Governor, advised by the Michigan Department of Treasury who was doing Andy.
Anyway, I was really waiting for something to come up about their public auctions or funding political campaigns.
I remember COBRA used to be busy, busy, busy doing lots of community outreach in Hamtramck.
I also know there is much more to the story because the article below, is true, trust me, I know.
The same thing that they were doing with Property Deeds is what they were doing to Vehicle Titles because it all started in child welfare.
Meanwhile, Detroit assistant chief James White sent a memo last year to Highland Park's police chief, claiming an officer also was improperly logging stolen cars into the LEIN system. Highland Park officials have not commented on the allegation.
The three police departments worked together, along with Hamtramck, as part of the COBRA stolen car task force until the unit disbanded last year, following complaints by Detroit officials about how cops in Ecorse and Highland Park processed stolen vehicles.
Similar issues are raised in a Wayne County Circuit Court lawsuit filed by Ecorse officer Cornelius Herring, who alleges he was subjected to a hostile work environment for exposing the alleged wrongdoing by fellow Ecorse officers.
Herring says the officers did not alert citizens that their vehicles had been stolen, which allowed the vehicles to become Ecorse's property, to be auctioned off and then purchased by Ecorse officials. The city's police chief and mayor acknowledge they bought two of those vehicles for private use, although the chief and the city's attorney insist there was nothing improper about the transactions.
Ecorse Sgt. Geoffrey Howard also told his superior officers about the alleged LEIN improprieties, according to correspondence between attorneys and city officials. Although Howard also has filed a lawsuit claiming he was mistreated by department officials, the LEIN charges aren't included in his complaint, which alleges racial discrimination over how a coworker's social media post was handled.
Moore told The Detroit News he looked into the claims by Herring and Howard and found nothing wrong.
Moore also said Craig told him and other Ecorse police officials during a meeting in Ecorse police headquarters last year that they were improperly processing stolen vehicles.
"At that meeting, (Craig) started telling everyone they were doing things illegally," Moore said. "Someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'let's go out for a minute.' Then, when he came back, he backpedaled on everything he said. I don't know what was said outside the room, but he clearly realized he was out of bounds by saying we were doing illegal things."
Craig called Moore's account "nonsense."
"I would have never came out and told him that — especially if I thought they were involved in criminality," Craig said. "If I thought they were doing something illegal, I would've taken that to the FBI.
"Did I possibly say I had some concerns? I may have, but I don't even remember that," he said. "I dispute these allegations. I don't know what (Moore) is talking about."
Moore also claimed Parish last year asked Ecorse officers to give more work to Fiore's tow firms.
"There were tow companies that were getting kickbacks, and they were upset that our officers weren't using those companies enough," Moore said. "(Parish) was here on behalf of (former Detroit police civilian deputy chief and department attorney) Celia Washington.
He wanted us to use (Fiore's) tow companies more often."
Washington was sentenced in April to a year in prison for taking bribes from Fiore, who also was convicted by federal authorities last year in a widespread corruption case.
Parish insisted his discussion with Ecorse police was about his investigation into how Ecorse officers weren't properly entering stolen vehicles into the LEIN system.
"There were several issues with how information was being put into LEIN by Ecorse officers," Parish said. "So I went there trying to get more information about their practices."
Parish said the notion that he would advocate for Fiore is "ridiculous," and pointed out that he testified against Fiore before the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners and in federal court, advocating for Fiore's companies to be banned from the Detroit police towing rotation.
Moore said he was concerned about Parish's visit. "We brought this to the feds and Michigan State Police," he said.
FBI spokesman Mara Schneider declined to comment. Michigan State Police spokeswoman Shanon Banner said Ecorse officials asked about LEIN procedures, but that no specific allegations of wrongdoing were made.
"We checked with our detectives in Metro Detroit and no one has awareness of this matter," Banner said.
Ecorse police officers Herring and Howard in July brought separate lawsuits against the city of Ecorse, Mayor Lamar Tidwell and Moore. Herring's lawsuit says he was demoted from sergeant to officer in part because he “exposed Moore and a coworker for violation of LEIN procedures, possibly being a criminal offense."
Moore and city attorney Charles Wycoff insist the lawsuits are baseless, saying there were legitimate reasons for punishing both officers.
"These are two employees who are disgruntled because they were being disciplined," Moore said. "That's all this is. They both have a long record of disciplinary issues."
Barry Keller, attorney for Herring and Howard, said: "This isn't disgruntled employees. According to my client (Herring), stolen cars weren't being properly entered into the LEIN system."
According to Herring, the alleged scheme involved officers manipulating the LEIN system to hide recovered stolen vehicles from their owners until they became Ecorse property. The vehicles were listed in the system as abandoned, not stolen, and the owners were never notified, Herring said.
Under Michigan law, if the owner of an abandoned vehicle doesn't respond within 20 days after it's towed, the vehicles become property of the police department that oversaw their recovery. The vehicles are then scrapped, retained by the police department or auctioned off.
Herring said Ecorse's police chief and mayor ended up driving stolen vehicles that were towed from other jurisdictions and not properly entered into LEIN. Moore and Wycoff insisted the vehicles — the chief's 2010 Nissan Armada and the mayor's 2006 Chevrolet Trailblazer — were legitimately purchased.
Oakland University criminal justice professor Daniel Kennedy said officials purchasing vehicles that were confiscated in their own jurisdiction opens up questions of impropriety.
"My opinion is that (police and city officials) should try to avoid even the appearance of impropriety," Kennedy said. "The most important thing would be to make sure the (officials) had no advantage over other citizens in being able to bid for those vehicles, and that it was an open process."
Moore said a 2008 Cadillac Escalade, which was stolen in Detroit in 2016, kicked off the allegations about LEIN misuse.
"The issue which created this whole thing was one of our officers, (Cpl.) Kevin Barkman, recovered a vehicle in Detroit and put it in LEIN through the city of Ecorse," Moore said. "(Herring and Howard) are trying to say it was illegal for Barkman to put that car into LEIN using the Ecorse ORI (Originating Agency Identifier) number, because the vehicle was recovered in Detroit."
Moore acknowledged the stolen Escalade was initially logged into the LEIN system as an abandoned vehicle.
"Cpl. Barkman didn't have a report that the vehicle had been stolen," Moore said. "He found it on cement blocks with the window knocked out, so he listed it as abandoned. The Detroit ORI wasn't used because Barkman is deputized as a Wayne County sheriff, so he has countywide jurisdiction."
The SUV eventually was returned to the Detroit woman who owned it — "but the tow company (B&G Towing in Detroit, which has ties to Fiore, according to Detroit police) never told us the owner had picked it up," Moore said. "If they had, we'd have taken it out of LEIN immediately."
Six months later, the SUV was stolen a second time from in front of the woman's house on Detroit's east side, Moore said.
"The woman went to the Detroit precinct to report her vehicle was stolen, but the Detroit sergeant was unable to put it into LEIN as a stolen vehicle because it was still in our system as a recovered vehicle," Moore said. "The Detroit police sergeant called us and said the vehicle was still listed in the LEIN system as an abandoned vehicle."
Moore said Herring refused the Detroit sergeant's request to remove the vehicle from LEIN, for which he was charged with neglect of duty and insubordination, and demoted. His case is pending. Howard was reprimanded for smoking in the police station.
Flat Rock attorney David Grunow was retained by Ecorse to look into the allegations made by Herring and Howard. In a Feb. 23, 2018, letter to Wycoff, Grunow wrote that he'd interviewed the two officers about their claims.
Grunow's letter says Moore investigated the allegations of LEIN abuse "and found no justification for the complaint ... and found that there was insufficient evidence to discipline Cpl. Barkman."
Detroit police officials also have had problems with how Highland Park Cpl. James McMahon used the LEIN system. In a June 28, 2017, memo to Highland Park Police Chief Chester Logan, White, Detroit's assistant chief, wrote: "McMahon was not using the ... stolen vehicle recovery notification as required by ... LEIN.
"Several vehicle recovery notifications were being sent by Administrative Message, missing pertinent recovery information," White wrote, adding: "Corporal McMahon failed to reply or follow up when request for required missing information was sent to him.
"These failures raised some concerns within the Detroit Police Department, due to the fact that the ultimate outcome led to substantial tow fees to be paid by the citizens," White wrote.
A federal lawsuit filed in August accuses McMahon and Hamtramck Officer Michael Stout of conspiring with Fiore to illegally seize vehicles to collect towing and impound fees.
Highland Park spokeswoman Marli Blackman did not respond to a request for comment.
Marc Elias has a history of turning Democrats who lost on election night into winners after recounts.
The lawyer representing Sen. Bill Nelson in the recount of Florida’s contest for Senate has been at the center of nearly every major election controversy for the past decade.
Elias is chairman of Perkins Coie’s Political Law Group, which was behind the opposition research document that fueled the Trump-Russia investigation. Before that, he was highly instrumental in getting Al Franken into the U.S. Senate.
Nelson, the incumbent Democrat, trails by less than half a percentage point behind Gov. Rick Scott, his Republican challenger. That’s close enough to trigger a recount in Florida, but the deficit of over 10,000 votes is more than than any previous recount has overcome.
Nevertheless, Elias has predicted victory, and he has a winning record at his back in high-profile races.
BREAKING: In Florida we have sued in federal court to ensure that every county has a chance to complete the machine and manual recount without facing an unreasonable and arbitrary deadline. #CountAllTheVotes
“I have a pretty good track record on that prediction elsewhere,” Elias told reporters on a conference call last week.
The results of the governor’s race to succeed Scott as Florida governor also qualified for a recount.
Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., leads Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a Democrat, by more than 30,000 votes statewide, though, so the DeSantis win is less likely to be overturned.
Elias, who isn’t involved in the DeSantis-Gillum contest, didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
Both The Washington Post and CQ Roll Call referred to Elias as the “go-to” lawyer for Democrats. In addition to representing the presidential campaigns of Democrats Hillary Clinton in 2016 and John Kerry in 2004, Elias has represented the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governors Association, and former Attorney General Eric Holder’s group, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
He also did work for the fundraising organizations Priorities USA, Senate Majority PAC, House Majority PAC, and the pro-choice EMILY’s List.
Here’s a look at high-profile political controversies where Elias played a central role.
1. Al Franken’s Senate Victory
In 2008, the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota between Sen. Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, and comedian Al Franken, his Democratic opponent, went into overtime with recounts.
Elias represented Franken’s campaign in the litigation surrounding the recount. His biography on the Perkins Coie website boasts that the Coleman-Franken race was “the largest recount and contest in American history.”
Almost 3 million votes were cast in the race.
Franken actually trailed Coleman by 725 votes after Election Day. The incumbent’s lead was slashed by little more than 200 votes after the first canvass.
However, after the recount, things began to change. It dragged on for six months before the final recount showed Franken squeaking by with 312 votes.
Upon Franken’s belated seating in the Senate in July 2009, The Wall Street Journal editorialized:
The unfortunate lesson is that you don’t need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact. …
Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election.
Economist John Lott was studythat found at least 341 felons illegally voted in the Senate election, easily enough to have made the difference.
Most of those felon votes were cast in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul region, according to the study.
The group took the voting lists and matched them with conviction lists, then went to voting roster lists, where voters sign in before going to the voting booth, and matched the names by hand.
In their book about voter fraud, “Who’s Counting?,” journalist John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, explain the legal process in Minnesota:
So the Democratic strategy focused on how to conduct the recount so that votes could be added to Franken’s total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified for failing to meet state legal requirements be added to his count, while others be denied to Coleman. The team’s goldmine was the thousands of absentee ballots the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. …
According to Franken’s lead attorney, Marc Elias, scanners, laptops, and other mobile devices were used to record and keep track of every single disputed ballot in every county in Minnesota. Decisions made by local election boards on each ballot were immediately uploaded to a “cloud” database set up by the campaign so that Elias and his legal team knew exactly what vote totals were for each candidate across the state at every point in time. This gave them a tactical advantage over Coleman’s legal team by providing them with information on when to object or not object in individual ballot disputes.
2. Virginia Attorney General
In 2013, Democrats hoped to gain control of the Virginia attorney general’s office for the first time in two decades.
Elias represented Democrat Mark Herring in his razor-thin Virginia attorney general’s race against Republican Mark Obenshain.
On election night, Obenshain led Herring by 1,000 votes out of 2.2 million cast. However, a week later, local election boards produced results putting Herring ahead by 164 votes statewide. The state certified the results weeks later, on Nov. 25.
Obenshain initially asked for a recount, but conceded the race before the recount had ended.
3. The Steele Dossier
Elias was general counsel for Clinton’s 2016 campaign when his firm, Perkins Coie, retained the Washington-based company Fusion GPS to do opposition research.
That resulted in a document written by former British spy Christopher Steele that has become infamous. The unverified, dossier alleged that the Russians might have salacious, compromising information on Donald Trump.
The document also became the basis for the federal investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian operatives to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.
Special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly is set to issue a report before the end of the year on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow or whether the president obstructed the investigation.
4. Jill Stein’s Recount
After Trump’s election victory, Elias got involved in a recount he likely didn’t have any hope of winning.
Although Clinton didn’t ask for a recount, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein demanded recounts in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In a post on Medium in late November 2016, Elias explained that the Clinton campaign wasn’t initiating a recount, but would assist the Stein campaign.
“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” Elias wrote, adding:
If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those states as well. We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states—Michigan—well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount.
But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.
In the end, only Wisconsin had a statewide recount that saw Trump widen his lead over Clinton, by 131 votes.
5. North Carolina Standoff
On election night in 2016, state Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat, ledRepublican incumbent Pat McCrory in the North Carolina governor’s race by fewer than 5,000 votes.
Elias represented Cooper in the recount process. In this case, he didn’t reverse fortunes for his client, as the Democratic challenger maintained his lead.
McCrory’s campaign filed complaints with the State Board of Elections alleging voter irregularities in 50 of North Carolina’s 100 counties.
However, the state Republican Party narrowed its focus to Durham County, with a request for recounting 90,000 ballots cast there. After the recount was complete, McCrory conceded defeat to Cooper.
6. The Other 2000 Recount
Elias wasn’t part of the famous 2000 Florida recount over who would win the presidency, Texas Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore.
But Elias was on the team that represented Democrat Maria Cantwell in her defeat of Sen. Slade Gorton, a Republican, in Washington state.
Out of nearly 2.5 million votes case, Cantwell emerged the winner with 2,200 votes. A Libertarian candidate won 64,000 votes that year.
FUN FACT! CITY OF DETROIT ELECTIONS DIVISION HIRES TEMPORARY PRIVATE CONTRACTORS WHO DO NOT TAKE OATHS OF OFFICE
P.I.E. Management, L.L.C. has privately contracted with the City of Detroit Elections Division, just like KForce, as identified in the Affidavit, below.
It dawned on me that Marc Elias, "Legal Genius" (trademark pending) of Perkins Coie Sucks is about to deal with his own election interference Office of the Special Prosecutor indictment in Detroit, so I thought it best not to tell his tale, because that would just ruin another cocktails & popcorn moment.
