"This is a red Chinese communist op run against the United States by Chinese operatives, and it's a disaster."
In a live chat released on Monday, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips appeared together on “truethevote.locals.com” to discuss their 15-month involvement with what was characterized to them as a “counter-intelligence operation” with the Federal Bureau of Investigation into American election company Konnech Inc.
Konnech, based out of East Lansing, Michigan, builds software to manage the poll workers, poll locations, campaigns, assets, and supplies necessary to run elections in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
In January 2021, Phillips said that the cyber analyst he had been working with encountered an “oddity in some of the URLs” such as vote4la.com, vote4detroit.com, and vote4boston.com, which Konnech’s “PollChief” software application used to gather personally-identifying information about poll workers.
Using Binary Edge, a software product companies use to identify and assess the risk of cyber breaches, “We began to look at where do these URLs resolve to. We found that most of them resolve to one I.P. address and that I.P. address — the URL resolved in China,” Phillips said.
“What we also learned in our review, apps.konnech.com [.net], resolved into this same URL in China, meaning that the application itself was residing in China,” he continued.
“In Binary Edge, you can figure out what type of database they are using, their database port, and all the different services offered by ports in this particular application living in China. It turned out that not only did it live there, but they left the database open.”
This database “stored the personally identifying information of over a million Americans,” he emphasized.
Engelbrecht and Phillips decided that “this was a major national security risk” and immediately took the information to the FBI.
When Engelbrecht and Phillips took this information to the FBI, the FBI “said the information was forwarded to their counter-intelligence operation, and a counter-intelligence op was opened up in January or February of 2021,” Phillips said.
Phillips described how he and Engelbrecht played an active role in the FBI’s operation, “They engaged us in the operation, they were communicating with us on a regular basis. They were communicating with Catherine regarding communications with the target and this went on for approximately 15 months.”
Phillips and Engelbrecht noted that the field office they worked with for those 15 months was “legitimate” and not “political law enforcement.”
“These were legitimate people who believed that this software posed a national security risk to the United States of America and they were working with us closely to try to stop this from being in place during the midterms,” Phillips said.
“The focus point was always we needed to remove this software from the election, but taking a step further, there were a lot of other concerns that the bureau had.”
The FBI agents indicated that Konnech had already “been on their radar” and that there were “lots of other problems” with the U.S. election company, including “banking issues” and problems involving the company’s overseas operations in “Australia” and “Canada.”
In April 2022, Engelbrecht received a call from one of the FBI agents, who informed her that the FBI’s “Washington D.C. headquarters” was now involved in the investigation.
Engelbrecht described how everything changed after this call, “There was no more goodwill, there was no more let's work together, the script had been flipped, and now we were the target,” she said. “That was a very disturbing call.”
The agent informed Engelbrecht that “two women” at the FBI’s headquarters believed that Phillips and Engelbrecht were “in the wrong for doing this” and that the D.C. office was now trying “to figure out how you guys broke the law to find all of this.”
Engelbrecht added, “which of course we didn't, but that was kind of their MO [modus operandi], they were going to try to pin something on us, and today you can pick your headlines about how the FBI has done this time and again.”
Phillips remarked, “The problem is they know about this, and they chose to do nothing. They chose to investigate it, and in the end, they chose to blame us, but this is China. These are Chinese operatives in the United States; these are Chinese citizens who are programming this.”
Engelbrecht and Phillips, who have worked in the election industry for a combined fifty years, described how this was a “complete and total failure” of federal law enforcement, U.S. intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security which is primarily responsible for securing the “critical infrastructure” making up the U.S. election system.
“The president of this company sits on the board of another election company that is one of the founding members of DHS's election security task force. So you want to talk about the fox in the hen house? It's all right there,” Engelbrecht noted about...
