SAN JOSE — Apple’s chief security executive was acquitted Wednesday of charges alleging he tried to broker a large iPad donation with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office to speed up his employees’ concealed-carry weapons licensing, ending the latest trial borne from a corruption scandal that upended the previous sheriff’s administration.
Former sheriff’s captain James Jensen, who was convicted in a separate bribery trial related to the scandal, was found not guilty alongside Thomas Moyer, head of global security for the Cupertino-based Apple. A mistrial was declared for ex-undersheriff Rick Sung, also a defendant in the case, after the jury could not agree on a verdict.
Moyer initially got his bribery charges dismissed by a Superior Court judge, but they were reinstated by the Sixth District Court of Appeal after the district attorney’s office objected. His attorneys, Ed Swanson and Mary McNamara, said after the verdict that the earlier dismissal should have been a sign to prosecutors about the strength of the criminal case.
“One of the most extraordinary things about this case is that it was already thrown out once,” Swanson said. “We think that should have been a clear signal to the prosecution that they had it wrong, but they persisted and they shouldn’t have, and the jury brought this to an end.”
Moyer and his attorneys had long argued that no bribery motive existed because the permits eventually issued to four Apple security employees in early 2019 had already been approved by the sheriff’s office by the time he proposed donating 200 iPads to the agency’s training division. In the criminal indictment, Sung and Jensen were accused of holding up those permits to procure what would eventually become the proposed donation.
“Thomas had five years of utter hell,” McNamara said Wednesday. “The case never looked like a bribe, this was a corporate donation. That’s what made this incomprehensible as a case to us.”
In a statement, the district attorney’s office pointed to the multiple convictions it has secured to convey the strength of its wide-ranging CCW corruption probe.
“We respect the jury’s determination,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said. “We remain proud of our office’s investigation because it resulted in several related convictions as well as improvements at the Sheriff’s Office and in how concealed firearms permits are handled. We remain committed to rooting out this type of corruption wherever it may lie.”
Sung’s attorney Chuck Smith took satisfaction in the fact that seven of the 12 jurors sought to acquit his client before they deadlocked on his charges.
“I would have preferred an acquittal, but out of 36 votes, the defense got 31,” Smith said. “We’re very happy that most of the people concluded Rick Sung did not commit a crime. I hope the DA decides not to retry it.”
Regarding Sung’s prosecution, Rosen’s office said: “We are reviewing our options.”
Jensen’s attorney declined to comment late Wednesday.
The trial that just concluded comes after a series of investigations and charges that revolved around previous sheriff Laurie Smith and longtime accusations of political and other kinds of favor-trading in how her office issued concealed-carry weapons permits. The case became public with a 2020 criminal indictment that led to Jensen’s conviction last year, and was joined by two more criminal indictments, one of which ended with the jury’s verdict Wednesday.
Jensen was portrayed as a close adviser to Smith and a linchpin in a ploy that brokered the coveted CCW permits in backroom deals while largely ignoring applications from ordinary citizens. The practice was buoyed by the wide discretion state law once gave to sheriffs and police chiefs, and which has since been curtailed by U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen ruling that outlawed “good cause” tests for the gun licenses.
In the original criminal indictment for which Jensen was convicted, one co-defendant pleaded to a lesser charge, one was able to get his charges dismissed, and another who was tried alongside Jensen was acquitted. Three other co-conspirators — private security moguls who sought the coveted gun permits in exchange for a proposed $90,000 donation to support Smith’s 2018 re-election — cooperated with prosecutors and were convicted of misdemeanor crimes.
Smith invoked her Fifth Amendment rights in refusing to testify to a criminal grand jury, but the indictments formed the foundation of a 2022 civil grand jury trial in which she was found guilty of much of the same corruption alleged in the criminal case. The civil outcome formally removed her from office, though she had already announced her retirement and resigned mid-trial in an attempt to nullify a verdict.
Sung remains a defendant in the third criminal indictment that sprang from the CCW corruption probe, which accuses him of another bribery allegation in which prosecutors say he leveraged the renewal of a CCW permit to compel businessman Harpreet Chadha to donate a San Jose Sharks luxury suite for Smith’s use. Chadha has asserted in court that the donation was part of a routine practice.