SAN JOSE — A state appellate court on Friday reversed a Santa Clara County judge’s 2021 decision to drop a bribery charge against an Apple security executive who was accused of offering a large iPad donation to the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office to get concealed-gun licenses for his security agents.
That means for the time being, Thomas Moyer — who runs global security operations for the tech titan — will head back toward trial in the South Bay. The charge he faces were part of a massive scandal involving former Sheriff Laurie Smith that saw her administration accused of leveraging the coveted weapons permits for political donations and other in-kind favors.
In June 2021, county Superior Court Judge Eric Geffon ruled that the criminal grand jury that indicted Moyer the previous year “could not have reasonably concluded that Moyer had a corrupt intent with respect to the donation of iPads to affect the issuance of CCW permits because he did not act … wrongfully to gain an advantage.”
Geffon sided with the contention by Moyer’s attorneys 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 a criminal indictment, former Undersheriff Rick Sung and sheriff’s Capt. James Jensen are accused of holding up those permits to procure what would eventually become the proposed donation.
But Friday’s ruling by the Sixth District Court of Appeal, which came two years after the District Attorney’s Office challenged Geffon’s dismissal of Moyer’s bribery charge, came to the opposite conclusion.
“Consistent with the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation of California law, federal law and the law in many states, we conclude that such a promise may constitute a bribe,” the ruling reads. “We also conclude that the evidence presented to the grand jury was sufficient to raise a reasonable suspicion of such bribery. Accordingly, we reverse the trial court’s order dismissing the bribery count against Moyer, reinstate that count, and remand for further proceedings.”
Later in the ruling, the appellate court added that “The evidence presented to the grand jury … created a reasonable suspicion (and therefore permitted the grand jury to find) that Moyer proposed the iPad donation principally for another purpose: to secure release of Apple’s CCW licenses.”
Britt Evangelist, a partner with the firm Swanson & McNamara LLP, which represents Moyer, said in a statement that they “strongly believe the Court of Appeal reached the wrong conclusion. Tom Moyer did not commit a crime, and we will continue fighting this case until he is exonerated.”
District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who said at the time of Geffon’s dismissal that he stood by the criminal grand jury’s indictment, also weighed in.
“Moyer is right back where he should be,” Rosen said in a statement. “On the trial calendar and charged with bribery.”
Two sets of criminal grand jury indictments filed in 2020 are still making their way through the court system, with Smith’s former undersheriff and a top commander and advisor still facing criminal charges along with several alleged co-conspirators.
Smith was never criminally charged. She retired last year after a civil grand jury filed corruption accusations against her, which was followed by a civil trial jury finding her guilty of many of the same allegations in the criminal case. The civil outcome formally removed her from office, which was entirely symbolic since she had already signaled her retirement and even resigned mid-trial in an attempt to head off a verdict.
To date, no one indicted criminally in the CCW scandal has gone to trial, though several people who received or brokered the illicit permit trades agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for lenient charging and sentencing consideration. That includes a former Bay Area security executive whose $45,000 donation to a political committee supporting Smith’s 2018 re-election touched off the investigations that would end in the indictments.
One defendant in the initial indictment, an adviser and attorney for Smith, was able to get his charges dismissed after the Sixth District court agreed that his past friendship with and fundraising for Rosen presented a significant conflict of interest.