A California grand jury has indicted Apple’s head of global security on charges that he tried to bribe Santa Clara County officials to procure firearms (CCW) licenses, according to a news release. Santa Clara district attorney Jeff Rosen alleges that Thomas Moyer offered 200 iPads — worth about $70,000 — to Capt. James Jensen and Undersheriff Rick Sung in the Santa Clara County sheriff’s office, in exchange for four concealed firearms licenses for Apple employees.
The charges came after a two-year investigation. “In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” Rosen said in the news release. The iPads were never delivered, according to Rosen’s office, because Sung and Moyer became aware in 2019 that the district attorney was executing a search warrant for the sheriff department’s CCW records.
Moyer’s attorney, Ed Swanson, said in a statement emailed to The Verge that his client is innocent of the charges filed against him, adding he believed Moyer was “collateral damage” in a dispute between the Santa Clara sheriff and district attorneys’ offices. “He did nothing wrong and has acted with the highest integrity throughout his career,” Swanson said. “We have no doubt he will be acquitted at trial.”
According to Bloomberg News, Moyer has been at Apple for about 15 years and has been its head of global security since November 2018. He wrote a memo in 2018 warning Apple employees about the potential consequences of leaking information to the media, which he wrote “can become part of your personal and professional identity forever.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.