Patricia Dunn, who resigned as chairman of Hewlett-Packard in the midst of a pretexting scandal, pleaded not guilty to four felony counts at an arraignment today in San Jose, Calif.
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, said in the criminal complaint filed Oct. 4 that Dunn and four other defendants were charged with: fraudulent wire communications; wrongful use of computer data; identity theft; and conspiracy to commit those three crimes in relation to the scandal.
Dunn has consistently stated, including during testimony before a Congressional committee, that she is not guilty of criminal behavior in the pretexting case.
Pretexting essentially is the practice of impersonating the identity of another person to gain access to his or her records.
The California AG’s office confirmed today that the other four defendants in the case previously had entered not guilty pleas after their indictments.
The other defendants include Kevin Hunsaker, former in-house lawyer and ethics chief at HP, and outside investigators hired by HP to investigate leaks of information discussed in confidential boardroom meetings.
Those investigators are: Ronald DeLia managing director of Security Outsourcing Solutions, Matthew Depante, manager of information broker Action Research Group (ARG), and Bryan Wagner, an employee of ARG,
Lockyer claims the investigators allegedly used pretexting methods to gain the phone records of journalists, HP board members and others they suspected might be the source of the leaks.
Congress is looking into HP case specifically and the broader issue of whether pretexting is or should be legal.