California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) stepped in Tuesday to stop the L.A. County Sheriff from investigating County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, a Democrat, for corruption after she claimed that Sheriff Alex Villanueva was acting on political motives.
As Breitbart News reported last week, L.A. County deputies raided and searched Kuehl’s home in Santa Monica pursuant to a warrant in an investigation of corruption. Kuehl has been accused by critics of giving a county contract to a donor and friend.
Kuehl accused Villanueva of being “out of control” and claimed she was the victim of a political vendetta. Villanueva and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors have clashed over “defund the police,” vaccine mandates, and policies on homelessness.
The Board has placed a referendum on November’s ballot that would allow it to fire the sheriff at will — even though the sheriff is an elected office. Villanueva, who is running for reelection this year, accuses the supervisors of election interference.
In theory, the unit within the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department that investigates corruption is independent from Villanueva. But Democrats — ironically, echoing Donald Trump’s claims about the Department of Justice — claim there is political bias.
Villanueva wrote to Bonta last week, complaining that Kuehl and her associate, Patti Giggans, appeared to have been tipped off in advance of the raid, potentially allowing them to hide or destroy evidence, and to raise allegations of political motives.
Bonta replied by taking over the investigation, as the Los Angeles Times reports:
Bonta’s letter was in response to one Villanueva sent him last week, in which Villanueva demanded Bonta open an inquiry into allegations that Kuehl and Giggans had been tipped off in advance of the impending searches.
In his letter, Bonta replied that while he would look into Villanueva’s claim, he was also taking over the department’s investigation into Giggans’ charity.
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Villanueva said he has recused himself from the investigation in order to avoid conflicts of interest. But he has discussed the investigation in recent news interviews and used it as fodder on the social media accounts for his reelection campaign for sheriff, declaring: “L.A. Political Establishment borrows a page from Donald Trump’s playbook to discredit the corruption investigation into Supervisor #SheilaKuehl.”
In a further irony, Kuehl’s lawyers are asking a local judge to appoint a special master to go through potentially privileged materials seized by police — just like Trump.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.