bass and feuer team up to make cringe content

bass endorses feuer while the bar investigates the former city attorney and u.s. congressional candidate for his role in litigation collusion and an extortion payment to conceal it.

Mayor Karen Bass has endorsed Mike Feuer for Congress, apparently not caring that he screwed over a Black man and reportedly committed federal crimes while doing it. Although Bass is just returning a favor because Feuer dropped out of the mayoral race in 2022 and endorsed her, it’s a pretty bad look given what we’ve learned about the corruption during Feuer’s time as City Attorney.

Feuer’s campaign website.

Check out the video. Cringe content to the max:

Voting in California is about to begin for the March 5 elections, and Feuer hopes to become the next Adam Schiff, who himself is running for Senate off his #Resistance brand. Schiff came up as a federal prosecutor in the same office that failed to charge Feuer.

But like an abuse victim who eventually transforms into their abuser, Democrats have become neoconservatives. Now Feuer wants to be the leader of the Anything But Trump Movement, a hysterical collective of corporate authoritarians and culture war addicts who haven’t bothered to look in the mirror for decades.

Look, scandal or not, Feuer was never going to be Mayor of LA. But he could become a U.S. Congressman, mostly because 55 people no one knows about are running. The LA Times endorsed a state legislator named Laura Friedman, while devoting one sentence to Feuer’s corruption:

“There are, however, many unanswered questions about Feuer’s role in the LA Department of Water and Power billing scandal.” Yea there are, but the Times editorial board never cared to talk about them. I tried multiple times, but they never spilled ink over it.

We’ve known that Feuer and almost 20 other private and city lawyers in LA have been under State Bar investigation for over a year now related to what went down during Feuer’s time as city attorney. Publicly, he doesn’t seem too worried about it, saying he is confident the Bar will find no issue.

We now know more about what Bar investigators are looking at. I’ve obtained a supplement 90-page Bar complaint about Feuer, which alleges a slew of State Bar Act and California Rules of Professional Conduct violations.

Here’s what the complaint alleges:

Mike Feuer perjured himself during a deposition after he was asked when he found out about the collusive LADWP lawsuit drafted by his office.

I’m starting with this one because it hasn’t gotten much attention. Feuer testified during his 2019 deposition that “the first time I was aware” of outside counsel assisting in the filing of the sham Jones billing lawsuit was “April 24, [2019].” The information that made Feuer “aware” of the collusion were emails between outside city lawyers and attorneys for LADWP customers planning the filing of the staged lawsuit.

That’s false, according to former outside counsel Paul Paradis, who is now in federal prison in Colorado. Feuer knew earlier, the complaint alleges. Three months prior to Feuer’s office stating it first became aware his own employees sued the city itself, Feuer discussed the possibility of those details leaking publicly with his employee. Paradis cites a January 27, 2019 audio recording in the hands of the State Bar of California in which Paradis, City Attorney official Thomas Peters and outside counsel Paul Kiesel discussed the matter. On the call Peters said he discussed details of the documents with Feuer, as they had been recently been produced through court discovery.

“Ya know Mike…although it is not teed up yet, there’s probably greater than 50 percent likelihood that eventually it will be revealed that we drafted for Landskroner a draft complaint,” Peters reportedly said on the call, relaying his conversation with Feuer. “Mike is aware that this could get ugly for a while.”

Landskroner was the city’s puppet attorney on behalf of incorrectly billed LADWP customers who was involved in a bribe to do the job.

This lie led to an even bigger lie, according to the Bar complaint.

Feuerbarcomplaint

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Feuer lied about his participation in an extortion payment to conceal litigation collusion

The complaint also alleges that Feuer lied about criminal activity that went down on his watch, specifically the 2017 extortion meeting.

During his deposition, Feuer was asked:

Q: Is it your understanding that Mr. Paradis hid his conduct in regard to his working with Mr. Landskroner from attorneys within your office?

A: Yes.

Q: And what do you base that understanding on?

A: Because . . . . I have inquired of Mr. Clark and Mr. Peters if they had any previous knowledge of any of the activity to which you’re referring by Mr. Peters – Mr. Paradis or Mr. Kiesel, among others, and they have been emphatic in their denial of any knowledge of anything even approaching what has been revealed.

That Feuer said he asked Peters if anything bad was going and that Peters said no was also perjury, according to the complaint. That’s because Feuer attended the Dec. 1, 2017 meeting in which Peters was directed to order the extortion payment which concealed the collusive details of the Jones lawsuit, according to public records. Feuer also falsely testified as to Peters’ integrity despite Peters eventually pleading guilty to the extortion crime, according tot he complaint.

“Feuer’s statements, under oath, that Feuer had ‘seen nothing’ that caused Feuer to question Peters’ integrity was known to Feuer to be false when he made this statement because Feuer had actual knowledge that Peters had committed a federal crime when Peters acted at Feuer’s direction to aid and abet Salgueiro’s $1 million extortion scheme in December 2017,” wrote Paradis. Salgueiro was a former employee of Kiesel who made the demand.

Feuer Violated the State Bar Act with a False Court Filing

Back to those April 2019 emails the City Attorney’s Office claimed to had just found as evidence that its lawyers went behind Feuer’s back. They were just a public relations stunt to deflect blame off the city. Again, the city already knew about those emails months before they claimed to have first known about them. As a result, the city lied to the court about them with its filing.

“Feuer knowingly directed the City to make a false statement to Judge Berle and the Los Angeles County Superior Court and offered evidence Feuer knew to be false in furtherance of Feuer’s and the City’s scheme to falsely portray Kiesel and Paradis as ‘rogue agents’ of the City,” according to the complaint.

Feuer Violated Opening Meeting Laws

In 2016 the LADWP board voted in favor of debarment proceedings against Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC), which meant the city would end its business dealings with the consulting firm following PWC’s involvement in LADWP’s messy 2013 billing rollout (PWC was contracted by the city to consult).

But Feuer, along with then-LADWP Board President Mel Levine, illegally interfered behind closed doors to undue the board’s vote on debarment, according to the complaint. This entailed a series of meetings out of the public view to undue that vote, the complaint alleges. It gets ethically stickier knowing that PWC was represented by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. Then-LADWP Board President Levine was also of counsel at the firm, and Feuer’s biggest campaign donors were Gibson Dunn attorneys. Levine and Feuer, according to the complaint, allegedly told board members to stand down on debarment proceedings, and ultimately, they did. And city lawyers falsified the public record to say the debarment vote never happened, the complaint alleges. Side note: when Levine voted to sue PWC over the billing fiasco, he voted to sue his own client. How does that work?

Feuer intentionally defrauded the LA City Council

Feuer was not forthright when he asked the city to reimburse legal fees for two city attorney’s who have been found by an independent body to have participated in the filing of the Jones lawsuit, according to the complaint. Instead, Feuer told the council that the attorneys did not act with “malice, or in bad faith.”

If you want to go deeper, I wrote about this last year. Also: reporting on the initial Bar complaint is here.

Anyway, I am sure Bass has read up on all of this.