Two years after Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies with guns and a battering ram carried out an early-morning raid on Sheila Kuhl's Santa Monica home, the investigation has officially ended. No criminal charges will be filed.
Instead, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William Ryan on Wednesday approved an agreement that California's Department of Justice said contained “a lack of evidence of wrongdoing.” The Justice Department took over a politically biased investigation originally launched by former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva's controversial corruption unit.
“The Department of Justice conducted a thorough and independent investigation of the allegations that formed the basis of the LASD investigation,” state prosecutors wrote. “Based on this independent investigation, the Department of Justice has concluded that there is insufficient evidence to support criminal charges.”
The suit centered on a more than $800,000 contract Metro gave to Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit run by Patty Giggans, a friend of Kuehl and a critic of Villanueva. The group was tasked with running a hotline to report sexual harassment on the public transit system, but the contract came under scrutiny after a whistleblower alleged that Giggans was improperly awarded the contract in return for her support of Kuehl, a former Los Angeles County Supervisor.
The investigation eventually ballooned into other allegations, including unsubstantiated assertions repeated by Villanueva that Inspector General Max Huntsman had tipped off Kuehl before conducting early-morning searches of Kuehl's home, Gigans' home and the nonprofit's offices.
Days after the raid, Attorney General Rob Bonta's office took over the investigation from the sheriff's department. The state had been quietly investigating the case for two years, but Villanueva had lambasted it at every opportunity. He called both Kuehl and Huntsman “suspected felons” and tried to use the case to undermine some of the most vocal critics who oversee his department. He did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment Wednesday.
Bonta reiterated the terms of the agreement in a news release, saying the department “concluded that there is insufficient evidence to support charges regarding the MTA's awarding of sole-source contracts to POV or Superintendent Kuehl's receipt of campaign contributions from POV associates. Additionally, the Department of Justice has determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a charge of obstruction of a search warrant. As such, the Department of Justice has closed its investigation of this matter.”
Kuehl, who retired as county supervisor. Deciding to retire in 2022Wednesday's results were a vindication.
“I think this is a total victory,” she said, “because there's nothing there and it's all been made up by the sheriff.”
of The controversial case was concluded several weeks later. The Times reported that state prosecutors also recently dismissed another high-profile investigation led by the same corruption unit. In that case, investigators had charged Huntsman and several others, including a former Times reporter, with a variety of felony charges, including stolen records and leaked documents. Federal and state authorities repeatedly dismissed the case, with the county's general counsel at one point warning agency officials that it was “legally unfeasible.”
That investigation, along with Kuehl's, was one of Villanueva's main criticisms of the county oversight agency. Villanueva at one point cited it as a reason to block Huntsman from the department's database. He asked county officials at least twice to remove Huntsman from his job. But after a years-long legal battle, Huntsman was finally no longer the target of an investigation launched by the agency he oversees.
The Sheriff's Department did not immediately comment.
The raid took place in the fall of 2022, but the corruption that led to it allegedly began several years earlier.
After a wave of complaints of sexual harassment and groping on local buses and subways in 2013 and 2014, Metro turned to Peace Over Violence for help. A Metro spokesman at the time later said he found the group through an internet search. He called Gigans, and she began working informally with Metro, helping them devise an advertising strategy and the anti-harassment slogan, “No Trespassing.”
Ultimately, Gigans said, if Metro officials needed her further assistance, her organization would have to get paid. So, as The Times previously reported, in 2015 and 2016, Peace Over Violence received $105,000 for consulting work.
Kuehl was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2014 and served on the Metro board in that capacity, but Metro officials said she had no involvement in the original anti-harassment efforts.
The reach of the effort expanded after three Metro executives, including Kuehl, urged officials to hire outside groups that could provide support to victims as one way to address the ongoing problem without relying on police.
Peace Over Violence then proposed setting up a 24-hour hotline for $160,000 a year. The hotline opened in early 2017, and Metro staff paid an additional $495,000 to extend the contract for three more years. The decision did not require board approval, so Kuehl had no say.
The hotline was overseen by Jennifer Rowe, then a Metro employee. But by 2019, As The Times previously reportedMs Lowe was beginning to cause problems at work and was eventually reprimanded after an internal investigation found she had “intimidated” staff.
A few weeks later, according to court records, Ms. Rowe began to accuse Metro of corruption, focusing on the peace-and-violence contracts she alleged were made in exchange for $2,000 that Giggans donated to Mr. Kuhl's campaign in 2013 and 2014. Ms. Rowe said Metro staff pushed the contracts to stay in Mr. Kuhl's good graces.
First, Rowe asked Metro's inspector general to investigate. He also asked the FBI, the LAPD, and the LA County District Attorney's Office to look into the incident. None of them showed any interest, but in September 2019, the Sheriff's Department sent a detective to look into Rowe's report.
The detectives are from the Public Corruption Unit. Which Critics say Villanueva was targeting political opponents, the same forces that the Civilian Oversight Board, of which Gigans was a longtime member, later denounced. 10 page memo They are calling for an investigation into whether Villanueva abused his power.
The unit's first search warrant in the Peace Over Violence investigation was executed in February 2021. Agents targeted the nonprofit's offices and the offices of Metro and the Metro Inspector General. Peace Over Violence turned over boxes of records. Metro and its inspector general questioned the legitimacy of the investigation and went to court to challenge the warrant.
That fall, the sheriff's department presented the evidence to the local prosecutor's office and asked them to consider filing charges, but the prosecutor refused, citing the evidence as contradictory. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” There was no evidence that anyone committed a crime. The Sheriff's Department continued to investigate. Villanueva, who frequently spoke out and posted online about the investigation, said he had recused himself from the case, as well as others handled by the Public Corruption Unit.
In the fall of 2022, Superior Court Judge Eleanor Hunter told the Sheriff's Department that if investigators wanted to conduct further searches, they would have to narrow the scope of the warrants they were seeking. But the following week, while Judge Hunter was on vacation, the lead investigator on the case, Max Fernandez, brought a new set of warrant requests to another judge and received approval for the searches, citing the possibility that they might uncover evidence of bribery or other crimes.
In a statement filed with the court to justify the warrant, Fernandez also alleged that the Peace Over Violence hotline was a “total failure” and that the contract was nevertheless extended without competitive bidding or analysis. Outside court on Wednesday, Fernandez declined to comment on the case or its outcome.
Officers began knocking on the door of Kuehl's Santa Monica home just after 7 a.m. on September 14, 2022. They went inside, escorted Kuehl outside barefoot, and took his cell phone. Investigators also searched Gigans' home, the Peace Over Violence offices, and several other buildings downtown.
While the search was taking place, Kuehl said in an interview outside her home that the allegations against her were “total lies” and that she “knew nothing about the contract,” and later said that a county attorney had informed her the night before that a search was coming.
Villanueva then wrote Bonta, urging him to open a criminal investigation into the early warnings Kuehl received, which he blamed on Huntsman. He denied the allegations. He said that the phone records would prove his innocence.
Like the previous raids, the latest one sparked a months-long legal battle over the search warrant, a fight that continued even after Bonta's office took over the case. In a settlement approved this week, the state agreed to quash the warrant and return the seized items.
Though the case is closed and the public corruption unit has been disbanded, the political tensions that sparked it could feed into future investigations — this time of the unit and its activities. Sean Kennedy, a member of the Civilian Oversight Board who represented Gigans during the investigation, said the watchdog group has been trying in recent weeks to subpoena Fernandez, who remains with the sheriff's department, to testify.
“We are concerned that there may be ties to deputy gangs,” Kennedy told the Times. “We have heard from multiple sources that the suspects in the corruption investigation were selected by former Sheriff Villanueva and former Deputy Tim Murakami. We already know that Murakami is a caveman with tattoos and lied about his tattoos for years. We are deeply concerned that the suspects in the corruption investigation may have been used to dissuade supervisors from investigating deputy gangs in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.”
