Los Angeles police recently raided the Eagle Rock home of two individuals who worked for the Los Angeles County Federation of Trade Unions as part of an investigation into the covert recording incident that dramatically upended city hall politics last year.

A search warrant was served earlier this month to the home of Santos Leon and Carla Vazquez, a married couple who were employed by the federation at the time of the recording, according to people familiar with the investigation. He said he knew about the warrant but was not authorized to speak publicly. Leon’s computer was seized by the police.

In California, recording conversations without the person’s consent is illegal, with rare exceptions, and can be prosecuted as a felony.The warrant cited criminal law eavesdropping and Destruction or Concealment of Evidencesaid the official.

Three neighbors said Monday they saw police enter their Eagle Rock home from both the street and the alleyway behind the house in the early hours of July 13. Two neighbors said police entered the property for about two hours, searching both the main house and the back house.

A fourth neighbor, Hillary Maxwell, said she saw a police van parked on the street and about eight police officers in and around the house. She said police officers told her they were executing a search warrant.

Leon, who works for the federation as an accountant, declined to comment through his lawyer. When his wife, Vazquez, arrived at her home, she did not comment on the inquiry. Her attorney also declined to comment.

Neither Leon nor Vazquez have been named as suspects in the case.

Leon, 43, was first mentioned last week in connection with an investigation by Los Angeles Magazine. report He was questioned by the police officer in charge of the case. The recording provoked widespread condemnation and led to the resignation of two major political figures, then City Council Speaker Nuri Martinez and then Labor Union Chief Ron Herrera.

Vazquez, 46, left the federation in March to serve as Herrera’s executive assistant, according to his LinkedIn page.

Last Tuesday, the federation called an emergency meeting to report to the board the results of the group’s internal investigation into the recordings, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Yvonne Wheeler, the federation’s president, told the board about the work of the federation’s forensic investigators who interviewed federation staff following the audio leak and examined each staff member’s laptop, said the official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the federation’s internal investigation publicly.

During the investigation, forensic investigators discovered voice-editing software on Leon’s computer and turned over their findings to the Los Angeles Police Department, the people said. A person familiar with the matter said Leon was on unpaid leave and remains a federation employee.

Federation leaders have so far dismissed the idea that one of their staff members may have been involved in the covert recording, saying last fall that the federation has “the best staff in the country.”

The federation said on Twitter last year that it “rejects any accusations that our staff are responsible for these recordings as totally false and absolutely outrageous.”

Wheeler, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the internal investigation, saying the investigation was still ongoing. The Los Angeles Police Department also declined to comment.

The leaked conversation was recorded during a meeting between Herrera, Martinez and two other city councilors (Gil Zedillo and Kevin De Leon) in October 2021. At the Federation’s Westlake Headquarters.

The conversation contained racist and derogatory comments, leading to widespread calls for the resignation of all four participants. Mr. Zedillo missed re-election before the recording was released and resigned in December. De Leon remains on the council, but he has yet to say whether he will seek re-election.

The four people in the conversation spent most of the meeting discussing district realignment (the city’s process of creating new political maps for each of the 15 districts of Congress) and efforts to draw boundaries in ways that consolidate political power.

The Los Angeles Police Department announced in mid-October that it had opened a criminal investigation into the recording, led by the department’s Major Crimes Unit. At the time, Police Chief Michelle Moore said the investigation was launched at the request of those who were present at the taped meeting.

Times staff writers James Quarry and Laura J. Nelson contributed to this report.