One legal expert called it “some kind of nonsense.” Another said it raised more questions than it answered.
But two months later, state prosecutors announced 11 felony charges against the senior Los Angeles County consultant. Atty. George Gascón’s newly released court records provide a window into the controversial case.
The basis for the charges against Gascón adviser Diana Tran has been opaque since the California bar. Gen. Rob Bonta announced the news in April.
State prosecutors said only that Tran improperly accessed confidential police records in 2018 while serving as a constitutional police consultant for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then improperly used those records three years later when she joined the district attorney’s office. The data.
It’s unclear whose documents she allegedly used or how, but after weeks of legal wrangling, a lawyer for the company los angeles public press Convince the judge to unseal the affidavit used to justify the arrest warrant.
The core accusations in the 15-page document unsealed Tuesday night center on Tran’s attempts to get more deputies’ names into a database the district attorney uses to track problem officers, as her attorneys had previously speculated.
But the documents also show that when she marked the disciplinary records of at least two of the 11 deputies for listing, those records were already public. This week, The Times discovered that the records can be easily found through a Google search.
The identities of the other nine deputies remain redacted in the public version of the affidavit — although Tran’s attorney said he was “99 percent confident” their records have also been released.
“I couldn’t believe that there would be a prosecution based on this kind of evidence,” James Spertus told The Times. “I underestimated the seriousness of this case.”
On Wednesday, several legal experts who reviewed the testimony raised questions about the case.
“From a broader criminal justice perspective, it shocks me that we’re missing the forest for the trees,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a San Francisco attorney with a background in computer crimes. “She didn’t put people into the database that shouldn’t exist.”
In an emailed statement, Bonta’s office declined to comment, citing the need to “protect the integrity of pending cases.”
A law enforcement source familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the state was considering dropping both charges against Tran, and late Wednesday Spertus confirmed that was his expectation.
With a general election months away, Gascocon faces serious challengers, and some see Tran’s indictment as a political betrayal because Bonta endorsed Gascocon four years ago. But it’s unclear what impact, if any, the controversy will have on the campaign.
The District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Department had no immediate comment.
The 15-page affidavit, signed by state Department of Justice Special Agent Tony Baca, traces the investigation into Tran back to a traffic stop three years ago involving another district attorney’s officer.
The affidavit does not identify the officer, but the details match the December 2021 arrest of Gascón’s chief of staff, Joseph Iniguez.
As The Times previously reportedAzusa police pulled over Inigos’ fiancé after he allegedly made an illegal U-turn into a McDonald’s drive-thru. Police said Iniguez attempted to interfere with the stop and arrested him on suspicion of public intoxication.
The police union later claimed that Inigos threatened to add the arresting officer’s name to the district attorney’s so-called Brady List, which contains officers with questionable disciplinary records. The name comes from a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that required prosecutors to turn over any evidence favorable to a defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.
The case against Inigos was referred to the California Department of Justice due to potential conflicts of interest. But state prosecutors never filed charges, and Iniguez eventually sued the Azusa Police Department Cases closed last year.
The state’s investigation somehow led officials to Tran, who was in charge of the district attorney’s Brady database, according to Baca’s affidavit. The Justice Department has not provided further explanation.
Spertus previously said he believed the investigation into his client was prompted by a complaint from former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who said he was involved in a 2019 Lang’s “massive data breach” alerted the FBI and the state Department of Justice. At that time, both agencies agreed to take on the case.
When Tran worked for the Sheriff’s Department under Villanueva’s predecessor, part of her daily duties included reviewing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations. According to Baca’s affidavit, the department’s secret tracking software recorded all of her searches starting in 2018.
When Tran joined the DA’s office in 2021, she allegedly began suggesting names of deputies that should be added to the Brady list — a practice two prosecutors told Baca was uncommon. Then in April 2021, Teran sent a list of 33 names to another prosecutor for possible inclusion in the database, the affidavit said.
Several of the names were from officer files she accessed while working for the Sheriff’s Department, otherwise she “would not have identified so many deputies,” the affidavit said. The affidavit also claims that some of the documents Tran sent along with his name appeared to have been “scanned, copied, or obtained directly from LASD data files.”
The 11 charges reflect 11 of the 33 deputies whose names “do not appear in public records request responses or media articles,” Baca wrote.
Susan Seager, a lawyer who fought for the record’s release, questioned that reasoning.
“This is an extremely narrow and inaccurate way to determine whether their disciplinary files are confidential,” she wrote in an emailed statement.
Seager went on to call it “shocking” that Bonta described the records of 11 deputies as confidential, noting that two of the names – Lisa Gonzalez and Thomas Negron – had been released The affidavit has not been redacted.
“Bonta’s office did not explain why the two names were released, but it may be because two California Court of Appeals rulings in 2014 and 2015 discussed Gonzalez and Negron in detail,” Seager wrote. The MPs’ disciplinary files and how they were sacked for dishonesty in 2010 and 2011.
Other legal experts who reviewed the affidavit offered similar criticism.
“I think it raises more questions than answers, in part because there are still redactions,” said police oversight expert Michael Gennaco, who added that the investigator who wrote the affidavit does not appear to have dealt with the matter. Such cases, this “very interesting” nature before.
Cristine Soto DeBerry, executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance, criticized the case as “ridiculous.”
“A prosecutor who conscientiously strives to do his job and pursue important information should be praised, not punished,” she said in an emailed statement.
Fakhoury, an attorney with a background in computer crimes, noted that state prosecutors do not appear to be claiming that any of the information Tran flagged as being included in the Brady database was incorrect or did not belong in the database.
“There is no allegation, in my view, that she was incapable of computer access to records at least while she was employed by the Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “So the unauthorized access was that she obtained information that she was permitted to possess and used that information after she left the Sheriff’s Department.”
Fakhouri said federal prosecutors are trying to argue that “unauthorized access” includes theories similar to those in the Tran case, where someone accessed data for a permitted purpose and then used it for other purposes. But he said the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that theory, and the California Supreme Court did not weigh in on the scope of its interpretation of the state statute.
“This is a strange case,” he said. “Frankly, I think it’s a bit of nonsense.”
Legally, he said, it may not matter whether the records have been made public, although it could cast greater doubt on the decision to prosecute Tran.
He wondered whether it would have a “chilling effect” on other prosecutors focused on police accountability: “Is this what we really want for this statute and this investigation?”
Times staff writers James Qualley and Richard Winton contributed to this report.
