How’s this for outrageous BS?
While Larry Agran, Orange County’s most notoriously devious campaign finance violator has operated a multimillion dollar campaign scheme with impunity for more than a decade, state regulators in California spent five years investigating $340 then-county supervisor Chris Norby spent on a crappy hotel room for several days in 2007.
The state’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) finally ended its Norby probe yesterday after concluding he’d violated no law or regulation in the hotel spending he claimed was related to his study of homelessness in the area.
Norby’s critics believe the hotel spending was an illegal conversion of campaign funds into personal use because the supervisor had been in the midst of marital discord at the time.
The commission overruled the opinion of Gary Winuk, the agency’s
chief enforcement officer, who noted suspiciously that Norby checked
into the hotel on the same day that the supervisor officially separated
from his wife.
Meanwhile, the FPPC can’t bring itself to sanction Agran, the longtime unethical political boss of Irvine’s city council.
Agran–a Democrat and 1992 presidential campaign candidate with a pronounced preference for secrecy, financial shenanigans and arrogance–enacted contribution limitations on local candidates years ago by
arguing that citizen’s deserve council members who haven’t been bought
by special interests.
But each election cycle he creates a fake “independent” expenditure campaign committee with an out of town address for wealthy individuals and corporations with financial interests in Irvine to donate large sums. The money evades the Agran-imposed limitations all the other candidates obey and goes to illegally benefit Agran and his handpicked Democratic Party candidates.
Several years ago, Chuck DeVore–one of Agran’s Republican critics–asked state campaign finance law experts if he could copy Agran’s fundraising operation and was told the scheme is brazenly illegal.
Agran has manipulated one of California’s biggest public projects, the $3.4 billion Orange County Great Park, into a cesspool of financial corruption by diverting millions and millions of taxpayer dollars to his friends, campaign consultants and associates.
Norby, a Republican, is now the state Assemblyman representing Fullerton.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.