Hold your hat!
Either Orange County flipped upside down in a cosmic miracle or a sudden gust of hurricane force wind tossed District Attorney Tony Rackauckas on his head and gave him amnesia.
Rackauckas first ran for the county's top prosecutor job in 1998 while promising to shift agency resources away from launching public corruption cases that had so delighted his predecessor, Mike Capizzi.
But the four-term DA is now asking the Orange County Board of Supervisors to give him an additional $1,117,425 annually to supplement his Special Prosecutions/Special Assignment staff with two senior deputy district attorneys, two investigators, one paralegal, one investigative assistant and one clerk.
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According to a county agenda document for the board's Sept. 25 public hearing, the seven new posts will be part of a new Public Integrity Team “dedicated exclusively to address the growing number of complaints and investigations of crimes involving people holding public office.”
Over the last several years, the DA officials claim they have witnessed an increase in the number of cases of possible criminal acts by elected officials in the county, including bribery, misuse of public resources, conflicts of interest, illegal secrecy, officer involved shootings, custodial deaths and campaign violations.
“The citizens of Orange County have the right to expect their public officials will carry out their duties in a lawful, ethical and professional manner,” the DA's staff wrote in support of the new government spending.
The proposal is a good one, if tardy. Rackauckas critics like public integrity activist Shirley Grindle have long complained that the DA was soft on public corruption.
Rackauckas' move is also a likely small step compared to what future Supervisor and future DA (my apologies, of course, to Susan Kang Schroeder) Todd Spitzer will want deployed.
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.
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