On Sunday–the same day the Weekly broke news of Republican allegations that Van Tran cheated to win a California Republican Assembly endorsement, the Orange County state assemblyman who hopes to face Democrat Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez in November also found himself a centerpiece in a daily newspaper investigation.
Brian Joseph, the OC Register's Sacramento reporter, wrote an article (“How lawmakers turned a perk into profit”) demonstrating how entrenched politicians like Tran abuse taxpayers by taking as much as $137,000-a-year under the pretense that they have to work away from their homes when, in fact, they live comfortably in Sacramento.
From the Register's article summary: “Overlapping laws allow savvy California politicians to leverage their tax-free allowances to buy homes, secure tax deductions and sometimes pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.”
To win elections, Tran poses as a fiscal conservative who is determined to reduce wasteful government spending.
Read Joseph's excellent work HERE.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
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.