Ex-L.A. sheriff’s corruption squad targeted Kuehl. Now state has dropped the case

Two years after Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies showed up with guns and battering rams for an early morning raid on Sheila Kuehl’s home in Santa Monica, the investigation is officially over — and there will be no criminal charges.

Instead, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William Ryan approved an agreement Wednesday in which the California Department of Justice said there was a “lack of evidence of wrongdoing.” The department had taken over the politically charged investigation originally launched by then-L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s controversial public corruption squad.

“The DOJ has conducted a thorough and independent investigation into the allegations that formed the basis of the LASD investigation,” state prosecutors wrote. “The DOJ has concluded, based on this independent investigation, that there is insufficient evidence to support the filing of any criminal charges.”

The case had centered on more than $800,000 worth of contracts Metro awarded to Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit run by Patti Giggans — one of Kuehl’s friends and Villanueva’s critics. The organization had been tasked with running a hotline for reporting sexual harassment on the public transit system, but the agreement to do so came under scrutiny after a whistleblower alleged that Giggans had been unfairly awarded the contract as a quid pro quo for supporting Kuehl, a former Los Angeles County supervisor.

The investigation eventually ballooned into other allegations, including the unfounded claim — repeated frequently by Villanueva — that county Inspector General Max Huntsman had been involved in tipping off Kuehl before the search of her home, as well as Giggans’ home and the nonprofit’s offices.

Days after the raids, state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office took the investigation from the Sheriff’s Department. For two years, the state quietly investigated the matter while Villanueva fulminated about it at seemingly every opportunity. He referred to Kuehl and Huntsman as “felony suspects” and seized on the case as a way to undermine some of the most vocal critics overseeing his department. On Wednesday, he did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

In a news release, Bonta reiterated the terms of the agreement, saying the agency “has concluded that there is insufficient evidence to support the filing of charges based on the MTA’s awarding of a sole-source contract to POV, or on the campaign contributions received by Supervisor Kuehl from persons affiliated with POV. Further, DOJ has found insufficient evidence to file charges for interference with a search warrant. DOJ has therefore closed the investigation into this matter.”

To Kuehl, who decided to retire in 2022, Wednesday’s outcome came as a vindication.

“I think it’s a pure victory,” she said. “Because there was never anything there, and it was all made up by the sheriff.”

The conclusion to the case comes weeks after The Times revealed that state prosecutors also recently turned down another high-profile investigation spearheaded by the same public corruption squad. In that case, investigators had accused Huntsman and several others — including a former Times reporter — of a variety of felonies involving supposedly stolen records and leaked documents. Federal and state authorities repeatedly rejected the case, and at one point a legal advisor for the county warned department officials that it was “not legally viable.”

That inquiry — along with the Kuehl investigation — served as one of Villanueva’s chief criticisms of the county watchdog. At one point, he cited it as part of the justification for locking Huntsman out of department databases. At least twice, he asked county officials to remove Huntsman from his job. But now, after years of legal wrangling, Huntsman is finally no longer in the crosshairs of investigations launched by the agency he oversees.

The Sheriff’s Department did not immediately comment.

Though the raids took place in the fall of 2022, the supposed corruption that led to them allegedly started years earlier.

Amid persistent complaints about sexual harassment and groping on local buses and subway rides in 2013 and 2014, Metro turned to Peace Over Violence for help. The Metro spokesman at the time later said he found the organization from an internet search. He cold-called Giggans, and she started informally collaborating with Metro, helping officials come up with an ad strategy and an anti-harassment slogan: “It’s Off Limits.”

Eventually, Giggans said, her organization would need to get paid if Metro officials wanted more of her help. So in 2015 and 2016, Peace Over Violence received $105,000 for consulting work, as The Times previously reported.

Though Kuehl was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2014 and served on the Metro board of directors in that capacity, Metro officials said she had nothing to do with the initial anti-harassment efforts.

The scope of that work grew after three Metro board members — including Kuehl — asked staff to hire an outside group that could offer support to victims as one way of addressing the ongoing problems without relying more on police.

Then Peace Over Violence proposed a 24-hour hotline for $160,000 a year. The hotline launched in early 2017, and Metro staff extended the contract three more years for an additional $495,000 — a decision that did not require board approval, meaning Kuehl had no say.

The hotline was overseen by Jennifer Loew, then a Metro employee. But by 2019, as The Times previously reported, Loew was starting to run into trouble at work. She was eventually admonished after an internal investigation found that she’d been “intimidating” to staff.

A few weeks later, court records show Loew began alleging corruption at Metro — and she focused her claims on the Peace Over Violence contracts, which she said had been awarded in return for $2,000 Giggans donated to Kuehl’s campaign in 2013 and 2014. Metro staff, Loew said, pushed the deals forward to stay in Kuehl’s good graces.

First, Loew asked Metro’s inspector general to investigate. She also asked the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County district attorney’s office to take up the case. There was no sign any of them took interest, but in September 2019, the Sheriff’s Department sent detectives to investigate Loew’s report.

The detectives were from the public corruption unit, which critics said Villanueva used to target his political enemies. It was the same unit whose activities the Civilian Oversight Commission, of which Giggans has long been a member, later condemned in a 10-page memo calling for an investigation into whether Villanueva was abusing his power.

The unit’s first search warrants in the Peace Over Violence inquiry were carried out in February 2021. Investigators targeted the offices of the nonprofit as well as of Metro and the Metro inspector general. Peace Over Violence turned over boxes of records. Metro and its inspector general questioned the investigation’s legitimacy and went to court to challenge the warrants.

That fall, the Sheriff’s Department took its evidence to local prosecutors and asked them to consider filing charges. Prosecutors refused, saying the evidence didn’t prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that anyone had committed a crime. The Sheriff’s Department kept investigating. Though he frequently spoke and posted about the inquiry online, Villanueva said he recused himself from the case, as well as from other cases handled by his public corruption unit.

In the fall of 2022, Superior Court Judge Eleanor Hunter told the Sheriff’s Department that if investigators wanted to carry out more searches they needed to narrow the scope of the warrants they were seeking. But the following week, while Hunter was on vacation, Max Fernandez — the lead investigator on the case — took a new batch of warrant requests to a different judge and got approval for the raids, saying they might reveal evidence of bribery and other crimes.

The statement Fernandez presented to the court to justify the warrants also alleged the Peace Over Violence hotline was a “complete failure” and, despite that, the contract had been extended without a competitive bid or analysis. Outside the courtroom Wednesday, Fernandez declined to comment on the case or its outcome.

Just after 7 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2022, deputies started pounding on the door of Kuehl’s Santa Monica home. They went inside, escorted Kuehl outside barefoot and took her phone. Investigators also searched Giggans’ home, Peace Over Violence offices and several other buildings downtown.

In an interview outside her house while the search was underway, Kuehl called the allegations against her “totally bogus” and said she “didn’t know anything about the contract.” Then, she said the county’s lawyer had alerted her to the impending search the night before.

Afterward, Villanueva sent a letter to Bonta asking him to open a criminal inquiry into the early warning Kuehl had received — a warning for which Villanueva blamed Huntsman. Huntsman denied the allegations and said phone records would clear him.

Just as they had the first time around, the searches sparked a months-long legal battle over the warrants that allowed them — a battle that continued even after Bonta’s office took over the case. In the agreement approved this week, the state agreed to quash the warrants and return the confiscated items.

Though the case is over and the public corruption unit is now defunct, the political tensions that led to it could still be the fodder for future lines of inquiry — this time into the unit and its activities. According to Sean Kennedy, a Civilian Oversight Commission member who represented Giggans during the probe, in recent weeks the watchdog group has been attempting to subpoena testimony from Fernandez, who is still with the Sheriff’s Department.

“I’m concerned that there is a deputy gang connection,” Kennedy told The Times. “Several sources have told me the public corruption detail was hand-selected by former Sheriff Villaneuva and former Undersheriff Tim Murakami. We’ve already learned Murakami is a tattooed Caveman and lied about his tattoo for years. We’re deeply concerned if the public corruption detail is or was being used to dissuade oversight officials from investigating deputy gangs in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.”