In the world of Soros district attorneys in big blue cities, it's amazing what passes for 'ethics and integrity' in policing the police.
Fox News's Bill Melugin has gotten hold of the actual arrest affidavit of Diana Teran, the top deputy to District Attorney George Gascon, who was busted last April for illegally accessing and downloading 11 police records, each act a felony, for her own purposes.
According to the Los Angeles Times's April 29 report, she had been Gascon's "ethics and integrity" director.
As of last week, Teran was supervising high-profile and sensitive cases involving police misconduct, fraud and public corruption. The district attorney’s office on Thursday told The Times it did not comment on personnel matters, but Teran was no longer overseeing Ethics and Integrity Operations.
At the time, the Los Angeles Times said it couldn't get much information on the scope of the matter:
Diana Teran, one of L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s top advisors, was booked on 11 felony charges days after Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta alleged that she downloaded the records of 11 unnamed deputies in 2018 while working at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Three years later, Bonta alleged, Teran “impermissibly used” those records after joining Gascón’s office.
The attorney general’s office has not said whose records Teran allegedly took or how she used them and has released little information about the underlying facts of the case.
The 11 illegally accessed records were the focus then and they didn't have much more on it than that.
But now Melugin has found that actually, she was a human strip-mining operation, illegally accessing 1,600 police officer personnel records and handing them over to Gascon's office where it would illegally have names, addresses, health records, Social Security numbers, family members and others information it wasn't entitled to, the better to look for any little thing that they could use to put these officers on a blacklist known as the 'Brady list' where names of problem-cops are kept. Getting put on that list is considered a career killer. So, they were trying to kill 1,600 police careers based on their own standards, and their famous capacity to indict a ham sandwich.
According to the affidavit:
16 In February 2022, the DepartmentofJustice began investigating the Brady and Officer
17| and Recurrent Witness Information Tracking System (ORWITS) databases maintained by the Los
18| Angeles County District Attomey’s Office (LADA). The investigation commenced after an
19| LADA official who oversees the databases threatened to put a police officer in the LADA’s
20| Brady database after the officer had arrested him for disrupting a December 2021 traffic stop
21 | investigation of his fiancé. Our investigation of that official led to the conduct of DIANA |
22 | MARIA TERAN, who was an LADA Special Advisor with constructive responsibility for the |
23 | Brady and ORWITS databases at the LADA.
2% Our investigation revealed that, in 2018, DIANA MARIA TERAN, while working as a
25| Constitutional Policing Advisor at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD),
26 | accessed over 1,600 statutorily-protected peace office files as well as intemal emails and
27| documents conceming internal affairs investigations and confidential civil service proceedings.
28| Her employment ended at the LASD on November 30, 2018. After joining the LADA in January
1 | 2021, TERAN repeatedly used data from those LASD personnel files and internal emails and |
2 | documents in a surreptitious attempt to add peace officer names to LADA's Brady and ORWITS
3 | databases.
So if they could put every cop on the Brady list as a bad cop, failing to prosecute crimes would be a breeze, because every cop would be labeled a bad cop and the Soros vision of no penalties for violent crimes would be achieved. She had 1,600 of these cops in her gunsights out of a Los Angeles Sheriff's Department force of 9,000, trying to pre-emptively ruin those 1,600 police careers.
Melugin's information, found in the arrest affidavit here, notes that this got started when Gascon's then chief of staff, and now chief deputy, Joseph Iniguez, threatened to place an Azusa police officer on the Brady List 'for arresting him during a traffic stop in 2021.'
Iniguez was Teran's boss, according to the affidavit.
Tweet space probably prevented Melugin from getting into how disgusting that was.
But the California Globe had the particulars on that yesterday:
In December, 2021 Iniguez and his fiancé [boyfriend -ed] – the driver of the car – were heading through Azusa on their way home from a wedding. The fiancé reportedly made an illegal U-turn, prompting the Azusa officer to pull the car over.
The officer smelled a strong odor of alcohol in the car and asked the driver to step out – Iniguez tells the officer that he’s the one who had been drinking and that his fiancé was doing the right thing by driving.
Once both are out of the car, the officer starts to question the fiancé and Iniguez starts to tape the incident. Throughout the six minute tape released by Fox, Iniguez – standing a few yards away from the officer and his fiancé – acts like an entitled jerk, telling his fiancé what to do – which was to say nothing – and that field sobriety tests are not compulsory, and that the traffic stop was not proper in the first place.
“This is not right,” said Iniguez. “This is why when they talk about law enforcement and like our interactions with law enforcement – he did the right thing tonight, and drove me.”
Iniguez also played the “do you know who I am?!?” card, telling the officer “you pulled over the wrong person, let me tell you” and asking him to “run” his license plates. By doing so, it is quite possible the officer would have immediately found out Iniguez was a deputy district attorney.
...plus this...
The officer involved alleged that Iniguez went further in his intimidation tactics by threatening to put him on the “Brady List.” While the direct threat is not heard on the tape, the list, which almost every prosecuting agency maintains, is a compendium of cops the District Attorney’s office consider unreliable and/or problematic.
Placement on that list is – at the very least – a career killer, law enforcement insiders said, and Iniguez, as custodian of the list, would have the ability – however unethical and/or illegal – to do so.
According to sources close to the DA’s office, it is quite possible that Iniguez followed through on his threat.
Gascon’s office declined to comment on the matter.
Why Iniguez isn't in jail alongside Teran is pretty repulsive to think about. What's vivid here is that both these characters were members of Gascon's inner circle and persecuting the police is apparently the only thing they care about because they aren't prosecuting many actual crimes.
As Los Angeles goes to hell in a handbasket and cops retire early on that force, one can see just why law and order is in such bad shape in that city. Gascon's office had a police persecution unit going full blast until the matter was shut down by the California state attorney general's office with the bust of Teran. But whether she was just a sacrificial lamb for a bigger, uglier operation protecting Gascon is the remaining question.
The City of Los Angeles will no doubt have to pay millions for these illegal violations of privacy and persecution in what will undoubtedly be significant lawsuits from the cops. They've already had to shell out for another group of city officials who released the names and addresses of the Los Angeles Police Department's undercover officers to a cop-hating activist group that offered 'bounties' for cops.
Now they have this. Slowly, surely, it's all going to come out and George Gascon will be right in the middle of it. So much for 'ethics' and 'integrity.'
Image: Screen shot from NBCLA video, via YouTube