GOP attorney general candidate attacks CJP charges as politically motivated

SACRAMENTO — Attorney general candidate and retired El Dorado County Judge Steven C. Bailey had his chance to answer charges from the Commission on Judicial Performance on Tuesday.

The state’s judicial watchdog charged him in February with 11 ethics violations allegedly taking place while he was in office between 2009 and 2017. These include campaigning for attorney general while he was still a judge and ordering criminal defendants to use an electronic monitoring service for which his son worked.

He is also charged with making insensitive comments and taking improper gifts.

In June, Bailey won 25 percent of the primary vote and earned a spot in the top-two fall election against Democratic incumbent Xavier Becerra, who got 46 percent. Contacted before the hearing, Bailey’s campaign declined to comment.

Attorneys for the CJP tried to paint a picture of a judge who casually engaged in a host of unethical behaviors for his entire judicial tenure. Bailey’s legal team countered by arguing the entire case was a politically motivated witch hunt.

“Your honor, this case is not complicated,” CJP trial counsel Mark A. Lizarraga told Kenneth R. Yegan, a justice with Division Six of the 2nd District Court of Appeal, who is presiding over the trial. “This case is not complicated because Judge Bailey has already admitted to almost all of the material facts.”

Lizarraga focused on how many of the charges Bailey confirmed, saying that in his reply Bailey admitted to at least some of the actions related to seven of the 11 counts. Lizarraga told the court that he would answer Bailey’s claims of “an amorphous, vast left-wing conspiracy” with “a mountain of adverse evidence.” “The evidence will show this is an overly zealous, politically-motivated prosecution,” countered Bailey’s lead attorney, James A. Murphy.

The San Francisco-based founding shareholder of Murphy Pearson Bradley & Feeney then laid out many of the same objections to the allegations that his team included in a 20-page response to the charges filed in May. That document began by claiming the inquiry was conducted by a commission “largely comprised of Democrats appointed by Governor Jerry Brown” and “timed” to disrupt Bailey’s candidacy.

Much of the bulk of the CJP’s allegations against Bailey concern two matters: his referral of criminal defendants to use services from a tracking company where his son worked, and Bailey’s alleged campaigning for office before formally resigning from the superior court on Aug. 31, 2017.

Murphy said Bailey referred five defendants in five years to the only available provider in El Dorado County, and only after getting a legal opinion from the California Judges Association that he did not need to disclose the connection.

The reply says that, although Bailey’s Candidate Intention Statement indicates it was filed on April 27, 2017, about four months before leaving the bench, this was an inadvertent error that was corrected and replaced by a later official filing.

Murphy argued that if Bailey did commit a campaign violation, it would be a matter for the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission.

The court heard from two witnesses in the initial two hours of the hearing, El Dorado County Superior Court Judge Vicki Ashworth and Suzanne Thurman, an administrative analyst with the court. Both women testified they were offended by comments Bailey made in 2015 about a gay store clerk in Paris who picked out his outfit. They alleged Bailey said, “Gays really know how to dress.”

Murphy and partner Janet L. Eversen cross-examined both women, asking if they spent work time and computing resources to look up information on Bailey and his campaign at the behest of longtime El Dorado County Presiding Judge Suzanne Kingsbury, whom they say has animus toward Bailey.

The CJP is not expected to announce any results of the investigation until after the Nov. 6 election. Bailey is considered a longshot, given that Becerra and fellow Democrat Dave Jones, the state insurance commissioner, split 61 percent of the primary vote in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican statewide since 2006.