SAN JOSE – Longtime Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith, whose conduct is the subject of a forthcoming corruption trial, knows what the rules are. And evidence gathered for that trial suggests she knows how to use them to her advantage.
In 5,600 pages of newly-released grand jury testimony, Smith emerges for the first time as a central actor in her office’s efforts to dodge gift-reporting requirements, direct concealed-carry weapons permits to powerful donors, and undermine the work of a civilian auditor reviewing an explosive jail-injury case.
Each of those scandals has become public over the past two years, leading to indictments of some of her closest aides, but Smith’s involvement remained obscure.
Now, the testimony of 65 witnesses called before the civil grand jury has her facing the end of a long career. The state attorney general has also begun a probe of Smith’s office.
One former top aide, for instance, recalled Smith directing her to buy three lower-cost tickets to a Sharks hockey game, to hide the fact she would be sitting gratis in a donor’s luxury suite.
“So that was to avoid disclosure of a gift?” the prosecutor asked.
“Correct,” the former aide said.
Other testimony made clear Smith’s key role in her office’s granting of an outsized number of gun permits to people with celebrity, power and connections, and showed that she personally and purposefully delayed the progress of an investigation into the jail-injury case of Andrew Hogan that led to a record $10 million settlement from the county.
Concealed guns and concealed truth
Civil grand jurors concluded in December that Smith committed “willful and corrupt misconduct in office” by her actions regarding the concealed-carry weapons, or CCW, licenses.
Their findings – officially referred to as “accusations” that now lead to a full trial – are based largely on a retracing of two previous criminal grand jury proceedings linked to the CCW permit scandal that resulted in bribery indictments for then-Undersheriff Rick Sung and Capt. James Jensen, Smith’s second-in-command and a close adviser, respectively. But the civil proceedings were more sharply focused on Smith.
Jon Golinger, an investigator for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office – which oversaw the civil grand jury because of conflicts cited by Santa Clara County’s counsel and district attorney offices – testified that an analysis of records showed that between late 2015 and early 2019, just 36 of 248 new CCW applicants were granted licenses, a 14.5% approval rate. But of the ten donors who applied, nine were approved — a 90% success rate.
Lara McCabe, a program manager in the sheriff’s office, testified that Smith said she opposed issuing CCW permits widely because “she doesn’t like to have a lot of guns out there on the streets.” Smith’s attorney and longtime political adviser Rich Robinson testified that Smith “would not issue CCW permits unless there was a demonstrated need.”
But her actions belied those claims, witnesses indicated.
Several permit applicants who were not donors described to the grand jury how they applied for CCW licenses because of documented stalking, death threats or physical abuse. Three did not even get a response, though state law requires a notice of approval or denial within 90 days. The fourth received a form letter citing a backlog in applications.
Meanwhile, a known campaign donor testified that he was passively guided by the sheriff’s office into providing his daughter’s address for his permit renewal because he had moved out of the county. Another longtime Smith donor, NVIDIA founder Chris Malachowsky, testified that he had no safety reason for applying, and left the “cause” field in the application blank, but was issued a permit anyway.
In contrast, and as was suggested in testimony before the earlier criminal grand jury, any permit application that didn’t have a green light from some combination of Smith, Sung or Jensen was left in a filing cabinet.
But former public information officer Rich Glennon offered new insight into Smith’s alleged role in that practice when he testified that Smith told him the “law was on her side in that if applications were always pending, she never had to render a decision on the application,” so if a criminal background check and fingerprint check were “never completed then she’s within the code.”
“So that was her explanation to you, personally, of why she could just keep applications pending indefinitely?” the prosecutor asked.
“That’s correct,” Glennon said.
Despite this evidence, the civil grand jury rejected bribery accusations against Smith, suggesting it couldn’t draw a direct line between her and what prosecutors in the criminal case have alleged was a pay-to-play brokering scheme partially orchestrated by Sung and Jensen.
How Smith might explain all this remains unknown. She was not called before the civil grand jury, and In one of the criminal grand jury proceedings, she invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify. Publicly, she has characterized efforts by the Board of Supervisors to investigate her office as politically driven attacks.
The Sharks suite situation
Three additional corruption accusations from the civil grand jury involve Smith’s use of a CCW permit recipient’s luxury suite at the SAP Center for a San Jose Sharks game. Knowing she’d be using the suite, Smith allegedly asked McCabe to purchase three general admission tickets for her, Sung and Jensen, to skirt reporting requirements for elected officials who receive gifts worth more than $500.
McCabe said that Smith told her explicitly that she was looking to avoid putting the suite tickets on a public gift-reporting document.
The suite – where Smith on Feb. 14, 2019, held a gathering of close friends and supporters to celebrate her 2018 re-election – is also the subject of a bribery indictment against the suite’s owner, Harpreet Chadha, alleging that Sung extracted the donation from him by holding up his gun permit renewal. Chadha has said that he routinely gives out the suite.
The civil grand jury rejected allegations that Chadha committed bribery.
Resisting an investigation
The final misconduct finding by the civil grand jury accuses Smith of “failing to cooperate” with the Office of Correction and Law Enforcement Monitoring – a civilian auditor – in its probe of the case of Andrew Hogan. No previous grand jury has examined this allegation, although the Board of Supervisors has excoriated her actions.
The county paid a $10 million settlement to Hogan and his family after the mentally ill man repeatedly injured himself in 2018 while riding unrestrained in a jail transport van, and jail staff and commanders stood by as he lapsed into unconsciousness. Hogan is now severely disabled. The settlement was the county’s largest-ever payout to resolve a jail-injury case.
Last fall, the Board of Supervisors tasked the auditor, Michael Gennaco, with investigating why an internal sheriff’s office probe abruptly ended with no conclusion or discipline being issued. But Smith’s office allegedly refused to hand over documents about the case to Gennaco.
In testimony to the civil grand jury, McCabe and Juan Gallardo, a former administrative services director who was the most senior civilian employee in the sheriff’s office, said Smith directed her staff to delay key meetings with the agency’s two main labor unions to stymie an information-sharing agreement with Gennaco.
“I believe she – something to the effect of, if – if the meeting doesn’t happen then we can’t proceed with the Information Sharing Agreement or at least slow down the process,” Gallardo said.
Other witnesses’ anecdotes and statements show additional instances in which Smith seemed to knowingly flout the rules.
Gallardo testified that during her 2018 re-election campaign, Smith was in contact with an independent expenditure committee run by two of her ardent supporters – even though under federal law, Smith and her campaign were barred from “cooperation, consultation, or concert with” the committee.
“I recall her saying that she wasn’t supposed to know” the inner workings of the independent committee, Gallardo testified, “but she knew what they were doing.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com