For at least three years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department secretly investigated a Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote about leaking a list of problematic deputies, and eventually asked the state attorney general to bring charges, according to internal records.
The investigation began in 2017, when investigators under then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell tried to determine who secretly gave reporter Maya Lau a list of about 300 names. The case quickly died down, but police reopened it after Alex Villanueva took office in 2018, according to a 300-page investigative file recently reviewed by The New York Times.
Police eventually identified Lau as a criminal suspect, alleging that she knowingly received “stolen property,” and named the department’s constitutional police adviser, Diana Teran, as the source of the leak, although Teran initially denied reporting the information or passing it on.
The sheriff’s office sent the case to Attorney General Rob Bonta in 2021, and in May of this year, his office formally dismissed the charges. The office did not answer specific questions, saying only that there was “insufficient evidence” to merit criminal charges.
“I’m glad the investigation is over. I’m outraged that the Sheriff’s Office would criminally investigate me for carrying out my duties as a reporter,” Lau, who retired from the paper in 2021, told The New York Times. “This is an attempt to intimidate journalists and keep them from investigating government agencies.”
The Sheriff’s Office confirmed that its investigation into Lau had ended and said it was no longer monitoring the journalist.
“Under the leadership of the sheriff [Robert] “Ms. Luna, we do not surveil journalists and respect press freedom,” the State Department said in an emailed statement this week.
In an email Thursday, Villanueva did not answer specific questions about the investigation into Lau, instead accusing another reporter of a crime and saying county attorneys “tried to obstruct the case at every step.”
Journalists are not typically held responsible for reporting leaked documents that concern matters of public interest, even if they know the materials were obtained illegally.
“You don’t have the authority to go into file cabinets and get records. You don’t have the authority to hack into computers. But it’s not a crime to receive information that someone obtained illegally,” said attorney David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, which advocates for free speech and government transparency. “Publicizing that information is protected by the First Amendment.”
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The leaked records at the center of the investigation date back to 2014, when Teran, who worked for the Independent Review Office, a private oversight group hired by the county, began collecting names for the so-called Brady List of officers with problematic disciplinary histories. The name comes from Brady v. Maryland, a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision that required prosecutors to turn over all evidence favorable to a defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.
Teran relied on information from the district attorney’s office and sheriff’s department databases to compile her list, she told investigators in 2017 and 2018 as part of the administrative investigation. She stopped adding new names in late 2014, when she believed the sheriff’s department had begun creating its own official Brady list.
Then, in 2015, she began working for the Sheriff’s Department as a constitutional police adviser, a position McDonnell created as an internal watchdog.
Two years later, she heard, Lau and other Times reporters began asking certain sheriff’s deputies how they felt about being on the Brady list, according to LASD investigative files.To find out what kind of list the reporters had and where they got it, Teran followed up on a recent public records request made to the Times.
She learned that reporters had requested information on about 300 sheriffs from the DA’s office – the same sheriffs who had been on her list in 2014. After researching the names, she realized the reporters’ list had the same mistakes as hers, down to a typo in an employee ID number. At that point, Teran “became concerned that ‘her Brady list’ had been leaked to the media” and began trying to find out who had done so, the report states.
According to the report, she began investigating one official in particular by asking the department’s Office of Data Systems what copy machines the official had access to and whether there was a way to examine their hard drives. But the drives “were destroyed, and Teran was not afforded the remedy he sought to prove his innocence,” according to the case file.
Three days later, on December 8, 2017, The Times published an article detailing some of the misconduct and criminal histories of the officers on the list: One officer, according to the Times, had falsified evidence; another had pulled over a strange woman and performed oral sex on her in his patrol car; a third had pepper-sprayed an elderly man in the face and written a false report to justify his arrest.
Internal affairs investigators interviewed Mr. Teran a week after the story was published. According to investigation records, Mr. Teran gave investigators the names of several senior officials who supposedly had copies of the list, including the interim sheriff and several chiefs and commanders. They all denied having kept copies or leaking them to Mr. Lau, according to the report.
At one point before McDonnell retired in 2018, investigators dismissed the investigation as “open and inactive” rather than turning it into a formal criminal investigation.
A few months after Villanueva took office, Detective Mark Lilienfeld was assigned to investigate a related case involving allegations that Teran and other supervisors illegally accessed personnel records of deputies that contained information that had been voluntarily turned over by police several months earlier. The investigation by Lilienfeld, the lead investigator in Villanueva’s controversial public corruption unit, reopened the dormant Brady List investigation.
Mr. Lilienfeld’s eventual 80-page report, part of a 300-page investigative case file reviewed by The Times, is sometimes difficult to understand. It accuses Mr. Villanueva’s opponents of everything from infidelity to ethics violations to new crimes, and its prose is peppered with biting asides and innuendos.
In a long and often confusing saga, the report describes two instances when Teran may have leaked the list. The first was in May 2017, when Lau sat down with Teran and Mark Smith, another constitutional policing adviser to the police, and asked them a series of questions about the Brady policy and the handling of Brady materials.
According to the report, Teran denied having a paper or digital copy of the list on him that day. The report called his denial of leaking records a “lie” and said it was “deceptive” for Teran to say he didn’t have the list, given that he would have had a computer in the office where the interview took place, which would have contained a copy of the list, according to the report.
But according to a transcript of her September 2018 interview with investigators, Teran was never asked if she had a digital copy, only if she had a copy in her purse, briefcase or “something like that.”
Investigative files suggest that after Teran claims to have leaked the Brady List in May 2017, she may have also leaked it more than a year later.
Shortly after McDonnell lost reelection in November 2018, Lau emailed the sheriff’s department requesting a phone interview with Teran, according to the report.
“We’re writing today about how Villanueva will impact reform,” Lau wrote. “Now that he has said he will abolish (the Constitutional Police Advisor), it would be great to hear from Diana what the CPA has actually accomplished.”
The two spoke by phone a few hours later, and Lau quoted Teran in an article published the following morning, November 28, 2018.
Later that week, Mr. Lau filed a new records request — a routine practice for reporters — seeking information on 322 police department employees, including the new sheriff. The request was sent just weeks before a new law expanding public access to police disciplinary records went into effect, but Mr. Lilienfeld’s reporting focused on the closeness of Mr. Lau’s meeting with Mr. Teran.
“It is neither explainable nor logical that Mr. Lau could have obtained a list of over 300 LASD officers from a source other than Mr. Teran just three days after meeting with him,” Lilienfeld wrote.
When the Internal Affairs and Communications Department interviewed Teran in 2018, she said she was not the source of the leaks.
“I want to state categorically that I never gave Maya Lau a copy of this list or any of the other lists that we’ve mentioned, at that meeting, any other meeting or any meeting thereafter. I never spoke to her on the phone, read the list to her, or instructed anyone else to give or provide that information to her,” she told investigators under oath. “I want to state categorically that it wasn’t just on that day, it was on any day. I’m 100 percent certain of that.”
In the fall of 2021, more than two years after Lilienfeld began his investigation, Deputy Attorney General Tim Murakami sent Bonta a 300-page case file covering the investigation into both the Brady list leak and the access to personnel records. The file listed Lau as a suspect, as well as Teran, Teran’s assistant, Inspector General Max Huntsman and lawyers from Huntsman’s office.
Bonta’s office ultimately declined to prosecute the case and notified the Sheriff’s Department of its decision in May but did not notify the five suspects, including Lau. Around the same time, however, Bonta announced 11 felony charges against Teran in a similar case that the office said stemmed from an unrelated investigation.
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The long-running attempt to prosecute Lau isn’t the only time the Sheriff’s Department has targeted reporters in recent years. In 2020, LAist reporter Josie Huang was tackled to the ground and arrested by a sheriff’s deputy while covering a protest. She was wearing her press pass on a lanyard around her neck. Villanueva defended the deputies’ handling of the case and referred it to the district attorney’s office so Huang could be prosecuted. The prosecutor refused to take the case, and Huang sued and settled with the county for $700,000 last year.
Two years after Huang’s arrest, Villanueva targeted another New York Times reporter who had exposed an internal cover-up for a criminal leak investigation. After announcing the investigation at a press conference, he faced fierce criticism and then backtracked, denying that he had named the reporter as a suspect.
Both of these cases were widely covered in the media, and this week independent journalist Cerise Castle reported that sheriff’s office personnel had been monitoring her since 2021, according to sheriff’s office records.
However, until now the police investigation into Lau has flown under the radar.
Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, expressed concern about how far the investigation into Lau has progressed. Case records don’t mention any attempts to surveil Lau or monitor her phone, and Lilienfeld didn’t respond to a request for comment. It’s also unclear what state prosecutors have done since agreeing to take over the case.
“It’s a chilling effect for us as reporters to think that our work could be the subject of a criminal investigation,” Snyder said. “That’s bad for journalism, that’s bad for democracy, and that’s why these investigations shouldn’t and aren’t happening under the law.”