LOS ANGELES (CN) — LA City Councilman John Lee's lawsuit against the city's Ethics Commission, which has accused Lee of various ethical violations, met a roadblock on Friday when a Superior Court judge agreed to throw out the lawsuit — though Lee will have an opportunity to refile his complaint.
Lee is only non-Democrat serving on the city's 15-member legislative body. Now an independent, he was formerly Republican. He faces 10 allegations of wrongdoing, all from his time as chief of staff to his predecessor, Mitchell Englander, who pleaded guilty to one federal felony count in 2020.
Those charges stemmed from a 2017 trip Englander took to Las Vegas, in which he was allegedly given an envelope stuffed with $15,000 cash — along with a free hotel room, meals, bottle service and the services of a female escort.
Englander would ultimately plead guilty to falsifying material facts, admitting to having lied to investigators but not to the actual corruption charges. He was sentenced to 14 months in prison and fined $15,000.
Englander's indictment made numerous references to "City Staffer B," who accompanied him on the ill-fated trip to Vegas and allegedly shared in some of the perks offered to the elected official. Lee was long rumored to be City Staffer B. The Ethics Commission's 9-page accusation against him, field in September, confirmed those rumors.
According to the accusation, the same anonymous businessperson who allegedly plied Englander with gifts had also given Lee some freebies — including a two-night stay in a $300-a-night hotel room and $1,000 in casino chips, which Lee used to play baccarat. (He lost the whole $1,000.)
Lee was also treated to a free dinner worth $431.50 and bottle service from a nightclub, estimated to be worth $4,000.
Lee is accused by the Ethics Commission of two counts of accepting excess gifts, three counts of failing to disclose gifts, four counts of misusing his position as Englander's Chief of Staff and one count of abetting Englander's misuse of his position.
If found guilty by the commission, Lee faces a fine of up to $5,000 per violation or three times the amount of money that was improperly received, whichever is more.
Weeks after the accusation was filed, Lee sued the Ethics Commission, asking a judge to block the commission's enforcement proceedings.
In his complaint, Lee said the commission had exceeded the four-year statute of limitations. The Ethics Commission countered that Lee's concealment of the gifts meant that the four-year window was tolled (delayed) for the amount of time Lee spent engaging in "concealment or deceit."
But Lee, in his complaint, said the commission had failed to establish the "fraudulent concealment" necessary to trigger a delay in the four-year window. He also said the commission had "provided no evidence to show that Councilman Lee knew" about the free bottle service.
On Friday, Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff agreed to a motion by the City Ethics Commission to dismiss the lawsuit, finding that Lee had not yet exhausted all his administrative options — that is, he hadn't waited for the commission's proceedings to play out.
"You’re in the middle of an administrative proceeding, and you’re trying to short circuit that administrative proceeding," Beckloff told Lee's attorney, Faisal Gill, who recently ran an unsuccessful campaign for city attorney as a progressive.
Gill argued that Lee should be exempt from going through the administrative process, because doing so would be futile since the Ethics Commission has already deemed the four-year window to have been open when it filed its probable cause report.
Judge Beckloff did give Lee three weeks to refile his lawsuit, in order to clarify his arguments about futility and exhausting the administrative process. Lee's spokesman said the councilman will refile the complaint.
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