OPINION |
By Royal Calkins
People ask me why I keep writing about Christian Schneider. In case you have forgotten, he’s the tremendously persistent campaign consultant whose life was disrupted in 2018 when he was falsely accused of various crimes by three Monterey County sheriff’s commanders acting on behalf of then-Sheriff Steve Bernal while he was running for re-election.
RELATED STORY: READ SCHNEIDER’S FAIR POLITICAL PRACTICES COMPLAINT HERE
I’ve explained it before but I will endeavor to be more clear this time because Schneider hasn’t given up his uphill fight to clear his name and get his career back. It boils down to this: Powerful county officials wanted Bernal to be re-elected in 2018 and were willing to do whatever to ensure his opponent, deputy Scott Davis — Schneider’s client — did not unseat him. So Bernal backers in the Sheriff’s Office and elsewhere used county resources to smear Davis, his close ally Sgt. Dan Mitchell and Schneider, his chief campaign consultant.
As election day was nearing, three sheriff’s commanders loyal to Bernal started very publicly accusing Davis and associates of felonies, even of embezzling from the sheriff’s union that he and Mitchell headed. Davis, Schneider and Mitchell justifiably sued for slander.
But rather than simply sit back and observe, as they should have, county officials overseeing the Sheriff’s Office provided county money to help the Bernal team defend themselves in court. The county actually hired the lawyers to represent commanders Joe Moses, Matt Caldwell and Archie Warren based on a fiction that the commanders were acting in their official capacities when they clearly were not. The county also agreed to pay their legal bills. Before receiving any formal authorization from the elected Board of Supervisors, county officials decided to help one group of county employees battle another set in court. They gave some gobbledy-gook explanations. It was pure politics.
The tactics helped Bernal win a second term, by the way. It didn’t go well, but that’s another story.
When a team of state Department of Justice investigators quickly concluded that the allegations against Schneider, Davis and Mitchell were poppycock, county officials should have backed far away from helping Bernal’s team of dirty tricksters. At significant expense to the taxpayers of Monterey County, they did not.
Supposedly the sheriff’s commanders, each of whom had been promoted by Bernal, were acting in their official capacities when they went before TV cameras to falsely accuse Schneider, Davis and Mitchell of felonies. And when they spread the same lies via anonymous emails. Moses played the lead role, solemnly telling reporters how he and his colleagues had investigated and found proof of criminality. In actuality, he had no business investigating anything outside the jail. And even if that had been OK, he would have been required to take his findings to the District Attorney’s Office, not KSBW. It was pure political theater.
The most relevant county officials at the time, County Administrative Officer Charles McKee and County Counsel Les Girard, told the Board of Supervisors early on that the county was obligated to pay the legal fees for the Moses team. They said they would stop using county money for the slander defense if a court found that the commanders were not on duty when they went on the attack.
A few years and many dollars later, a panel of appellate court justices ruled decisively that the commanders were in the wrong and hadn’t been acting as legitimate investigators.. But did the county stop paying the legal bills? Sort of. The county payments continued for several weeks. And though the higher-ups had said they would go after the money already spent, they did not.
How much did it cost taxpayers? At least $130,000 but likely more. It’s hard to tell because some of the numbers on the invoices are blacked out. And for reasons they never made clear, the county’s primary outside counsel, Fenton & Keller, provided the county and later the Moses group with significant discounts. The Moses discounts probably should have been reported as contributions to Moses’ sheriff’s campaign of 2022. They weren’t.
That’s one of Schneider’s gripes, one of many complaints he has filed with the state Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC), the county counsel, the supervisors, and others. Though it might not help his chances of finding justice, he accuses much of the political system in Monterey County as corrupt and he points fingers at the media, the Republican Party and even the first family of Monterey County, the Panettas. A sidebar to this article is his latest complaint to the FPPC and this link will take you to his latest, and voluminous, formal complaint to the county.
If you read the complaint, you will find that Schneider also takes serious issue with some of my early reporting on the allegations leveled against him by the commanders. Like the rest of the local press corps, I took some of their assertions at face value, not suspecting that people identifying themselves as sheriff’s commanders would broadcast fiction as the result of serious investigation. I was wrong, but eventually, by following the case and weathering numerous debates with Schneider, I could see that his anger was justified.
Lawsuit sputters
The appellate ruling seemed to be a giant boost to the Davis-Mitchell-Schneider team but it really wasn’t. To press the litigation further they needed money they didn’t have. Schneider’s business had crumbled because of the false allegations. Mitchell had suffered a stroke and Davis couldn’t cover the legal costs by himself. The lawsuit sputtered to an end with Davis and Mitchell eventually getting settlements of around $30,000. Schneider, remarkably, ended up owing the county around $60,000 over an early procedural issue.
That is the condensed, simplified version, but it does paint a fair picture of what the powers that be did to Schneider et al. It doesn’t really spell out how they pulled it off, however. That is harder to explain, largely because it came about through winks and nods instead of county paperwork. Ask them how they did it and you’ll hear them say they need to see a guy about another guy.
Now I’ll tell you how they did it. And, shortly, I’m going to tell you why I think the county owes Schneider an apology and some reparation.
The strongest personality on the Board of Supervisors in 2018 was John Phillips. Retired Republican judge who used to have his own chair at the Sardine Factory. Highly regarded for operating an important charity that helps keep kids off the street. Powerful friends. Intimidating presence especially among new supervisors. Had a lot to say about who gets to run as a Republican in Monterey County even for non-partisan positions.
When Phillips told county staffers he wanted something done, it usually got done.
The day that Schneider el al filed the lawsuit, either the County Counsel’s Office or the County Administrative Office, likely in consultation with Phillips, hired Fenton & Keller to represent the commanders. The contract set a $10,000 limit subject to unlimited renewals.
Most communities have that one law firm that represents the chamber of commerce, the hospital, the largest employers, the biggest players, county government. In Monterey County, that’s 70-year-old Fenton & Keller, headed by Chris Panetta, son of the former congressman and brother of the current congressman. They do good work.
When Bernal later came under investigation for illegally spending county money for a convention of California sheriffs, the county hired Fenton & Keller founder Charles Keller to counsel him while he was being questioned by the District Attorney’s Office. The prosecutors concluded that the sheriff had broken the law but didn’t charge him because he didn’t seem to understand the pertinent law.
For much of the time Schneider has been around, the County Counsel’s Office was run — or essentially run — by Charles McKee, who was county counsel for 16 years before becoming county administrator. And for some of that time, McKee took his lead from Phillips.
McKee, now retired, was a cagy and highly political manager. He knew that as long as three of the five supervisors were on his side, he was golden. And if Phillips was happy, at least two others would be happy as well.
Then and now, the supervisors have been able and conscientious public servants for the most part. Yet they are largely amateurs at governing and must therefore depend on county employees for much of the information they need to set policy and make the big decisions. And though McKee retired in 2022, his style of governance lingered. Many of the big decisions are reached in executive sessions, with county officials in the room. Their votes must be made public but their discussions aren’t supposed to seep under the closed doors.
Then-County Counsel Les Girard worked directly under McKee before becoming the county’s chief lawyer, and he learned from him. He probably wasn’t as cagy as McKee but he had a staff of some 20 lawyers to help with the task at hand, which usually amounts to protecting the county’s interests, not necessarily the public’s.
Days after the county hired Fenton & Keller, Girard and McKee took it to the Board of Supervisors for approval. The meeting was behind closed doors but some details did seep out.
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How the vote went down
Phillips and Supervisor Chris Lopez were on board right away. They had both endorsed Bernal, which means, Schneider contends, that their vote on the legal bills benefiting his campaign amounted to a conflict of interest. Supervisor Luis Alejo often went along with them but not this time. He thought it was simply a bad idea to favor one group of sworn officers over another.
That left the decision to supervisors Jane Parker and Mary Adams.
Parker later told her staff that the presentation from McKee and Girard was confusing, especially the part about how the commanders would repay the county if a judge ruled that they had not been performing their official functions when they accused subordinates of being felons. She said she was assured that the county might actually ask for the money back. With misgivings, she went along with the plan.
At that point, it was 3-1, so Adams’ vote wasn’t really needed. She went with the majority, it turned out, out of kind-heartedness. One of her staffers was related to Commander Warren and she told Adams that Warren’s wife was terminally ill, so paying the lawyers would have put a terrible strain on the family.
Fenton & Keller won’t say why, but for some reason it gave the Moses group a deep discount, according to court papers. Schneider is probably right that the discount should have been reported as a contribution to the Bernal campaign. He has tried bringing that to the attention of the supervisors and the state Fair Political Practices Commission, with little effect.
The early days of the litigation didn’t go well for Schneider et al. They lost some important motions but were still standing, barely, when Schneider scraped together just enough money to take the matter to the 6th District Court of Appeal in Southern California.
After a hearing in 2022, the justices clearly agreed with the Schneider team that Moses and his allies had distorted the evidence when they accused the opposition of criminality. Some of the accounting methodology in the deputies’ union headed by Davis and Mitchell was fair game, the justices wrote, but the commanders had distorted the truth during their attacks.
“When they started using phrases like ‘under the table,’ ‘political paybacks,’embezzlement’ and money laundering, they crossed into different territory,” the justices agreed.
The ruling came out after Bernal had announced that he wouldn’t seek a third term. He threw his support to Moses as his replacement. Undercut by that ruling and other missteps, Moses finished a distant second to Monterey County’s current sheriff, Tina Nieto. He continued working for a time in the jail but has since retired.
Unfortunately for the Schneider team and the county budget, the justices didn’t come right out and say the commanders were acting as political operatives rather than law enforcement officials — but county officials got the message. Sort of. They announced that they would no longer finance the commanders’ defense but didn’t attempt to retrieve the money already spent. In one of many later complaints filed with the county, Schneider notes that the county briefly continued paying the legal bills for a time.
The appellate ruling was a big win for the plaintiffs but they couldn’t ride it to victory. They didn’t have a pot of county money to pay for the end game – depositions, motions, a trial.
Davis had moved on to a seat on the Salinas City Council. Mitchell had moved his family out of state to recover from the stroke and start a new career. Schneider found it hard to pick up new campaign clients, so he stayed in the area to try to use his persistence and his knowledge of campaign finance and governance to convince county officials that he had been wronged.
Despite health issues, Schneider has given it his all. He has pored through county documents and researched spending practices for evidence of illegality and bias. He found a considerable amount of troubling information, including invoices for outside legal counsel that don’t seem to have been authorized by the elected Board of Supervisors. He initiated a case that resulted in an Assembly candidate being forced out of a race because he was lying about his legal residence. He says he was disappointed to learn that county officials and the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office don’t take official or unofficial shenanigans seriously.
Over and over, he has tried to call things to the attention of the supervisors. But a pattern was set early on. Schneider would send missives to the supervisors, or take to the microphone to address them during public comment sessions. But because it was a “legal matter,” county officials told the supervisors they could not respond to Schneider even though the county itself was never a party to the litigation. The supervisors were told they could only discuss his assertions among themselves or with the county counsel. But because of the county money involved, the county counsel was essentially part of the Moses defense team. Susan Blitch, who had been Girard’s chief deputy, now holds the top job. That hasn’t changed the county’s relations with Schneider. Often when Schneider stepped up to the podium to address the supervisors, the microphone might as well have been turned off.
To be fair to the supervisors and the county lawyers, Schneider is not always easy to deal with, but considering what he has been through he perhaps should be forgiven.
The bottom line is that the county bureaucracy as a whole was part of the Moses defense team and it, therefore, considered Schneider the enemy. He filed several Internal Affairs complaints with the Sheriff’s Office involving matters unrelated to the litigation, matters the department was required to investigate but didn’t. After one complaint, the department arranged a meeting that amounted to a deputy county counsel asking Schneider about his litigation plans.
He filed numerous public records requests with the Sheriff’s Office, County Counsel’s Office and others. Some succeeded, but in several cases the only response was an estimate of steep fees he would have to pay for the information. That seldom happens to the general public or the media.
A call to hear him out
As you may realize from this laborious account, I have followed this affair closely from the start. And I think that the current Board of Supervisors, a particularly strong board, would be well served to hear him out.
The best way to accomplish that, in my opinion, would be to assign someone on the county staff who wasn’t involved with any of this to sit down with Schneider and go over his story and his evidence. It would take a long while and some patience. Or perhaps the county should hire a lawyer, a special counsel of sorts, to gather Schneider’s long set of accusations and make sense of them. He’s a very bright fellow and an able researcher. That doesn’t come across when he’s at the microphone in front of the supervisors for a minute or two.
If they were to do something like this and take it seriously, I believe they would learn a lot about how Monterey County governance worked in the recent past and how some of the old ways could still be weakening the processes. Schneider isn’t going away. It wouldn’t hurt a thing if they heard him out.
The county supervisors are a smart and well-informed bunch. They probably don’t think they need any help sorting things out. But earlier versions of the board were also dominated by smart and well-informed people who, it appears, weren’t always on the side of truth and justice.
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