Complaint is filed against Kevin de León
GOP lawmaker seeks ethics probe of leader over alleged threats by board appointee.
SACRAMENTO — Republican state Sen. Andy Vidak on Friday filed an ethics complaint asking for an investigation into whether Democratic Senate leader Kevin de León engaged in an improper “cover-up” of threats allegedly made by former state Sen. Isadore Hall III against a group of farmers.
Anthony Reyes, a De León spokesman, defended the decision not to investigate the allegations.
“With due respect, the state Senate doesn’t waste taxpayer resources investigating dubious hearsay accounts of private conversations held in hotel lobbies — and that’s what Sen. De León clearly and politely communicated to Sen. Vidak,” Reyes said. “Any suggestion otherwise is patently ridiculous.”
Hall, a Democrat from Compton, was appointed in January to the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board by Gov. Jerry Brown. The appointment was opposed by farm industry groups, including the Western Growers Assn., which complained he received contributions from the United Farm Workers for his unsuccessful campaign for Congress last year.
Vidak, of Hanford, said multiple people told him that on Feb. 28, the evening before Hall’s confirmation hearing in the Rules Committee, Hall allegedly made threats in an “obscenitylaced tirade” in the lobby of the Sacramento Hyatt Hotel that he would “get” the farmers opposing his appointment, the senator wrote in a letter to the Senate Legislative Ethics Committee.
The board is a quasi-judicial agency that rules on disputes between farmworker organizations and growers.
The alleged threats were made to four farmers in the California Fresh Fruit Assn., Vidak said.
Vidak said he had formally asked De León, as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, to have the panel investigate the allegations and report the findings to the Senate.
He said De León informed him that there would be no investigation.
“Sen. De León told me yesterday that he and the leadership of the CFFA ‘have worked things out so Hall won’t be investigated,’ ” Vidak said in a statement Friday. “Is this really how the Senate handles reports of threats and intimidation by someone pending a Senate confirmation vote?”
The association called the allegation that it had worked out an agreement with De León “baseless and false.” The group said in a statement that Vidak did not talk to its members before he filed the complaint. “If he did, he would’ve learned there is no agreement and that CFFA remains opposed to the confirmation of Sen. Hall,” the group said.
Hall declined to comment on Vidak’s complaint, said J. Antonio Barbosa, the board’s executive secretary, responding on his behalf.
Reyes disputed Vidak’s allegations.
“Chasing goofy conspiracy theories might f ly on President Trump’s Twitter feed, but it has no place in the California Legislature,” Reyes said.
In his letter to the ethics panel, Vidak said his complaint is “that the Senate’s confirmation process of gubernatorial appointees may have been compromised in this situation.”
He asked for an investigation into whether “credible information about potential criminal activity by an unconfirmed gubernatorial appointee” has been “intentionally ignored/withheld,” and whether “a member of the Senate Rules Committee is making arrangements with representatives of private organizations to bury investigations of gubernatorial appointees.”