District attorney backs off whistleblower complaint
Rosen originally said that a lawyer’s fiery blog post constituted a threat
SAN JOSl >> Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has withdrawn a whistleblower complaint against deputy public defender Sajid Khan over his fiery blog posts demanding sweeping criminal justice reform, which touched off a nationally watched dispute in which Rosen saw Khan’s words as a threat and others saw it as a textbook exercise of free speech.
Word of the whistleblower complaint drew scrutiny — most prominently in a Washington Post commentary piece Friday — due largely to the optics of a top law enforcement officer turning to a remedy broadly understood as protecting line-level employees like Khan from retaliation from high-ranking officials like Rosen.
“He was using something designed for the little person to call out government misconduct, and weaponized it to throw his weight around. I don’t think that’s appropriate, reasonable or justified,” Khan said. “I’m grateful he saw the light and listened to the many voices that contacted him and let him know what he was planning to do was unwise, was unreasonable and an abuse of his authority.”
In a statement Tuesday, Rosen said he withdrew the whistleblower action to maintain focus on criminal justice reform efforts.
“I am withdrawing the county complaint that addressed workplace safety and security issues caused by a county employee’s social media posts. The complaint has become a distraction from a vastly more important aim: that we confront racism,” Rosen said. “A recent letter to me from Maha Elgenaidi of the Islamic Networks Group put it eloquently: ‘Our joint interests should be to improve our criminal justice system and to continue to have a safe and peaceful regional community.’ I, too, hope that we as a diverse community can unite behind our common fight against inequality.”
In filing the complaint, dated June 15, Rosen and his office were responding to blog posts by Khan — a deputy alternate public defender for the county and a vocal criminal-justice reform advocate — written amid the national outcry and protests over the
police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In the blog and social media posts, dated May 30 and June 3, Khan aimed to expand the spotlight on police brutality to prosecutors, who he characterized as being key gatekeepers in the same justice system that harshly and disproportionately punishes Black people and people of color.
In the complaint, provided to this news organization Tuesday, Rosen cites language from Khan’s June 3 post stating, “to best honor George Floyd, we should fire our very righteous outrage, fury and ire at District Attorney’s offices too,” and from the May 30 post in which Khan wrote, “No more trying to repair the irreparable. We need to tear and shut this shit down and start over.”
Rosen argued in the filing that Khan’s language, combined with a posted image of a map of various county law-enforcement institutions in North San Jose including Rosen’s office — and the backdrop of huge protests downtown — prompted officials to temporarily clear out several offices in the county administration building on West Hedding Street as a security precaution, especially for public-facing staff on the ground floor.
“Differences of opinion, passion and peaceful protest are needed now, but threats of violence and destruction are simply wrong,” Rosen wrote.
No protest at the D.A.’s office materialized that day. The map that Khan posted on his June 3 blog post was one distributed a few days earlier during a car-caravan protest against pretrial jailing amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Khan said he was surprised by the response. He said he expected to be met with opposing viewpoints, writings or editorials, not a whistleblower complaint.
“To take it to the extreme of claiming I was inciting violence and filing a complaint,” he said, “is contrary to what we expect of government officials in promoting free speech.”
Since the publication of the Post article, a chorus of national support has emerged to back Khan, including the local chapters of the NAACP and Council on American-Islamic Relations, the California Public Defender’s Association, and the national civilrights organization Muslim Advocates. Silicon Valley De-Bug started a petition calling for a public apology that has amassed over 1,000 signatures.
“In singling out Mr. Khan and conflating criticism of DAs with incitement to violence against public officials and buildings, you unfortunately replicate the rhetoric that paints protestors calling for reform and wholesale overhaul of the criminal justice system as violent and dangerous members of the public,” reads a letter Tuesday from Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR-San Francisco Bay Area.
Rosen writes in the complaint that pursuing whistleblower relief came at the advice of the county administration, and that they saw the avenue as a way of addressing a county employee’s actions that resulted in a “wasteful” use of public resources, namely the cost of evacuating the county offices.
He also wrote that he was “not asking for any particular form of discipline against Mr. Khan, but that the county should evaluate this matter and take whatever steps it deems appropriate.”
The California Public Defender’s Association called Rosen’s interpretation of Khan’s writings “absurd” and that at no point did he call for any violence.
“Mr. Khan should not be ‘reported’ for encouraging peaceful protests and expressing anger at the DA’s office in his community,” the organization said in a statement. “He should be commended for speaking the truth.”
With the controversy mostly behind him, one area where Khan agreed with Rosen was in redirecting public focus on the issues behind his blog posts.
“This was never a personal dispute between Mr. Rosen and me,” he said. “The points that we are calling for in terms of systemic change still stand. We’d love to see his withdrawal of the complaint be followed by concrete and discrete reforms to ensure his office doesn’t perpetuate police violence.”