Thousands of pages of testimony portray Laurie Smith as willing to bend and defy laws to defend her agency and practices
Longtime Santa Clara
County Sheriff Laurie Smith, whose conduct is the subject of a forthcoming
corruption trial, knows what the rules are. And evidence gathered for that
trial suggests she knows how to use them to her advantage.
In 5,600 pages of
newly-released grand jury testimony, Smith emerges for the first time as a
central actor in her office’s efforts to dodge gift-reporting requirements,
direct concealed-carry weapons permits to powerful donors, and undermine the
work of a civilian auditor reviewing an explosive jail-injury case.
Each of those scandals has
become public over the past two years, leading to indictments of some of her
closest aides, but Smith’s involvement remained obscure.
Now, the testimony of 65
witnesses called before the civil grand jury has her facing the end of a long
career. The state attorney general has also begun a probe of Smith’s office.
One former top aide, for
instance, recalled Smith directing her to buy three lower-cost tickets to a
Sharks hockey game, to hide the fact she would be sitting gratis in a donor’s
luxury suite.
“So that was to avoid
disclosure of a gift?” the prosecutor asked.
“Correct,” the former aide
said.
Other testimony made clear
Smith’s key role in her office’s granting of an outsized number of gun permits
to people with celebrity, power and connections, and showed that she personally
and purposefully delayed the progress of an investigation into the jail-injury
case of Andrew Hogan that led to a record $10 million settlement from the
county.
Concealed guns and concealed truth
Civil grand jurors
concluded in December that Smith committed “willful and corrupt misconduct in
office” by her actions regarding the concealed-carry weapons, or CCW, licenses.
Their findings –
officially referred to as “accusations” that now lead to a full trial – are
based largely on a retracing of two previous criminal grand jury proceedings
linked to the CCW permit scandal that resulted in bribery indictments for
then-Undersheriff Rick Sung and Capt. James Jensen, Smith’s second-in-command
and a close adviser, respectively. But the civil proceedings were more sharply
focused on Smith.
Jon Golinger, an
investigator for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office – which oversaw
the civil grand jury because of conflicts cited by Santa Clara County’s counsel
and district attorney offices – testified that an analysis of records showed
that between late 2015 and early 2019, just 36 of 248 new CCW applicants were
granted licenses, a 14.5% approval rate. But of the ten donors who applied,
nine were approved — a 90% success rate.
Lara McCabe, a program
manager in the sheriff’s office, testified that Smith said she opposed issuing
CCW permits widely because “she doesn’t like to have a lot of guns out there on
the streets.” Smith’s attorney and longtime political adviser Rich Robinson
testified that Smith “would not issue CCW permits unless there was a
demonstrated need.”
But her actions belied
those claims, witnesses indicated.
Several permit applicants
who were not donors described to the grand jury how they applied for CCW
licenses because of documented stalking, death threats or physical abuse. Three
did not even get a response, though state law requires a notice of approval or
denial within 90 days. The fourth received a form letter citing a backlog in
applications.
Meanwhile, a known
campaign donor testified that he was passively guided by the sheriff’s office
into providing his daughter’s address for his permit renewal because he had
moved out of the county. Another longtime Smith donor, NVIDIA founder Chris
Malachowsky, testified that he had no safety reason for applying, and left the
“cause” field in the application blank, but was issued a permit anyway.
In contrast, and as was
suggested in testimony before the earlier criminal grand jury, any permit application
that didn’t have a green light from some combination of Smith, Sung or Jensen
was left in a filing cabinet.
But former public
information officer Rich Glennon offered new insight into Smith’s alleged role
in that practice when he testified that Smith told him the “law was on her side
in that if applications were always pending, she never had to render a decision
on the application,” so if a criminal background check and fingerprint check
were “never completed then she’s within the code.”
“So that was her
explanation to you, personally, of why she could just keep applications pending
indefinitely?” the prosecutor asked.
“That’s correct,” Glennon
said.
Despite this evidence, the
civil grand jury rejected bribery accusations against Smith, suggesting it
couldn’t draw a direct line between her and what prosecutors in the criminal
case have alleged was a pay-to-play brokering scheme partially orchestrated by
Sung and Jensen.
How Smith might explain
all this remains unknown. She was not called before the civil grand jury, and
In one of the criminal grand jury proceedings, she invoked the Fifth Amendment
in refusing to testify. Publicly, she has characterized efforts by the Board of
Supervisors to investigate her office as politically driven attacks.
The Sharks suite situation
Three additional
corruption accusations from the civil grand jury involve Smith’s use of a CCW
permit recipient’s luxury suite at the SAP Center for a San Jose Sharks game.
Knowing she’d be using the suite, Smith allegedly asked McCabe to purchase
three general admission tickets for her, Sung and Jensen, to skirt reporting
requirements for elected officials who receive gifts worth more than $500.
McCabe said that Smith
told her explicitly that she was looking to avoid putting the suite tickets on
a public gift-reporting document.
The suite – where Smith on
Feb. 14, 2019, held a gathering of close friends and supporters to celebrate
her 2018 re-election – is also the subject of a bribery indictment against the
suite’s owner, Harpreet Chadha, alleging that Sung extracted the donation from
him by holding up his gun permit renewal. Chadha has said that he routinely
gives out the suite.
The civil grand jury
rejected allegations that Chadha committed bribery.
Resisting an investigation
The final misconduct
finding by the civil grand jury accuses Smith of “failing to cooperate” with
the Office of Correction and Law Enforcement Monitoring – a civilian auditor –
in its probe of the case of Andrew Hogan. No previous grand jury has examined
this allegation, although the Board of Supervisors has excoriated her actions.
The county paid a $10
million settlement to Hogan and his family after the mentally ill man
repeatedly injured himself in 2018 while riding unrestrained in a jail
transport van, and jail staff and commanders stood by as he lapsed into
unconsciousness. Hogan is now severely disabled. The settlement was the
county’s largest-ever payout to resolve a jail-injury case.
Last fall, the Board of
Supervisors tasked the auditor, Michael Gennaco, with investigating why an
internal sheriff’s office probe abruptly ended with no conclusion or discipline
being issued. But Smith’s office allegedly refused to hand over documents about
the case to Gennaco.
In testimony to the civil
grand jury, McCabe and Juan Gallardo, a former administrative services director
who was the most senior civilian employee in the sheriff’s office, said Smith
directed her staff to delay key meetings with the agency’s two main labor
unions to stymie an information-sharing agreement with Gennaco.
“I believe she – something
to the effect of, if – if the meeting doesn’t happen then we can’t proceed with
the Information Sharing Agreement or at least slow down the process,” Gallardo
said.
Other witnesses’ anecdotes
and statements show additional instances in which Smith seemed to knowingly
flout the rules.
Gallardo testified that
during her 2018 re-election campaign, Smith was in contact with an independent
expenditure committee run by two of her ardent supporters – even though under
federal law, Smith and her campaign were barred from “cooperation,
consultation, or concert with” the committee.
“I recall her saying that
she wasn’t supposed to know” the inner workings of the independent committee,
Gallardo testified, “but she knew what they were doing.”
By Robert Salonga
February 26, 2022 /Updated: February 28, 2022
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