Orange County supervisors Tuesday approved a resolution asking federal prosecutors to review the plea deal for former Supervisor Andrew Do, who pleaded guilty to bribery and is awaiting sentencing.
The board voted 4-1 in favor, with Supervisor Don Wagner the dissenting vote, for the resolution sponsored by Supervisor Janet Nguyen, who replaced Do on the board. Do once worked as Nguyen’s chief of staff until the two had a falling out, and they have clashed politically in the past.
The board delayed voting on the measure two weeks ago by the same vote with Vice Chairwoman Katrina Foley voting no because she wanted to vote for it then and not put it on hold. The resolution the board voted on Tuesday was revised.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the resolution.
Do’s attorney, Paul Meyer, said, “This blatant attempt to assert political influence in a federal matter is reprehensible.”
Do is scheduled to be sentenced June 9. On April 14, U.S. District Judge James Selna approved a forfeiture order for Do that includes the former supervisor paying $1,702,640.86 from one bank account and $724,749.10 from another as well as giving up property at 14732 Candeda Place in Tustin and another property at 2410 W. 17th St. in Santa Ana.
Do pleaded guilty to a felony federal bribery conspiracy charge on Oct. 31. His attorney worked out a deal that puts a five-year lid on Do’s time behind bars.
Do admitted in his plea agreement that in exchange for more than $550,000 in bribes, he cast votes starting in 2020 that directed more than $10 million in COVID-relief funds to the Viet America Society, where his daughter Rhiannon worked, according to federal prosecutors.
Do faces up to five years in prison and his daughter, Rhiannon Do, will be placed in a diversion program as part of the plea deal.
“A federal prosecutor who looks at the totality of the evidence will hopefully come to the same conclusion as the general public: Andrew Do is getting a special deal because he was a public official,” Nguyen said. “I want to see justice in this case. Five years in prison is not punishment. Andrew Do will be out of custody in the blink of an eye.”
Part of the reason the board wants a review of the case stems from the discovery that Do continued to receive updates on the county’s civil lawsuit against Do and others tied to the alleged bribery scheme.
Do’s civil attorney, Eliot Krieger — a former federal prosecutor — previously told City News Service that before Do was named in the lawsuit, the emails went unnoticed, but once he became a defendant, Do realized he was receiving messages from county counsel Leon Page and brought them to Krieger’s attention.
Krieger said he alerted Page that Do was mistakenly on an email chain and turned over Do’s phone to a third party forensic specialist to examine it and pick out all the privileged emails, which amounted to 57 from Page and none from the Board of Supervisors.
“I never reviewed the content of those emails and no one else on our side has looked at those emails,” Krieger said.
It appears Do’s email was just mistakenly not removed from the listserv for the parties involved in the lawsuit, Krieger said.
Wagner voted against the resolution because he did not think it was proper for the board to take a position on the plea deal.
“We’ve heard the emails as a reason to … weigh in and explain further one more time why we think this is a light sentence and the truth is we don’t know anything about those emails either,” Wagner said. “We know how it happened, but we also know it was set up well before any of the emails from county counsel were coming through. It was done in the ordinary course of convenience to get information.”
Wagner said it may never come out what happened because of Do’s attorney-client privilege.
“It’s not our lane,” Wagner said. “It’s not for us to be saying, and we look bad piling on and saying we don’t trust the justice system.”
Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento said, “It’s an irregular path we’re taking, but I think these are instances that shock the conscience and instances that are outrageous and we want to do everything we can to draw attention to that.”
Orange County Board Chairman Doug Chaffee said, “We are a victim and this is a statement from the victims whose money was taken.”
Chapman University Law School professor Lawrence Rosenthal, a former federal prosecutor, told CNS that earlier this month that “under the plea agreement, the United States attorney is bound to agree unless (Do) breached it … The likelihood for a move to withdraw from the plea agreement seems extremely low.”
Rosenthal added, “I certainly have to say it is an extremely lenient plea agreement for Mr. Do, especially because the most unusual part about it is it’s a package deal (that includes his daughter).”
Rosenthal said Nguyen has “ample reason to be concerned about it … I do not fault Ms. Nguyen for being concerned about this agreement, but the likelihood it can be undone at this late date is very low.”
UC Irvine Law School professor Tony Smith agreed that there’s little chance of overturning the plea agreement.
“My take on this is it’s just performative politics,” Smith told CNS before the board’s last meeting earlier this month.
Smith added that the resolution was “not in (Nguyen’s) wheelhouse of authority and it is not why anyone votes for her. You might think of it as the politics of vendetta, which (President Donald) Trump has brought to a new level, so now lower-level politicians think that’s where they can be now. Criminal justice has real things to do and ought to focus on those things.”
Smith said it is not unusual for politicians to get lighter sentences “because they always get credit for their service to the people. So even when they do very bad things, judges and prosecutors still say, `Well, they’re still a politician, so somehow or another we should take it easy on them.”’
The resolution is “just a way to get attention and somehow do a moral superiority dance, but there’s no substance to this,” Smith said.
While agreeing to plead guilty to the federal bribery conspiracy charge, Andrew Do also reached a separate but related plea agreement with the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, under which he resigned as a county supervisor and will forfeit any pension credit he amassed during the time he was engaged in the bribery scheme since 2020, prosecutors said.
Rhiannon Do, a third-year UC Irvine law school student, who was also caught up in the investigation, agreed to fully cooperate with authorities and will be allowed to enter a diversion program.