caree harper

Just hours after the Trump administration moved to extend U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli’s term as Los Angeles’ top federal law enforcement official, prosecutors moved to dismiss charges in a pair of controversial criminal cases, including one involving a donor to the president.

In a motion filed late Tuesday, federal prosecutors sought to dismiss an indictment accusing Andrew Wiederhorn, ex-CEO of the company that owns the Fatburger and Johnny Rockets chains, of carrying out a $47 million “sham loan” scheme.

Prosecutors also sought to dismiss charges against L.A. County sheriff’s deputy Trevor Kirk, who has already been convicted and sentenced in an excessive force case after he attacked a woman in a supermarket parking lot in 2023.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office declined comment. Both cases had already drawn significant controversy during Essayli’s turbulent run as L.A.’s top federal prosecutor.

Days before Essayli’s initial appointment in April, Adam Schleifer, the assistant U.S. attorney handling the criminal case against Wiederhorn, was fired at the behest of the White House.

Schleifer alleged in appealing the decision that his firing was motivated in part by his prosecution of Wiederhorn, a Trump donor who has maintained his innocence.

According to three sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly, Essayli had a meeting with Wiederhorn’s defense team shortly after he was appointed. The meeting included former U.S. Atty. Nicola T. Hanna, whom the sources said was in charge of the office when the investigation into Wiederhorn began and is now on Wiederhorn’s defense team.

According to those sources, Essayli suggested shortly after the meeting ended that the cases against Wiederhorn could be dismissed if Essayli was permanently appointed.

“From day one, we have maintained Andy’s innocence,” Hanna said in a statement on Tuesday. “We are extremely grateful that the U.S. Attorney’s Office listened to our arguments and determined, in the interests of justice, that all charges should be dropped.”

Hanna has not responded to requests for comment about the prior meeting with Essayli.

Earlier on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Essayli would be named acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, a move that extends his term another 210 days.

Under normal procedures, U.S. Attorneys must receive Senate confirmation or be appointed by a federal judicial panel. But facing opposition to Trump’s picks in the Senate, the administration has used a similar tactic to skirt legal norms and keep its chosen prosecutors in power in New York, New Jersey and Nevada in recent weeks.

The indictment against Wiederhorn also alleged he was aided by the company’s former chief financial officer, Rebecca D. Hershinger, and his outside accountant, William J. Amon. The U.S. attorney’s office moved to to dismiss the indictment against all three defendants, as well as charges against their company, Fat Brands.

“From day one, we have said Rebecca Hershinger was innocent,” attorney Michael J. Proctor of the law firm of Iversen Proctor LLP said in a statement. “We are grateful that the government has acknowledged the case should be dismissed.”

Wiederhorn was also under indictment on a gun charge, which prosecutors moved to dismiss as well. Wiederhorn is banned from possessing firearms after he pleaded guilty in 2004 to charges of paying an illegal gratuity to his associate and filing a false tax return. He spent 15 months in prison and paid a $2-million fine.

Late Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney’s office also moved to dismiss an indictment against Alejandro Orellana, a 29-year-old ex-Marine who had been accused of aiding in civil disorder for passing out gas masks during large scale protests against immigration raids in Southern California.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment. Orellana’s case was one of the few indictments Essayli’s prosecutors had won related to alleged misconduct during the protests, and Essayli had fervently defended the charges when questioned by a Times reporter last month.

“He wasn’t handing masks out at the beach … they’re covering their faces. They’re wearing backpacks. These weren’t peaceful protesters,” Essayli said. “They weren’t holding up signs, with a political message. They came to do violence.”

Orellana issued a statement Tuesday that declared: “Protesting is not a crime. Defending my community is not a crime.”

“I want to thank all the supporters across the country who mobilized to get the charges dropped,” he said. “We won because we’re on the right side of history and our cause is just.”

Kirk, the sheriff’s deputy, was convicted of assault under color of authority in February and faced 10 years in prison for hurling a woman to the ground and pepper spraying her while responding to a reported robbery at a Lancaster supermarket in 2023. The victim, Jacy Houseton, was filming Kirk at the time but was not armed or actively committing a crime.

Kirk and his defense team have argued Houseton matched the description of a suspect given to Kirk as he responded.

Kirk was set to self-surrender next month, on August 28.

“We support that obviously without any objections and I think it’s within the confines of the law,” Kirk’s attorney, Tom Yu, said.

Caree Harper, who has represented Houseton, said she was notified Tuesday afternoon by Asst. U.S. Atty. Robert Keenan of the plan to dismiss the indictment against Kirk.

“We thought Trump’s new U.S. Attorneys office could not stoop any lower, but it seems like Mr. Essayli & Mr. Keenan’s insistence on being Trevor Kirk’s BEST defense attorney has no limits,” Harper said in an email.

Reached by phone, Harper called the news “disappointing and disheartening,” citing the fact that the judge in the case “already gave him an unbelievable break.”

“They don’t want him to spend one day in jail. They don’t want him in cuffs at all,” Harper said. “This is a travesty of justice yet again.”

A federal judge will decide later this week whether to allow an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy to take a plea deal that would spare him from prison time months after he was convicted of punching and pepper spraying an unarmed woman who filmed him during a 2023 arrest.

In a Monday court hearing, Judge Stephen V. Wilson and Assistant U.S. Atty. Rob Keenan sparred for more than two hours over the federal government’s highly unusual legal maneuver to offer L.A. County sheriff’s Deputy Trevor Kirk a misdemeanor plea deal just two months after he was convicted of a felony in the excessive force case.

Kirk was convicted in February of one count of deprivation of rights under color of law after he was caught on camera rushing at the victim, hurling her to the ground and then pepper spraying her in the face while planting a knee on her neck during a 2023 incident outside of a Lancaster supermarket.

Wilson said he would rule on the motion to accept the plea in the next “three or four days.”

He faced up to a decade in prison at sentencing.

But that was upended after the Trump administration last month appointed Bill Essayli, a former California assemblyman, as U.S. attorney for Los Angeles. On May 1, prosecutors reached a rare post-trial plea agreement with Kirk.

The government recommended a one-year term of probation for Kirk and moved to strike the jury’s finding that Kirk had injured the victim, which made the crime a felony. Kirk agreed to plead guilty to a lesser-included misdemeanor violation of deprivation of rights under color of law.

The agreement caused turmoil in the U.S. attorney’s office, with assistant U.S. attorneys Eli A. Alcaraz, Brian R. Faerstein, Michael J. Morse and Cassie Palmer, chief of the Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, all withdrawing from the case. Keenan, the only assistant U.S. attorney who signed off on the plea agreement, was not previously involved in the case.

Alcaraz, Faerstein and Palmer submitted their resignations following the “post-trial” plea agreement offer, sources previously confirmed to the Times. A filing submitted in the case last week also confirmed Palmer is departing the federal prosecutor’s office.

The incident mirrored turmoil at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan that followed pressure by Trump Administration officials to drop a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Essayli, a former California assemblyman, is a staunch Trump ally and hard line conservative appointed at a time when the President has sought to weaken the independence of the Department of Justice. He made the post-conviction plea offer to Kirk the same week Trump issued an executive order vowing to “unleash” American law enforcement.

In court Monday, Wilson grilled Keenan, appearing increasingly perplexed at the government’s logic in offering Kirk a deal. He questioned if prosecutors had a “serious and significant doubt” as to the deputy’s guilt and continually pushed Keenan to justify the deal.

“If the government hasn’t offered any explanation for its change of course, the court must grant the motion?” Wilson asked.

Keenan said he believed the court was legally obligated to do so, claiming the deal was “a pure exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

In June 2023, Kirk was responding to a reported robbery when he threw a woman to the ground and pepper-sprayed her in the face while she filmed him outside a Lancaster WinCo. The woman — who is only identified in federal court filings as J.H. but named as Jacey Houston in a separate civil suit — matched a dispatcher’s description of a female suspect she was not armed or committing a crime at the time Kirk first confronted her, court records show.

But in a 31-page position statement filed May 13, Keenan dissected the victim’s actions leading up to and during the confrontation with Kirk. Keenan said Kirk used the pepper spray after “continued resistance by J.H.”

“In contrast to other excessive-force cases, defendant did not use pepper spray after J.H. was cuffed or otherwise secured,” Keenan wrote.

Keenan said the evidence didn’t show that Kirk sprayed Houston in the face with an intent to cause bodily injury. He also described her injuries as “limited in duration and severity” and said they did not constitute “serious bodily injury.”

In the filing, Keenan appeared to question the government’s evidence relating to a reported “blunt head injury,” calling it “vague and ill-defined even at trial.”

In court Monday, Keenan described Kirk’s use of force as “excessive, but just “barely so,” at one point attacking the credibility of the victim in the case, suggesting she exaggerated her injuries in a victim impact statement she made before the court.

Wilson did not accept that analysis.

“The jury was completely justified in finding he used excessive force in taking her to the ground and pepper spraying her,” the judge said. “Had he ordered her to be handcuffed … that would be a different case,” the judge said.

Earlier in the morning, Houston said Kirk should never be allowed to be a police officer or own a firearm again, given the “uncontrollable rage” he aimed at her on the day of the incident.

“I was certain that I was going to die,” she said, describing the moment Kirk grabbed her.

Houston’s attorney, Caree Harper, has said Keenan’s filing distorts the reality of what happened in the parking lot that day.

“J.H. is a senior citizen. She committed no crime. She had no weapon. She did not try to flee. She did not try to resist. J.H. sustained a black eye, a fractured bone in her right arm, multiple bruises, scratches, and significant chemical burning from the pepper-spray,” Harper wrote in a court filing. “J.H. screamed in pain and struggled to fill her lungs with oxygen.”

Wilson had previously denied a motion from Yu for an acquittal, finding that footage of the incident was sufficient evidence for a jury to find Kirk had used “objectively unreasonable force.”

“J.H. did not have a weapon, did not attack Defendant, was not attempting to flee, and was not actively committing a crime,” Wilson wrote in his ruling last month.

The judge also noted that, while Kirk acted aggressively toward Houston from the outset, his partner managed to lead the arrest of the other robbery suspect without using force.

Keenan painted the concessions Kirk made in the post-trial agreement as “significant.” He said Kirk was agreeing to admit that he “used unnecessary force” while attempting to detain Houston and that he did so “willfully.”

In early 2024, shortly after the Winco incident, Kirk was arrested by his own department on suspicion of domestic violence against his wife. His attorney dismissed it as a non-issue, noting the victim did not want Kirk to be prosecuted, contending the alleged abuse was reported by a third party. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said the case was rejected due to insufficient evidence.

In her filing last week, Harper also said Kirk was arrested on allegations he threw his wife on the ground in January 2023. Harper alleged Kirk “threatened to bury [his wife] in the desert,” records show.

Sheriff’s department arrest logs only display the 2024 arrest. A sheriff’s department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Support for Kirk began gaining steam on social media after his indictment last September. In January, Nick Wilson, founder of a first responder advocacy group and spokesperson for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Professional Assn., wrote a letter to Trump urging him to intervene before the case went to trial.

Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who has become increasingly popular in right-wing circles online, has also championed Kirk’s case, posting an Instagram video of himself and Wilson consoling the deputy at the courthouse after trial. Both Villanueva and Wilson have insisted Kirk did nothing wrong.

Villanueva, Wilson and Essayli were all present in court Monday. At one point Harper approached Essayli directly and asked about the legality of the plea deal he was offering.

Essayli, seated in a plastic chair because all of the benches in the courtroom were filled, threatened to have Harper removed from the courtroom. Harper noted that only judges and federal marshals have the right to remove someone from a courtroom. A U.S. Attorney’s office spokesman declined to comment.

Some deputies have also blamed current Sheriff Robert Luna for pushing federal prosecutors to go after Kirk, a fact Luna has denied. Some deputy groups have staged forms of protest against Luna as a result.

But in a sentencing recommendation obtained by The Times, Luna asked Wilson to sentence Kirk to probation, blaming his actions that day on poor training.

He noted prior department leaders had effectively ignored a monitoring agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that was meant to mandate reform policies on use-of-force issues at the Lancaster and Palmdale stations. Luna’s letter did not address whether or not Wilson should act on Essayli’s request to vacate the jury verdict.

“I’m not suggesting that the failures of the Department should immunize Deputy Kirk or any other deputy taking responsibility for their actions,” Luna wrote. “No deputy who is found by a jury to have used excessive force or who has agreed to a plea deal should have such immunity.”