leaked

The Los Angeles city attorney is often described as the most powerful elected official almost no one’s ever heard of.

The office prosecutes most misdemeanor crimes, defends the city against costly lawsuits and serves as the public’s chief lawyer at a time when L.A. faces frequent attacks from a hostile White House. Races for the office tend to be sleepy affairs, but this year’s contest has featured last-minute entrants, a whopping influx of cash and defections among the incumbent’s key supporters.

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s first term was marked by an explosion in costly litigation against the city and allegations of misconduct and mistreatment of employees. She has denied wrongdoing and defended her record, but now two well-funded opponents are flanking her from different sides of the political spectrum.

The race began to heat up last month after a data breach that saw a massive trove of LAPD records leaked onto the internet. That spurred the city’s police union to withdraw its endorsement of Feldstein Soto and tell its members to vote instead for John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor who has received a massive influx of corporate cash to support his campaign in recent weeks.

The progressive challenger is Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice. Roy, 34, has said she would run the office as a sprawling “public interest law firm” that sues to fight wage theft and renter harassment, champions a care-first approach to homelessness and stands as a legal bulwark against the Trump administration.

Roy Behr, a veteran political consultant in the city, said Roy and McKinney have clear brands and target audiences, whereas Feldstein Soto may now be a candidate without a constituency.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she didn’t make the runoff. What she’s facing are two people with pretty clear critiques from different directions,” he said of the incumbent. “All she’s left with is ‘I did an OK job in an office that people don’t really understand.’”

Feldstein Soto, 67, says she’s the steady hand the city needs as it faces a budget crisis and gears up to host the Olympics in two years. She scoffed at her opponents’ lack of experience in a recent interview, dismissing Roy’s campaign promises as “insane,” and noting that McKinney’s history as a felony trial prosecutor has little overlap with the city attorney’s job.

“This is not the time for on-the-job training,” she said.

A former corporate lawyer, Feldstein Soto squeaked through the primary before sailing to victory in her bid for the position in 2022. She has since taken heat for defending aggressive LAPD crowd control tactics, and also for her refusal to prosecute hundreds involved in 2024 campus protests against the war in Gaza.

Although Feldstein Soto has received endorsements from Mayor Karen Bass and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), critics say frequent personality clashes have alienated her from the city’s Democratic kingmakers. McKinney called her a “bully” in a recent interview and said her behavior has demoralized her staff.

Feldstein Soto pushed back on those criticisms, touting steps she has taken to modernize the office and enhance public safety. She argued many of the allegations against her stem from a 2024 lawsuit filed by a disgruntled employee, who claimed they were subjected to a “barrage of retaliatory actions” after reporting issues within the office, including mishandling of grant funds, discriminatory treatment of co-workers and “inappropriate alcohol consumption” in the workplace. The case remains pending. Feldstein Soto said the employee was fired for having improper outside employment.

Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto hosts a May 12 news conference to discuss the recent prosecution and conviction of a UCLA early childhood teacher charged with sexual abuse.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Explaining her decision to drop most charges in the campus protest cases, Feldstein Soto pointed out many lacked enough evidence for prosecution.

The city’s legal payouts have exploded under her watch — jumping from $64 million in the mid-2010s to $294 million in the last fiscal year. Feldstein Soto said the rising costs reflect an increase in “nuclear verdicts” in civil courts nationwide.

Feldstein Soto noted the city’s payouts were inflated by a “cascade of horrible” cases that were pending when she took office. She said she could only mitigate the damages, citing as examples cases that involved the city’s misuse of federal housing grants and a massive sewage spill.

“I’ve protected the city at every turn,” she said. “I’m the only candidate in my race who has the receipts to prove that I can do this.”

Roy said the biggest challenge may be convincing Angelenos to cast a vote at all in what has historically been a low-turnout, down-ballot contest.

“It’s where we always start, to be honest,” she said. “It is one of the most important, least understood positions.”

In a city where 60% of residents are renters and many feel under siege by the Trump administration, Roy has campaigned as a civil rights avenger ready to spar with landlords or the White House on behalf of working-class Angelenos.

She recently hit the streets sporting a crisp purple blazer, violet chrome manicure and a battered pair of black Rothy’s flats, evidence of the shoe-leather she and her army of volunteers have already invested in the race.

Roy typically starts her pitch by explaining what the city attorney actually does, then delivers her vision for the post.

“Of course it’s the lawyer for the city, but what people don’t realize is it’s also the lawyer for the people,” she said to one would-be voter in Silver Lake.

John McKinney, a county prosecutor running for L.A. city attorney, speaks at a May 5 news conference where he received endorsements from Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union for rank-and-file LAPD officers.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

McKinney, 58, said he wants more “aggressive” prosecutions for misdemeanor gun crimes, and believes the city attorney has the power to “leverage” homeless people into mental health or addiction treatment after they’ve been arrested.

Despite having no experience as a civil litigator, the deputy L.A. County district attorney also thinks he can help drive down lawsuit costs for the city.

McKinney told The Times he envisions himself as “a protector, as the local prosecutor, and a defender, as the general counsel of the city.”

“I think public safety is the number one priority, or should be, of all elected officials,” he said.

While Feldstein Soto and Roy have raised considerable war chests, McKinney has received just $72,000 in direct contributions, according to campaign finance records. But independent expenditures supporting his bid have supercharged his finances in the last two weeks, pouring $1.7 million into the race.

The vast majority of those funds have come from a political action committee backed by Airbnb, which Feldstein Soto sued last year for violating price-gouging laws in the wake of the wildfires. The city attorney has aggressively prosecuted and sued those seeking to profit off wildfire victims, winning a $1.2-million settlement against another rental company in a price-gouging suit this week.

Feldstein Soto said both of her challengers are financially beholden to special interests, pointing to McKinney’s Airbnb windfall money Roy has taken from a political action committee bankrolled by an organization whose attorneys often sue the city.

“They’re not investing millions of dollars for fun and for free because they think these candidates are going to be great city attorneys … they are expecting a return on investment,” Feldstein Soto said.

McKinney said Airbnb simply believes in his campaign to clean up the city, which would improve tourism and the company’s profits in the city.

Roy said she has received broad support from across the legal profession and is committed to reducing lawsuit payouts that have “spiraled out of control.”

Dan Schnur, a USC professor and former advisor to Republican politicians in California, said Feldstein Soto’s biggest obstacle might not be her opponents, but voters themselves fed up with elected officials citywide.

“The challenges she faces are very similar to what Bass is going on in the mayor’s race,” he said. “This is a very impatient and angry electorate that wants change now.”

May 4 (UPI) — A man accused of leaking classified military information to a Washington Post reporter will be released on home detention ahead of his trial next year, a judge ruled Monday.

U.S. District Judge Michael Maddox ordered the Justice Department to release Aurelio Perez Lugones to be held on home detention until his trial in February.

Lugones, whose location would be monitored and blocked from using internet-connected devices, is charged with leaking classified information to Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, Politico and The New York Times reported.

Natanson’s home was raided in January by the FBI, with the agency seizing two laptop computers, a cell phone and a Garmin Watch as it investigated Lugones, who was a systems administrator at the Pentagon with a top-secret security clearance.

He allegedly had been taking classified reports home and keeping them before passing some to Natanson, which motivated prosecutors to suggest he could send more information to her if she was not held in jail until the trial.

“The government has no way of knowing what he has retained and what he is able to provide to others,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia McLane said during the hearing.

“The person he was communicating with is still employed and has a willingness to accept classified and national defense information … The receptacle of additional national defense information is still available to the defendant,” she said.

The controversial search of a journalist’s home was triggered by stories Natanson wrote about various national security issues, including one that noted the more than 1,000 sources she had cultivated during the course of her reporting.

Magistrate Judge William Porter approved the search warrant, though he was not told about a federal law that restricts the government from raiding reporters and news organizations, and has said he would go through Natanson’s records for things related to the national security case.

Lugones attorney pushed back on the prosecutors’ assertion that he has “a historical Rolodex of classified information in his head,” and that he’d lost his job, top-secret clearance and access to classified information.

The prosecutors said, however, that the information Lugones retained and passed to Natanson “was not old information.”

“This was current information regarding military movement in the Caribbean, in the Gulf and specifically with Venezuela,” McLane said during Monday’s hearing.

“We have a man who has thrown everything away in an attempt to get back at the administration,” she said.

Calling the prosecution’s argument for holding Lugones in jail speculative, Maddox ordered his release and set a trial date of Feb. 22.

In the aftermath of a recent data breach that saw hackers make off with a vast trove of confidential police records, Los Angeles leaders have sought an explanation from the city’s top lawyer, whose office was targeted.

What they have gotten so far, according to Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, are answers that only leave more questions.

In an interview, Jurado said she had expected City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto to appear before the Government Operations committee this week, but instead had received an internal report offering a “high level view” of the breach that left many key details unaddressed.

“When did the city attorney’s office become aware, what actions were taken, and why were city officials not notified promptly?” Jurado said. “Right now, we’re still left to question and trying to assemble the information.”

The Times reported the existence of the hack last week, prompting further scrutiny by public officials — some of whom, like Jurado, said they hadn’t previously been informed. Since then, The Times has reviewed an inventory of 337,000 files that were compromised.

The documents amount to millions of pages, and appear to mostly come from civil lawsuits against the city that have been resolved in court. They range in nature from trip-and-fall cases to police excessive force.

During a brief discussion at the council committee Tuesday morning, Jurado said she had received information that an internal link used by the city attorney’s office to access the files had been clicked at least 5,000 times on the first day of the breach, which is thought to have occurred sometime in March.

The files were not secured by a password, according to sources who spoke previously with The Times and requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation. A senior police official last week assured the department’s civilian bosses, the Police Commission, that none of the department’s own systems had been compromised.

Jurado said she wanted answers for why and how the city had managed to leave exposed sensitive records, such as medical reports, autopsy photos and witness names.

“It’s just horrific to think that that was out there,” Jurado said.

The city attorney’s office responded to questions from The Times by referring to a public report issued April 17, which said a preliminary investigation indicated that “the incident was contained to that third-party environment, and that no other City applications, systems, or department records were accessed or affected.”

The report noted that the hackers teased “small samples” of the data on its dark web site over a week starting March 20, before publishing the whole thing on March 27. The data were taken down after about eight hours, and then reappeared again twice in early April, the report said.

In a separate letter to the police union, the office said it would begin notifying people whose information was compromised “without unreasonable delay.”

The inventory reviewed by The Times shows personnel files for LAPD officers who were accused of using excessive force against a Black military veteran during a traffic stop in 2021. Another file included the identities of witnesses who saw a man die after LAPD officers knelt on him during an arrest, the records reviewed by The Times showed.

Thousands of hours of uncut body camera footage were released. There were also medical records from thousands of cases in which police and other city employees were accused of misconduct. At least 1,060 of the files are labeled as confidential, the inventory says.

The city attorney’s office has said that it alerted senior LAPD officials and the city’s IT department as soon as they discovered the leak, and has in the weeks since been in regular contact with other city departments to assess the scope of the leak. The FBI has begun investigating the matter.

The situation has already cost Feldstein Soto, who is up for reelection, the endorsement of the powerful union for the LAPD’s rank-and-file officers, which withdrew its support after accusing the city attorney of failing to disclose the full extent of the breach.

The leak follows Feldstein Soto’s efforts to weaken the state’s public records law after the release of many police officer photos and other materials, which she demanded be returned.

Several attorneys whose cases were included in the list of compromised files told The Times they have not yet heard from city officials. Some said they could foresee the records leaked being used as justification to reopen old cases — or initiate new ones.

“I’m curious to know what exactly it is that the city attorney’s office had that they may not have disclosed to us in discovery,” Arnoldo Casillas, an attorney for the family of Eric Rivera, a 20-year-old man whose family sued after he was killed by police in Wilmington in 2017 and whose files are among those included in the leak, according to the inventory reviewed by The Times.

The case was later dismissed, but the family has filed an appeal.

Other attorneys whose lawsuits against the city and LAPD were listed among the hacked materials said they wanted to know exactly what was included in the files.

Robert Glassman, who successfully sued for $18 million last year on behalf of two elderly brothers who were badly injured when a speeding LAPD squad car broadsided their vehicle, said he also hadn’t heard from the city attorney’s office.

“You’d think that they would notify [the affected parties] and tell them that they’re working to get their information back,” he said.

Experts said similar cyberattacks on government offices across the country have shown it can take months or years for the dust to fully settle and the full scope of the damage to emerge.

James E. Lee, president of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that provides advice and assistance related to identity theft, said last year alone the center documented an all-time high of 3,322 hacks.

That’s almost certainly an undercount, given the number of cases that go undetected or unreported, Lee said. Of the recorded incidents, roughly 165 targeted government agencies — up from 47 in 2020, he said.

In the past, according to Lee, many attacks of government entities were carried out by state-sponsored actors, but the emergence of AI-powered hacking tools have allowed everyday people to carry off such incursions.

“They want data that they can repurpose: anything that’s going to have financial information, anything that’s going to have driver’s license information is going to be very valuable to them,” he said.

Matthew McNicholas, a lawyer who has represented many officers in their lawsuits against the city, said he has fielded numerous calls from clients worried their personnel and medical records were exposed.

The leaked records, the inventory shows, include a case in which McNicholas sued the city on behalf of a victim who said they’d been sexually molested as a minor by an employee at a city-run recreational center.

McNicholas said he is worried that the leak will expose the private information of police whistleblowers who came forward to reveal discrimination and other misconduct.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.