For at least three years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department secretly investigated — and ultimately urged the state attorney general to prosecute — a Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote about a leaked list of problem deputies, according to internal department records. The probe began in 2017 when investigators under then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell tried to figure out who slipped the list of roughly 300 names to reporter Maya Lau. The case soon fizzled out. After Alex Villanueva took office in 2018, the department revived it, according to a 300-page investigative case file. The department deemed Lau a criminal suspect — alleging she knowingly received “stolen property.” It fingered Diana Teran, its own constitutional policing advisor, as the source of the leak, even though Teran initially reported it and denied passing along the information.
Sheriff’s officials sent the case to California Attorney General Rob Bonta in 2021, and in May of this year his office declined to prosecute, the Los Angeles Times reports. The office said it “found insufficient evidence” to merit criminal charges. “I’m glad this investigation is over, and it’s an outrage that the Sheriff’s Department would criminally investigate me as a reporter for doing my job,” said Lau, who left the paper in 2021. “It’s the kind of action that’s aimed at intimidating journalists from digging into government agencies.” Journalists generally cannot be held liable for reporting on leaked documents that involve matters of public concern, even if the reporter knew that the materials were obtained illegally. “You’re not authorized to break into a file cabinet to get records. You’re not authorized to hack computers. But receiving information that somebody else obtained unlawfully is not a crime,” said David Snyder of the First Amendment Coalition, which advocates for free speech and government transparency. “Publishing that information is protected under the 1st Amendment.”
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