Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-Well, that was quick. Last week, I posed this question about the upcoming race for Jose Huizar’s LA City Council seat: “will (his wife Richelle) quit the race before the end of the year? Smart money says yes.”
Sure enough, a few days later, the aggrieved Richelle Huizar, chief enabler of lecherous lawmaker Jose Huizar, quit her campaign to replace him when he is termed-out, just 69 days after she launched it back on September 13.
And as is almost always the case with the local political figures it adores and protects, there was a lot to the story that the LA Times never reported.
She only recently legally became a Huizar.
On May 22, 2018, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge approved Richelle Rae Rios’s request to legally alter her last name to Huizar, matching that of her husband of 19 years and their four young children, which they quietly notified the public about via the tiny LA Daily Commerce publication a month earlier, as required by law.
It appears that she made the change for political rather than professional (and certainly not familial) purposes, waiting almost four months to change her last name on her State Bar of California page on September 10. She did not respond to an inquiry about whether she practiced law, including filing sworn documents, using a name that was no longer legally hers between the date that her name was legally changed and the date the Bar became aware of it.
Not that anyone could blame her for changing her name. Name recognition is second only to incumbency in importance for raising money to get elected. Ironically, that very same name recognition ultimately sunk her campaign once the FBI humiliatingly raided her home a few weeks ago.
She was almost never actively licensed to practice law despite claiming she is an “Esquire 4 Kids.”
On March 4, 2017, Mrs. Huizar (then still Richelle Rios) reactivated her law license after an extended dormancy. According to the Bar, she was only actively licensed to practice law for 10 months out of the prior 17 years, despite her myriad inferences to a lengthy and accomplished legal career.
More specifically, between June 19, 2000 and May 4, 2017, she was only eligible to practice law from August 9, 2007 to June 17, 2008.
Further, at no point since obtaining her California law license did she ever attend “mandatory” continuing legal education courses, MCLE, which is required of all active attorneys every three years.
She was first obligated to take MCLE coursework in 1999, but the State Bar was shut down at that time, so it would be unfair to blame her for that.
But she also failed to do so in 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2014 and 2017 because her law license was inactive, and she was therefore ineligible to practice law, despite her contradictory public assertions about her law career.
She didn’t take her Mayor Garcetti appointment seriously.
Despite the fanfare of her Mayor Eric Garcetti appointment to the superficial Commission on the Status of Women, Mrs. Huizar left her very first meeting early, and at other times arrived late to the monthly meetings when they weren’t altogether scrapped during her brief tenure.
Her own #MeToo problem.
When her husband first ran into legal problems when a former office staffer sued him and the taxpayers for sexual harassment (which was around the time of his vague, but unrelated, incident in the back of an LAPD squad car), the Huizars were forced to pick-up part of the city’s cost to litigate and settle the suit, so she was on the financial hook for his misconduct.
That’s what makes her appointment to Garcetti’s Commission all the odder. It raises the question of whether her access on the Commission to harassment and retaliation complaints filed more recently by other women against her husband caused a lengthy, unexplained delay between the time those complaints were filed with the city, and when they officially reached City Council president Herb Wesson. Some say yes, because it was an attempt to settle those new lawsuits before negative publicity impacted her soon-to-be doomed, FBI-tainted campaign.
And finally, that privacy thing.
The Huizars pushed their four young children and pricey French Bulldog Beau into scores of political photo ops. But now that those pursuits have run dry, the Huizars ask for their privacy as a shield for evading questions about their jeopardous legal circumstances. Only two people have exploited them with a mantra of “look at us” in the good times, and “respect our privacy” in the bad.
The 238,000 residents of LA City Council District 14 now have a chance to set a new course not only for themselves, but to also free-up the rest of the city’s four million residents from Huizar’s ruinous 1/15th policy influence, especially in the area of dubious land development and destruction of iconic LA buildings.
When qualified candidates start lining up to make a run for its eventually Huizar-free seat, the question is whether any of them will embrace a Huizar endorsement, and would a federal indictment or plea bargain (neither of which has happened at this point) make a difference? Or maybe they will set a great example for all of LA and choose someone from outside of the political world like a local teacher, doctor, engineer or CPA?
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. Join his mailing list or offer verifiable tips and story ideas at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
