Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Shea Sanna is suing his Soros-funded boss, District Attorney George Gascón, claiming that he was subjected to a “retaliation campaign” for speaking out against his policies and “misgendering” a transgender defendant who was later found guilty of molesting a 10-year-old girl, according to a legal complaint filed Monday.
Sanna in 2020 repeatedly referred to Hannah Tubbs, a transgender woman, as a man while prosecuting him for sexually assaulting a young girl, having been rebuked by the case’s judge and a superior at the district attorney’s office for doing so, The Los Angeles Times reported. The deputy district attorney was later suspended without pay for five days after the district attorney’s office found he intentionally “misgendered” Tubbs, demoted, forced to repeatedly make long drives to attend disciplinary meetings and endured a pay cut, according to the complaint.
“Tubbs is a violent sex offender,” Sanna said in 2020 after a judge reminded him that the defendant identified as a female, according to The Los Angeles Times. Tubbs pled guilty to manslaughter in 2023 for beating his friend to death with a rock in 2019, Fox News Digital reported.
Tubbs was tried as a minor as he was 17 when he assaulted the 10-year-old girl, The Los Angeles Times reported. Sanna wanted to have Tubbs face trial as an adult but was stopped by a policy instituted by Gascón that prevented prosecutors from attempting to move juvenile defendants to adult courts.
Tubbs was ultimately sentenced to two years in a youth facility, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Gascón announced shortly after taking office in December 2020 that his office would no longer be prosecuting select crimes, including trespassing, disturbing the peace, driving without a license or a suspended license, making criminal threats, drug possession, drinking in public, loitering to commit prostitution and resisting arrest, according to ABC 7, a local affiliate. Crime ticked up during his first year in office, with homicide increasing by 11.8% in areas patrolled by the Los Angeles Police Department, CBS News reported.
Sanna repeatedly criticized Gascón’s policies, calling some of them “bullshit,” according to The Los Angeles Times.
“For the past two years, Gascon has tried to silence me,” Sanna said in a press release from Dhillon Law Group, the firm representing him. “He has suspended me without pay, threatened my livelihood, attacked my credibility, tarnished my reputation, demoted me, investigated me, and harassed me, all so I would obey him; so I would stay quiet; so I wouldn’t speak up on behalf of those most affected by his misguided political policies.”
Sanna claims in his lawsuit that Gascón prevented him from introducing jailhouse recordings from Tubbs, establishing that his transgender identity was simply a ploy to achieve a more lenient sentence or be placed in a female correctional facility.
Gascón, in 2022, admitted that, based on the recording he allegedly refused to let Sanna use, Tubbs was using his purported transgender identity in an attempt to evade punishment, according to Fox News Digital.
“I became aware last Thursday of the contents of that call, and the contents of that call were extremely disturbing to me because it showed a level of callousness and a level of disrespect for humanity from an individual that I had previously felt, given her conditions when the crime had originally occurred, she needed to be prosecuted as a juvenile,” he said. “As a result of reviewing the contents of that particular jail call, I came to the conclusion that this person was gaming the system.”
Gascón also admitted that the two-year sentence in juvenile custody handed down to Tubbs was likely too lenient, CBS News reported in 2022.
“In the Tubbs case, Deputy District Attorney Shea Sanna did nothing but seek to uphold his ethical and legal duties to present all relevant evidence to the court,” Anthony Fusaro, Sanna’s attorney, said in Dhillon Law Group’s press release. “Yet because this evidence conflicted with D.A. Gascon’s recently enacted policies and public statements, Gascon sought to suppress it. When Mr. Sanna informed his supervisors and the public of Gascon’s suppression efforts, Gascon responded with a relentless retaliation campaign against Mr. Sanna that persists to this day.”
California Justice & Public Safety PAC, which was funded primarily by George Soros, spent over $4.5 million supporting Gascón’s 2020 campaign. The PAC, however, has not made any expenditures to prop up the district attorney as he faces a tough reelection bid against independent Nathan Hochman.
Gascon has faced two recall efforts since taking office, both of which have failed after falling short of signature thresholds. The second effort garnered 715,833 total signatures, but the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk determined that 195,783 were invalid, causing the initiative to fall below the 566,857 signatures required for a recall election.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Featured image credit: (Flickr/Ted Eytan)
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