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February 4, 2022

Chesa Boudin is starting to sweat

By Monica Showalter

With a voter recall four months away, things aren't going too well for San Francisco's far-left district attorney, Chesa Boudin, whose office appears to now be a dumpster fire of controversies.

Thursday, the news got out through court transcripts that a shouting match broke out in a courthouse, between Chesa's staff and the lawyers of a witness, Magen Hayashi, who testified that Chesa's D.A. office told her to withhold critical evidence that could have exculpated an officer in a police brutality case.  The D.A.'s investigation of the matter neglected to mention that the cop in question was answering a domestic violence call and didn't just start beating the suspect for no good reason.  The officer's defense team thought that relevant, and apparently, Chesa's staff were intimidating the witness.

According to the San Francisco Examiner:

"After the court exited the courtroom," [defense attorney Nicole] Pifari told the judge, attorneys for the DA's office "started yelling at ... began to yell at counsel for Ms. [Magen] Hayashi telling him to do his job."

Pifari told the judge that one of the attorneys for the DA's office "pointed at the witness and told her she was being accused of a crime. It's intimidating a witness, it's unprofessional, it's very problematic that they're trying to affect the testimony of this witness off the record. I have a real problem with what just happened. They were yelling at her attorney in open court." It's not clear what crime the attorney allegedly referred to.

"OK. Let's not yell, OK? Thank you," judge Teresa Caffese said, according to the transcript of the testimony.

"Will the court please instruct attorneys for the DA's office to not address the witness, talk to her, point at her and tell her she's — you know, off-the-record having discussions with the witness, it's totally inappropriate," Pifari said.

An attorney for the DA's office responded, "For the record, (the attorney for the investigator) was yelling too."

Obviously, her testimony was bothering them, despite the fact that the leftist judge seemed to think it was as irrelevant to the case as Chesa did. 

It got the defense lawyer barking, and even more significantly, it got the San Francisco police chief furious.  Chief Bill Scott yanked all cooperation with the D.A.'s office on investigations of police brutality cases as a result of this sneaky bid to stack the deck against the accused cop.  That's rather a heavy blow to Chesa, who goes at these cases with a gusto that's wholly lacking in his prosecution of violent crime.

The chief could have done this quietly, as the Examiner notes, but he went loud and public instead:

The chief could have reached out privately to Boudin about the testimony, and what it meant in relation to their memo of understanding, the agreement Scott abruptly terminated on how they handle investigations into police misconduct.

Instead, Scott issued a press release — a highly public statement saying the testimony "convincingly established that the San Francisco District Attorney's Office has not adhered to the MOU's provisions." In a letter to Boudin linked in the press release, Scott said "confidence has been eroded" in how the two departments work together on investigations into misuse of force.

Headlines on the press release cited "court revelations that prosecutors withheld evidence in investigations" and "evidence that DA's office systematically concealed information and evidence."

That is damning language in a press release about a district attorney who is facing a recall election in June.

Chesa and his team did a press conference on Thursday, attempting to claim that Chesa was as outraged as anyone about Hayaski's testimony, among other things, but it didn't go well.

He pointed the finger at the police chief, and got blowback like this:

On top of that, Boudin seems to have enraged the local press:

This comes as at least 59 attorneys have left the D.A.'s office during Chesa's tenure, 37 of whom simply quit, 11 of whom retired, and 11 of whom were fired, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

On top of this, victims are loudly accusing him of dereliction of duty, with some trying to sue him, and word has gotten out that the Union Square looters, who trashed tony shops in San Francisco's premier shopping district ahead of the Black Friday weekend, got let out on minor misdemeanors, following Chesa's announcement that he would charge these organized criminals with felonies.  Chesa gonna Chesa.  But the public knows about it this time.

He's got the cops mad at him.  He's got the people in his office mad at him, he's got the press mad at him, and he's certainly got the voters mad at him.  That's all by pointing fingers at others instead of himself as San Francisco circles the drain, blaming cops, engaging in sneaky pete against cops, engaging in even more of it against D.A. office employees with standards, lying, and losing his prized right to investigate cops for brutality based on his dishonorable behavior.

The hypocrisy is obvious to many:

Apparently, the police chief isn't even speaking to him anymore, based on the press accounts.  That's bad in a city that's inundated with violent crime, which Chesa keeps saying is either down or else nonexistent.

He's dropped himself into this because he's essentially a gaslighter — a liar, a misrepresenter, and a blamer.  His lies are catching up to him.  Now he's running out of gas.

As one minion of Twitter noted, he's falling to pieces.  "You can see it in his eyes."

Not exactly a guy who's up to his job.  It's chaotic enough now to make one wonder if he will actually make it to the recall.

Image: Twitter screen shot.

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