The Brief

Before he became an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Ebrahim Baytieh was fired as a prosecutor by District Attorney Todd Spitzer for allegedly cheating to win convictions. And Baytieh was accused by a San Diego judge last year of lying under oath. But an O.C. nonprofit that teaches youth about constitutional rights awarded Baytieh “Judge of the Year” at its annual reception last week.

The group, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Orange County, said in a statement that they honored Baytieh because he was the top volunteer for the group’s high school mock trial competition. The statement said the group had “received positive feedback from coaches and students over whose trials [Baytieh] presided.”

Some questioned whether the award was appropriate.

“It’s disgusting,” said Scott Sanders, the former public defender who uncovered the so-called “snitch scandal,” in which Baytieh was a major player. “If you’re going to have a group that’s dedicated to constitutional rights, it is not a good look to make your ‘Judge of the Year’ a guy who has been found to violate constitutional rights.”

What’s come to be known as the O.C. snitch scandal refers to the systematic use of jailhouse informants to coax confessions from defendants without their lawyers present, and then hide that evidence from defendants — both of which are illegal. The misconduct took place under former District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Spitzer, the current DA, has vowed to never let such misconduct happen again. But he has been left to deal with the fallout, including past wrongful convictions that continue to come to light.

Baytieh, who held a top position in Rackauckas’s office, repeatedly denied the allegations of misconduct.

Nevertheless, a federal civil rights investigation ultimately concluded that O.C. law enforcement “systematically violated criminal defendants’ right to counsel."

Baytieh’s prominent role in those violations has come into focus in recent years, most recently when the District Attorney’s Office was forced to drop murder charges in a decades-old case that Baytieh had initially prosecuted. The judge in that case concluded that Baytieh and his prosecution team had withheld evidence, and then lied on the stand about it in 2024. The judge called the prosecution’s behavior "reprehensible."

Orange County Asst. Public Defender Scott Sanders questions former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, now an O.C. Superior Court judge, about the use of jailhouse informants in a San Diego courtoom on June 10, 2024.

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Previously, Baytieh had been fired by Spitzer after an internal investigation found Baytieh had illegally withheld evidence in the same murder case. Baytieh would go on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.

LAist reached out to Baytieh for this story but has not received a response. Paul Meyer, a defense attorney who has represented Baytieh in recent years, declined to comment.

One-man protest from an unlikely critic

As high school students and their parents arrived at Calvary Church in Santa Ana last Thursday for the mock trial awards ceremony, Paul Wilson walked through the parking lot, handing out copies of a six-page letter, penned by Sanders, the former public defender, highlighting Baytieh’s unethical behavior and urging the Constitutional Rights Foundation not to honor the judge.

The event went on as planned.

Wilson and Sanders have become unlikely allies in a quest to root out past misconduct by O.C. law enforcement and seek justice for defendants who didn't get a fair trial.

More than a decade ago, Sanders and Wilson were on opposite sides of the courtroom. Sanders was defending Scott Dekraai, the man accused of killing Wilson’s wife, Christy, and seven others in the county’s worst mass shooting in modern history, at a salon in Seal Beach.

Dekraai was arrested in what appeared to be a slam dunk legal case. But then, while preparing for trial, Sanders discovered a secret law enforcement program that offered money and perks to jailed informants to surreptitiously question defendants, including Dekraai. Questioning a defendant without giving them the opportunity to have a lawyer present runs afoul of the Constitution. Prosecutors were also hiding evidence about informants from defendants, another constitutional violation.

As a result of Sanders’s discovery, the Dekraai case dragged on for years. In a humiliating defeat, the DA’s office was removed from prosecuting the case because of the misconduct. And in a blow to the victims’ families, a judge ruled that the death penalty would be off the table.

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice followed, during which Baytieh, then a top prosecutor, denied having any knowledge of the misconduct.

Paul Wilson hands copies of a letter detailing Judge Baytieh's role in the snitch scandal to attendees of an awards ceremony sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation of Orange County.

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After the ordeal, Wilson began crusading to reform O.C. law enforcement. “We haven’t gotten the justice we deserve,” Wilson said of himself and other victims’ family members.

That’s what led him to make copies of Sanders’s denouncement of Baytieh’s “Judge of the Year” award, and to bring them to the Constitutional Rights Foundation’s celebratory event last week, he told LAist.

“ I felt a great need to go down and let some of these students that Baytieh has been mentoring … know who this guy was and what he's all about and what he continues to be,” Wilson said.

“For years and years, those guys operated behind this shield that nobody was going to catch them,” Wilson said of Baytieh and other former O.C. prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies who were found by judges and the U.S. Department of Justice to have participated in the misconduct.

Wilson told LAist he passed out about 45 copies of Sanders’s letter before someone from the Constitutional Rights Foundation asked him to leave.

Read the letter:

Pending justice

Sanders retired last year from the O.C. Public Defender’s office after 32 years. Before he left, around 60 convictions tainted by the misuse of informants had been lessened or overturned. In one, a 69-year-old man was freed from prison after the DA's Office admitted that prosecutors withheld evidence decades ago that mitigated his guilt. The man had already spent 41 years in prison.

Sanders said there’s much more work to do — in court filings, he has detailed dozens of convictions that he argues should be revisited because of law enforcement misconduct.

Baytieh prosecuted many of those cases.

“Every one of his cases should be torn apart,” Sanders said.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving her post amid an internal investigation brought on by complaints about misconduct.

White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung announced the departure on X, writing "she has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives." Cheung said Chavez-DeRemer was taking a position in the private sector.

A senior official at the Labor Department not authorized to speak publicly about the departure said the secretary had resigned.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet member to leave during President Donald Trump's second term.

In early March, Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shortly after lawmakers on Capitol Hill berated her over her agency's handling of immigration enforcement — as well as its $220 million ad campaign featuring the secretary on horseback.

A month later, Attorney General Pam Bondi left amid simmering frustration over her leadership of the Justice Department and her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

While Chavez-DeRemer has played a far less visible role than Bondi or Noem in Trump's second term, her tenure has also been marked by controversy.

In January, the New York Post first reported that the Labor Department's inspector general was looking into complaints that Chavez-DeRemer was having an affair with a subordinate, drinking alcohol on the job and using taxpayer-funded travel to visit with friends and family members.

NPR has not independently verified the contents of the investigation.

While in office, Chavez-DeRemer spent much of her time away from Washington. A year ago, she launched her "America at Work" listening tour, an initiative that took her to all 50 states.

Chavez-DeRemer's chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, who had been on leave since January, resigned in early March. A third senior member of her staff, Melissa Robey, said in a statement issued March 26 that she had been fired a couple days earlier, after giving a four-hour interview to the Office of the Inspector General.

Meanwhile, the New York Times was first to report that Chavez-DeRemer's husband, Shawn DeRemer, an anesthesiologist in Portland, Ore., had been barred from Labor Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., after at least two staffers reported he had touched them inappropriately. Washington, D.C. police and federal prosecutors closed the investigations without bringing charges.

An unconventional choice

Trump's selection of Chavez-DeRemer to lead the Labor Department was seen by many as a concession to Teamsters President Sean O'Brien. O'Brien had been friendly with Trump through the presidential campaign, taking a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention and later declining to endorse Trump's opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

O'Brien had pushed for Chavez-DeRemer's selection, noting that she was one of only a few Republicans in Congress to have supported the PRO Act. That bill aimed to make it easier for workers to organize unions, including by overturning state Right to Work laws, which weaken unions.

At the time, Trump wrote, "Lori's strong support from both the Business and Labor communities will ensure that the Labor Department can unite Americans of all backgrounds."

Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who has already been running much of the day-to-day operations of the Labor Department, has been named acting secretary, according to Cheung's post on X.

Sonderling previously served at the Labor Department during the first Trump administration and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the Biden administration, having been nominated by Trump during his first term to fill a Republican seat.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down from the job that he inherited from the late Steve Jobs, ending a nearly 15-year reign that saw the company's market value soar by more than $3.6 trillion during an iPhone-fueled era of prosperity.

Cook, 65, will turn the CEO duties over to Apple's head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, on Sept. 1 while remaining involved with the Cupertino, California, company as executive chairman. That's similar to the transitions made by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Netflix's Reed Hastings after they ended their highly successful tenures as CEO.

"It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company," Cook said in a statement. "I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people."

Ternus, 50, has been with Apple for the past quarter century, including the past five years overseeing the engineering underlying the iPhone, iPad and Mac — a role that made him a prime candidate to succeed Cook.

"I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple's mission forward," Ternus said in a statement.

The transition to a new CEO comes at a pivotal time for Apple. Artificial intelligence has unleashed the most upheaval within the industry since Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007. Apple has gotten off to a rough start in AI after stumbling in its efforts to deliver new features built on the technology, as promised nearly two years ago.

Earlier this year, Apple finally turned to Google — an early leader in the AI race — for help making the iPhone's virtual assistant Siri into a more conversational and versatile helper.

Although he never shook the perception that he lacked Jobs' vision, Cook leveraged the popularity of the iPhone and other breakthroughs orchestrated by his predecessor to lift Apple to heights that seemed unfathomable when it was on the brink of bankruptcy during the mid-1990s.
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