The ethics commission hit Los Angeles City Councilmember John Lee with a $138,000 fine in connection to a lavish 2017 trip to Las Vegas.
The Los Angeles Times reports the case evolves around Lee accepting pricey meals, expensive bottle service, a hotel room, transportation and gambling chips totaling $1,000. These are all charges Lee denies.
“The Commission rubber-stamped a biased investigation and blatantly ignored all relevant facts, including that the FBI never charged me for backdating any checks or aiding Mitchell Englander’s 2017 illegal activities,” he said in a statement to LAist.
At the time, Lee worked as City Councilman Mitchell Englander’s chief of staff. A judge sentenced Englander to 14-month prison sentence after he pled guilty to providing false information to the FBI.
Englander resigned
Englander too was accused of accepting lavish gifts. In Lee’s case, he’s accused of accepting gifts from businessman Andy Wang, architect and developer Chris Pak and lobbyist Michael Bai.
In a statement about the ethic commission’s decision, commission president Manjusha Kulkarni said “It is essential to a properly functioning democracy that those who serve in positions of leadership and influence act in the best interests of the public, with the highest level of integrity, and not in ways that are designed to deceive and promote self-interests.”
Registration is closed for Common Ground: Building Together conference and gala award banquet in San Francisco on January 24. A shoutout to our planning committee: Jane Chin, Frank Mah, Jeannie Young, Akemi Tamanaha, Nathan Soohoo, Mark Young, Dave Liu, and Yiming Fu.
We are published by the non-profit Asian American Media Inc and supported by our readers along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AARP, The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation, The Asian American Foundation & Koo and Patricia Yuen of the Yuen Foundation.
Find additional content on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram ,Tiktok, X, and YouTube. Please consider interning or joining our staff. Don’t miss a single headline. Subscribe for free.
