A former Los Angeles official agreed Thursday to plead guilty to a felony charge after fabricating a bomb threat against the City Hall he was hired to protect as the deputy mayor of public safety.
Brian K. Williams, 61, who rose from the city attorney’s office to become a deputy in two mayoral administrations, admitted in a plea deal that he had concocted a bomb threat and called it in to City Hall last October, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said in a statement.
Under the terms of the deal, the statement said, Mr. Williams — who oversaw public safety for Mayor Karen Bass until she put him on administrative leave in December — has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony charge of “information with threats regarding fire and explosives.”
“In an era of heated political rhetoric that has sometimes escalated into violence, we cannot allow public officials to make bomb threats,” said Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California.
At Los Angeles City Hall, where Mr. Williams had been considered by colleagues a steady and affable presence, a spokesman for Mayor Bass expressed disappointment. “Like many, we were shocked when these allegations were first made and we are saddened by this conclusion,” Zach Seidl, the spokesman, said.
During the January fires that devastated Los Angeles, supporters of the mayor widely blamed her initial absence on the lack of a strong public safety adviser, who might have briefed her more fully than the fire chief, whom she later demoted.
Federal prosecutors did not offer a motive, but Mr. Williams’s plea agreement outlined an elaborate process that he had used to hide the origin of the bomb threat, which was reported on Oct. 3.
At the time the first anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israelis was approaching, and rallies and demonstrations protesting Israel’s devastating retaliatory strikes on Gaza were disrupting major cities around the world.
According to the plea agreement, Mr. Williams, while participating in a virtual morning meeting, used a voice application on his personal cellphone to call his city phone. He then called the Los Angeles Police Department to say that an unknown man had just threatened to bomb City Hall.
Ten minutes later, federal prosecutors said, he texted the mayor’s office: “Bomb threat: I received phone call on my city cell at 10:48 am this morning. The male caller stated that ‘he was tired of the city support of Israel, and he has decided to place a bomb in City Hall. It might be in the rotunda.’”
The Los Angeles Police Department quickly determined that there was no immediate danger, officials said.
Later, prosecutors said, Mr. Williams showed the police a record of the incoming call on his city phone, which appeared as a blocked number. “In fact, that incoming call record was the call Williams had placed to himself from the Google Voice application on his personal cellphone,” federal officials said.
Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Los Angeles field office, said in a statement that Mr. Williams had “not only betrayed the residents of Los Angeles, but responding officers, and the integrity of the office itself.”
Lawyers for Mr. Williams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Officials said that the charge to which Mr. Williams is expected to plead guilty carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. He is expected to make his initial appearance in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles “in the coming weeks,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Williams, a resident of Pasadena, has served for more than a quarter-century in local government in Los Angeles, including as an assistant city attorney for several years before he was appointed as a deputy mayor for Mayor James K. Hahn, who held office from 2001 to 2005.
Mr. Williams went on to hold a variety of civic posts, including president of Junior Achievement of Southern California, a major nonprofit focusing on financial literacy for children, and executive director of the Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission.
Appointed to the Bass administration in 2023, he oversaw the Fire Department, the Police Department, the Los Angeles World Airport Police and the Emergency Management Department.
He has been on administrative leave since December, when the F.B.I., which had taken over the case from the Los Angeles police because of the department’s working relationship with Mr. Williams, searched his Pasadena home.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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