The saga over Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s seizure of hundreds of thousands of special election ballots has taken another turn, as a dispute looms over who should foot the bill for his legal defense.
Bianco’s representative last week filed a claim for damages exceeding $10,000 — arguing that Riverside County should cover his legal costs in four civil proceedings that “arose out of his official actions as Sheriff and caused him to incur reasonable attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses,” the claim reads.
“If the County rejects the claim, Sheriff Bianco will have the right to sue the County for damages, which he intends to do,” Bradley Hertz, Bianco’s attorney, wrote in an email to The Times Friday evening. He declined a phone interview.
Brooke Federico, a spokesperson for Riverside County, said the county received the claim on Oct. 16 and is determining next steps.
The roots of the issue date back to February when Bianco — then running for governor as a Republican — pursued warrants to seize about 650,000 ballots cast in last November’s Proposition 50 special election from the Riverside County registrar. Bianco said the move was so deputies could review ballots to search for alleged election fraud.
The unprecedented action — for which Bianco obtained warrants from a local GOP-endorsed judge that he’d campaigned for — was quickly rebuked by state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. Last month, the seizure was ruled unlawful by the California Supreme Court.
Should the matter proceed to litigation, a central question will be whether Bianco was acting within the scope of his duties as sheriff when he seized the ballots.
Because Bianco “meets the statutory criteria,” he should be able to recover fees and costs for retaining private counsel because Riverside County refused to provide a defense, according to Hertz.
“California law requires public entities to provide for the defense of civil actions brought against employees acting in their official capacity and arising from acts within the scope of their employment,” Hertz wrote in the email.
County elected officials have disagreed.
In April, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 against funding Bianco’s legal defense. At the time, Supervisor Jose Medina told The Riverside Record: “The criteria that all government agencies use is pretty clear about whether someone should or should not be paid for their legal defense, and that criteria is whether they are acting within or outside of the scope of their position.
“It can be inferred that most of the board didn’t feel like he was acting within the scope of his job,” Medina told the local outlet.
The exact dollar amount Bianco is seeking from the county is still being determined, according to Hertz. Riverside County has until Dec. 2 to respond to the claim, he said.
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