Part 141: City Attorney Showdown – Hydee Feldstein-Soto vs. Michelle McGinnis

Published December 14. Updated December 28, 2024.

Dec 14, 2024

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto during this year’s Kingdom Day Parade. (Photo: LA City Attorney Instagram)

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

A brewing legal battle between former Chief of the Criminal Branch Michelle McGinnis and City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto is raising new questions about both the politics and operations of justice in Los Angeles. Last summer, the lawsuit filed by McGinnis against drew coverage from the Los Angeles Times, a fact noted on the webpage of McGinnis’s attorneys at McNicholas & McNicholas, LLP, a firm known for representing law enforcement officials in the ersatz City of Angels. “Los Angeles Times Reports on Retaliation Claim Filed Against LA City Attorney’s Office: Criminal Branch Chief’s Career Dismantled for Reporting Legal Violations” reads the law firms take on the matter. The original report by Times journalist David Zahniser notes McGinnis, a City employee since 1993, on April 22 “was escorted out of the building in front of her colleagues, forced to hand over her laptop and placed on administrative leave, according to the claim.” Not all claims in Los Angeles are equal, that’s for sure, but now things are heating up!

In a new sworn declaration dated December 2, the City Attorney herself, who won election in 2022, goes after McGinnis directly in a way that should concern us all. “Beginning in late 2023 and early 2024, I noticed changes in Plaintiff’s attitude and behavior,” Feldstein-Soto states, adding, “Plaintiff seemed less engaged in her job responsibilities.” Feldstein-Soto says that McGinnis became disconnected and “refused to report to Chief Deputy Denise Mills, who supervised all of the branch chiefs.” There’s a companion statement from Mills too, but the core of the heightened dispute revolves around the management of a critical criminal database known as “CLETS” (Criminal Law Enforcement Telecommunications System). According to Feldstein-Soto, when she took office, there were 449 individuals with access to the database, which collates information from national crime databases as well as state systems. This apparently included former employees from the office under prior City Attorney Mike Feuer and had grown during the COVID-19 pandemic when employees worked from home. Our current City Attorney claims to have now slashed access to only 150 users under “9 Originating Agency Identifiers, or “ORI.” Feldstein-Soto states that this was non-compliant with federal and state guidelines for the management of such information. There are no signs of any system breaches.

Whether anyone would know though is the million-dollar question, because assuredly some people would love to be able to access such information. Feldstein-Soto states that this was non-compliant with federal guidelines established by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as well as the California Department of Justice (CADOJ). The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which submits misdemeanor investigations to the City Attorney’s office, issued the following statement late Friday: “While we are aware of the ongoing court discussions involving the City Attorney’s office, LAPD does not comment on matters currently being addressed in legal proceedings.” The spokesman added in response to a question on if the City Attorney had met with new LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, “At this time, there is no information to release related to any interagency meeting between Chief McDonnell and the City Attorney.” The City Attorney claims that McGinnis deliberately undermined her at a January 22, 2024, meeting with LAPD Command Staff, including with former Chief Michel Moore.

“I encountered Plaintiff on a video call with members of my executive team dramatically explaining why, in her view, I could not possibly attend the meeting or answer questions,” City Attorney Feldstein-Soto states, adding that her time was slashed on agenda from 45 minutes to only 10 minutes. Feldstein-Soto states that the situation was so unacceptable that upon learning “that the Office had dozens and possibly hundreds of active email accounts in the names of former employees, including lawyers who had been retired from the Office for years,” with urgency, “I took immediate steps to order those accounts deactivated or resigned.” A request for comment to the City Attorney’s office was not immediately returned, and they’ve previously declined to comment on the matter to the Times, citing a policy to “not comment on personnel matters, internal investigations or potential disciplinary proceedings.” So what’s the deal?

The sworn declaration from Hydee Feldstein-Soto describes a breakfast meeting on February 27, 2024, including with Chief Deputy Mills and Criminal Branch Chief Michelle McGinnis, stating that “I was informed that Office employees were still accessing criminal databases remotely in violation of CADOJ and FBI guidelines.” Feldstein-Soto alleges that McGinnis told her “she would have nothing else to do with the CADOJ compliance issues and she was ‘done,’ and claimed that it was Chief Deputy Mills’ and my problem.” According to Feldstein-Soto at least, “In her words, "I'm done. This is your problem and I am not doing this.” The lawsuit had originally made headlines for McGinnis’s account of how Feldstein-Soto had pushed to target People’s City Council organizer Ricci Sergienko, who himself was recently admitted to the California State Bar without any evidence for having been a masked pro-Palestinian protestor, “in a video of a protest late last year outside the Westside home of ‘an Israeli lobbyist,’” so laughably that even the LAPD wouldn’t go along with the City Attorney’s recommendation.

The civil case number is 24STCV25077, and the next hearing is set for a 9:00 am date on February 5, 2025 in Department 52 of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, on both the demurrer, a claim that the lawsuit is defective, and an anti-SLAPP motion, which stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. The essence of the argument that the City Attorney’s office plans to make is that Michelle McGinnis is simply a disgruntled employee who is overstating her case that she was retaliated against as a whistleblower, much less somehow discriminated against as an African-American woman, and who is simply making a retaliation claim to cover up her failure to perform job duties. That, in this case, was set to appear before Judge Armen Tanzarian recently had a hearing on December 5 that seems to have mostly revolved around the fact that the City was about 30 minutes late in not meeting a filing deadline. Love the legal small ball.

In case you weren’t aware, Superior Court now to a great extent operates on a teleconference basis, so for the most part, unless you’re looking to kill time or otherwise are far enough along in your case, the lawyers are dialing it in. Sadly, in Los Angeles we’re gravely short of journalists of all types, and so it was good to read that at the Times, our so-called paper of record, there will be one new journalist joining the City Hall beat, editorial board member Tony Barboza, who, in rejection of newspaper meddling by owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, resigned his position and plans to take up City Hall reporting citing “new restrictions and censorship that did not exist a month ago.” What’s going on at the Los Angeles Times much less in the City Attorney’s Office remains deeply unclear, and assuredly Michelle McGinnis, who is a more well-established attorney than Patrick Soon-Shiong is as a newspaper attorney, is going to stand and fight for her claims.

A highly qualified attorney, McGinnis, in addition to having served as a criminal prosecutor, has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and as well within the Los Angeles Unified School District. Workplace disputes being what they are, it’s always tempting to jump to the conclusion that generally the employer was right; after all, the boss is the boss, but if the claim made by Feldstein-Soto that McGinnis was so juvenile as to have essentially neglected her workplace duties with almost childlike language is true, frankly, I’ll be surprised. It’s no secret that in the world of workplaces, employers resort to all kinds of contortions to avoid responsibility. That fingerpointing on this level is occurring in open court is beyond curious, as is the City Attorney’s disclosure that apparently securing crucial law enforcement information wasn’t a priority under former City Attorney Mike Feuer, who was lucky to avoid prosecution by the FBI for having engaged in collusive litigation in regards to the Department of Water and Power. The interesting part is that Michelle McGinnis isn’t even the only person running out of the City Attorney’s office screaming fire, with a number of other claims having been made.

In an August report, Times journalist David Zahniser reported that another employee, Sean Tyler, had backed up Michelle McGinnis’s claim that City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto has been “contributing to a climate of fear within the office,” including being “accompanied by an armed LAPD officer as she conducts business in City Hall East.” Tyler further claims that Feldstein-Soto “could be searching through the emails of employees in other city offices and departments” and is sweeping for listening devices. McGinnis had alleged that Feldstein-Soto was also drunk on one occasion, a claim that the latter denied as a mere rumor. Tyler "was hired in 2018 and works in the office’s technology and library services unit,” and of course his claims were denied as “flamboyent allegations” by the City Attorney’s office, according to Zahniser’s report. In the McGinnis case, Feldstein-Soto had sought representation by the firm Miller Barondess LLP only to end up with Willkie Farr & Gallager LLP, still likely quite expensive.

Within the December 2 filing accompanying the sworn declarations, the City’s outside counselors state about McGinnins that “Plaintiff’s administrative or human resources 'reports’ were not protected activities because she had no reasonable cause to believe she was disclosing a violation of law by relaying information as part of her job duties.” In the fallout after the February 27 breakfast meeting, Chief Deputy Denise Mills states that along with the City Attorney, she had directed McGinnis to work with Dan Jeffries, “a retired Assistant City Attorney who had technical expertise and had returned to the Office as a volunteer.” In addition to accusing McGinnis of holding an unauthorized staff "Retreat," Mills states that McGinnis undermined the relationship with the technical expert to the point that on March 16 he had stopped taking “my calls” and texted Mills “that he wanted to 'stay out of it and not get involved in the current situation.”

I couldn’t blame him! From the sounds of it, the City Attorney’s office is about as dysfunctional as that alleged to have existed under former District Attorney George Gascón, with employees touting new DA Nathan Hochman is everything but a workplace savior. Feldstein-Soto and Mills also accuse McGinnis of having unauthorized “external personal businesses and positions for which she had not received approval.” This appears to be related to McGinnis’s work in childcare centers and compliance business, for which she gave an interview in 2018 stating that “And about midway into the legal profession, being involved in this huge machine that incarcerates people and punishes and deters and does what the legal system does, I had a change of heart, went back and repurchased at market value my parents’ childcare centres.” This is further documented in a 2007 Los Angeles Times article profiling her mother and again in 2008 profiling McGinnis’s work with LAUSD under City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo to reform “Scared Straight” programs. So the outside work was nothing really new. Chief Deputy Mill’s declaration ends by concluding, “On April 22, 2024, as a result of Plaintiff’s neglect of basic job responsibilities, Plaintiff was placed on leave pending an investigation into her misconduct.”

For her part, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto has touted her work in South Los Angeles and on Figueroa Street addressing human trafficking, including that of minors. She’s experienced employment issues in the past with the firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP amidst a contentious divorce, with the issues resulting in her allegedly not being allowed to enter CitiBank branches after a paranoid meltdown, according to court records. She’s also been heavily criticized for attempting to restrict the California Public Records Act while losing a lawsuit over the release of LAPD officer pictures. So the City Attorney is certainly no angel of transparency. A showdown in court over credibility might not go exactly the way that City Attorney thinks, no matter how much legal firepower she brings to the table. Whether the City should be funding her defense was undoubtedly behind City Council resistance to funding it last August. Where the City Attorney came up with outside counsel money after getting only 10% of her request remains unknown.

Michelle McGinnis has alleged that Hydee Feldstein-Soto based prosecutorial decisions on “personal relationships” and “perceived political gain.” To date beyond the Sergienko case these haven’t gotten less hazy. Feldstein-Soto supported Rick Caruso over Mayor Karen Bass in the 2022 campaign, and as she gears up for the 2026 campaign she’ll likely have to do better than the $2,006,064.94 she raised in 2022 to keep her job. Who will stand up against Feldstein-Soto remains to be seen, but they’ll be battling the rightward forces in the City of Los Angeles with whom she’s both sought to support as well as placate. Being City Attorney isn’t an easy job, but it’d be nice to have one whom many don’t think is corrupt and whom is constantly batting with her subordinates. Judge Tamzarian, an appointee of former Governor Jerry Brown, should get down to business when he takes up this case next year and flesh out the facts.

Bothering the CALDOJ, much less the FBI, on a Friday and Saturday is undoubtedly a risky business, much less moving ahead of them on a story. If former City Attorney Mike Feuer, who had his phone searched by the U.S. Attorney’s office has anything to add, I’m sure he’ll be the first to let us know. If all this boils down to is that basically he had a hard time transitioning the office back from COVID-19 and work-from-home that’d be a good resolution, otherwise it would be time to start asking hard questions, and even auditing if anyone in the City Attorney’s was able to improperly obtain and use criminal database information to their advantage. You know how people love to look things up! About McGinnis the City’s outside counsels say, “Plaintiff clearly subscribes to the theory that the best defense is a good offense.” Thanks lawyers!

UPDATE 1: A spokeswoman for the FBI Los Angeles office, Laura Eimiller deferred to the City Attorney’s Office for comment, stating that for “information about FBI guidelines, you would have to make a formal request to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. where administrative policies are established.”

UPDATE 2: CAL DOJ issued the following statement through its Press Office: “DOJ was not aware of and has not been involved in a lawsuit between Ms. McGinnis and the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office. DOJ routinely communicates with California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS) subscribing agencies about various issues. Information about CLETS compliance or security issues is generally subject to confidentiality requirements.”

Link: Los Angeles Times Reports on Retaliation Claim Filed Against LA City Attorney’s Office: Criminal Branch Chief’s Career Dismantled for Reporting Legal Violations

Link: Veteran city prosecutor accuses L.A. City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto of legal, ethical violations

Link: LAPD voiced concerns about city attorney’s push to charge a protester, memo says

Link: Katie Robertson Tweet RE: Tony Barboza City Hall Beat

Link: Documents will be unsealed in L.A. city attorney and DWP corruption case, judge rules

Link: L.A. city attorney is searching through employee emails, creating a climate of fear, staffer alleges

Link: Underserved Child Care Communities and Compliance. What’s the relation?

Link: Girls home founder salvaged many lives

Link: Secure in their studies

Link: After police photo release, L.A. city attorney tries to weaken public records law

Link: L.A. city attorney wanted $500,000 for outside law firm. The City Council gave her only 10%