Legal Question in Legal Ethics in California
Is this fraud?:
A local, elected government official, is also a professional marketer.
In her role as an elected official, she, using her professional marketing skills, writes and produces (using public funds) an official newsletter from that government agency, that she then mails to every property owner in her District.
In that newsletter, she gushes about how "on schedule" a huge public works project, that the District is proposing, is.
The newsletter does its job, and convinces the town's voters to pass a tax assessment to fund the "on schedule" "drop dead gorgeous" project.
However, a few years later, subsequent investigation reveals that at the time that the elected official produced that newsletter, the project that she's raving about in that newsletter had ALREADY FAILED, and her own government agency documents show she KNEW it had already failed when she produced that newsletter.
In other words, the elected official used the town's public money to produce a newsletter that lied to "every" property owner in the town, about a huge public works project, and those lies played a major role in tricking the town's voters into passing the assessment -- an assessment that they are STILL paying today (and will be paying for the next 20 years) for a public works project that never even came close to working, and, in fact, had already failed at the time of that newsletter.
A knowingly false newsletter, produced by an elected official, solely to dupe property owners into voting for a tax assessment, leads to the passing of that assessment, but the public works project that the assessment was for, had ALREADY FAILED at the time of that newsletter.
Is that fraud?
Thank you in advance for your answer!
1 Answer from Attorneys
Is it fraud? Yes. Is there anything you can do about it? No. Government officials are immune from liability for that kind of fraud. So unless you can show that she somehow illegally benefited from the passage of the assessment, by some violation of conflict of interest laws or other bribery or corruption, independent of the false newsletter, she did nothing that the law can punish.
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