Supervisor Moorlach addresses Bustamante arrest in email update

Subject: MOORLACH UPDATE — Carlos Bustamante — July 3, 2012
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 21:45:01 +0000
From: Moorlach, John

To refresh your memory, you may want to reread MOORLACH UPDATE — Closed Sessions — March 14, 2012, which I am providing below. The reason I refer to this UPDATE is that I was unable to comment publicly on this issue until a thorough investigation had been concluded. The District Attorney, Tony Rackauckas, and his staff completed their investigation and arrested Santa Ana Councilman and former Orange County employee Carlos Bustamante yesterday evening.

When people ask me how it is going, I tell them that this is the busiest year to date. Dealing with the matter covered below certainly consumed a significant amount of my time. It started with the nonsense that our Internal Audit Department discovered after a lengthy investigation from a fraud hotline call that just turned my stomach. It generated countless meetings and resulted in the Board turning over the information in our possession to the District Attorney. The apparent failures in judgment in this case are staggering and massively disappointing. Once again, another elected person who should have known better has become a major source of disappointment.

I want to thank Peter Hughes, the County’s Internal Audit Department Director, for persevering through a very contentious investigation in spite of the stonewalling that he endured. I want to thank my colleagues for addressing this matter in a swift and professional manner once it came to our attention through the Internal Audit Department’s report. And, I want to thank Tony Rackauckas and his staff for pursuing this high-profile case against an elected official in Orange County.

I believe my quotes in the OC Register article at the bottom adequately express my views (I’m providing the online version, as there have been several iterations of the piece).

MOORLACH UPDATE — Closed Sessions — March 14, 2012:

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