A very light slap on the wrist for corrupt former Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu – Daily News

There’s this charming thing that dogs do, some of them: after relieving themselves, maybe on grass, on dirt or concrete, they give a little kick, as though they were covering up their mess.  It’s just a thoughtless gesture, passed down through countless dog generations, and no grass or concrete is actually moved.  But they feel they’ve done their due diligence, and trot on carefree.

It was a lot like that when Mayor Harry Sidhu’s prosecutors fretted dutifully over the disparity between the light sentencing of white-collar crimes committed by the rich, powerful and well-represented, versus the harsh sentences regularly meted out to the working class… and then, despite their fretting, still went  ahead and recommended a measly sentence of eight months in prison for Harry’s substantive white-collar felonies.

And it was even more like that when Judge John Holcomb cut that sentence in a quarter, giving the disgraced Mayor a mere two months while also bemoaning our two-tiered justice system. Two months. What regular folks might get if they shoplifted.

Remember this was Mayor Sidhu here, who helped engineer the sale of Anaheim’s most valuable property, the Stadium, for what many consider hundreds of millions under its value, a deal so favorable to the Angels that he reasonably expected a million in grateful campaign spending.  Also remember that last year the Angels sued us Anaheim taxpayers for $5 million over the whole Sidhu debacle.  And remember that, limited as his charges may have been, this was the mere iceberg-tip of his public destructiveness.

But naturally Sidhu hoped to get no time in prison at all, and while he claimed to be very ashamed and sorry for his crimes, his team spent an hour Friday trying to show how these crimes were really no big deal:

• The insider information he shared with the Angels team was “really just public knowledge”… even though Harry considered it valuable enough to be worth a million in campaign contributions and then took pains to hide it when he learned the FBI was on to him;
• The documents he deleted in panic from his computer were “not essential or probative” … because the FBI was able to find them elsewhere no thanks to him – so no harm no foul, right?
• The request for a million dollars in campaign contributions was just humorous “boasting” … even though he repeated it three times to his political director Todd Ament and even instructed him to start with a request for three million so he could haggle down.  Still, no harm no foul again, because the request was never made – well, duh, Ament was already state’s evidence.  

Judge Holcomb didn’t fall for most of that, and affirmed that Sidhu “betrayed the city of Anaheim, deleted evidence and lied,” and deserved at least a period of incarceration.  This was a relief, as the prosecution was represented by one Melissa Rabbani, who didn’t say much except to praise Sidhu for quickly resigning as Mayor in 2022 and apologizing a lot.

Resigning?  As I remember he didn’t have much choice, all his colleagues were calling for his head.  And apologizing?  He should apologize to Councilman Jose Moreno and fired City Manager Chris Zapata, for publicly calling them liars and traitors to the City, during the People’s Homeless Task Force Brown Act Lawsuit.  Newsflash – it was Harry who was lying; the Stadium Sale was indeed decided on in closed session, a Brown Act violation.

And contrite?  In the year after his resignation Harry stonewalled the JL investigation by withholding the passcode to his iPhone.  Who knows what other misdeeds of his own and others he covered up that way?  This was a corruption investigation unanimously called for by his former colleagues, and the City’s taxpayers spent $1.5 million on it.  And this “model defendant” successfully hamstrung it.  Nobody mentions that.

Incautious, vainglorious, Harry Sidhu is also a useful fall guy for smarter people, like Jeff Flint and Todd Ament.  When are they coming to justice, we wonder, these two swindlers whom the FBI caught expressing embarrassment at Harry’s mindless obedience to them.  On the other hand they can’t be accused of betraying Anaheim voters, like Sidhu or the four lockstep Councilmembers – Brandman, Kring, O’Neil & Faessel – without whom Sidhu couldn’t have done nearly so much damage.