Chad Bianco defends getting warrant from judge who praised him

from Jeanne KuangCalMatters

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Riverside County Sheriff and Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco has denied wrongdoing after his office was authorized to confiscate and count hundreds of thousands of ballots by a judge who publicly praised him, calling it a coincidence.

“It’s impossible to know who’s the judge on duty that day,” he said in an interview Thursday, in which he defended his controversial investigation into alleged “improperties” in the 2025 Proposition 50 election as like any other criminal investigation. “It happened that a judge was appointed.”

The Bianco investigation and seizure of more than 600,000 ballots from the Riverside County voter registry last month alarmed election experts. Since Feb. 9, Bianco’s office has received three court-approved orders allowing him to confiscate and count 1,000 boxes of ballots released last November.

Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a court filing that Bianco seized 426 additional boxes of election materials this week.

Never has a sheriff seized ballots en masse for a criminal investigation in state history, Bonta said in documents.

On Thursday, Bonta filed his second lawsuit to stop his efforts; The UCLA Voters’ Rights Project and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra also filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court on behalf of four Riverside County voters, claiming Bianco’s actions violated state laws governing who is allowed to process and count votes.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber also condemned the ballot seizures, particularly Bianco’s plan to have sheriff’s deputies who are not trained in election administration count the ballots.

Bianco said Thursday that he expects a judge to appoint a special monitor to oversee the count, which he hopes will take about a week.

Bianco’s move comes as the Trump administration continues to press baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election and reflects In February, the FBI seized 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia.

Bianco, who is a Trump supporter, is keeping pace with Republican Steve Hilton for leadership in the race for governor. Bonta and Weber, both Democrats, are also running for re-election.

Bianco insists his efforts are unrelated to his campaign and not intended to re-contest the outcome of the state’s special election, in which 56 percent of Riverside County voters approved Proposition 50, the Democratic ballot measure to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts.

Voter fraud remains rare

Voter fraud is rare in California and nationally, multiple surveys have found. In Riverside County, Bianco has been studying the election system since late 2022 and said he has “not found any massive election fraud in Riverside County.”

But earlier this year, a local election activist group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team told Bianco’s office that election officials had inflated the number of ballots counted.

Secretary of Voters Art Tinoco told county supervisors last month the group relied on incomplete data on the number of ballots, which did not include confidential, provisional and other ballots. Bianco on Thursday called the explanation “some kind of apology.”

Bonta’s first attempt to stop the recount failed on Tuesday when an appeals court dismissed the case. That case revealed that the orders allowing the ballots to be seized were signed by Riverside Superior Court Judge Jay Keel, whom Bianco supported when Keel ran for the bench in 2022.

Kiel is a former Riverside County deputy district attorney who ran for judge with three other prosecutors. They were jointly supported by the local Republican Party, Bianco, law enforcement groups and Our Watch, a conservative group run by local pastor Tim Thompson that aims to “increase the influence of Judeo-Christian values” in government.

Bianco, who also appeared in our watch videos and spearheaded a fundraising campaign for the Thompson Political Expenditure Committee, wrote on social media in 2022 that Kiel and his fellow prosecutors should be elected judges “to help rein in political activism destroying the judiciary.”

In an interview with Thompson on Our Watch’s social media pages in 2022, Keel praised his then-boss, District Attorney Mike Hestrin, and Bianco.

“The people of Riverside County I don’t think sometimes realize how fortunate they are,” Kiel said. “These two are incredible when it comes to law enforcement… We are so fortunate to have Chad Bianco.”

The warrant requests were assigned to Kiel because he was the “duty judge” that day, said Karim Gongora, a spokesman for Riverside County Superior Court. Gongora declined to comment on Keel’s ties to the sheriff. Kiel could not be reached for comment.

California courts typically assign duty judges on a rotating schedule to hear warrant requests from police each day, and it’s common for prosecutors and law enforcement to know who’s on duty, prosecutors in several other counties told CalMatters. Gongora did not say whether that schedule has been circulated to Riverside County law enforcement.

Bianco bristled when asked if he knew Keel was on the job on Feb. 9, the day his office received its first warrant, and when asked if their mutual approval constituted a conflict of interest. He said deputy sheriffs never know which judge is on duty.

“The idea that I’m corrupt because the Democrats are corrupt and they expect everyone to be corrupt just like them is absolutely false,” he said.

Orders remain under seal

Jerry Feinman, a former Riverside County prosecutor who will retire in 2021 and who now lives out of state, said prosecutors usually know who the judge on duty is, but deputies usually walk into court without knowing. Feinman has worked with both Kiel and Bianco, and said Kiel’s previous assignments as a narcotics prosecutor indicated he would be “very familiar with the legal requirements of the warrant.”

Bianco also refused to release the warrants. Under state statute, search warrants and affidavits police make with evidence to support their investigation must be executed within 10 days of being issued, after which they become public records. But Kiel has ordered the warrants sealed, which judges can do in limited circumstances to protect confidential whistleblowers. Feinman said the warrants are usually sealed so as not to alert a suspect to an investigation.

Bonta’s office has reviewed the affidavits and warrants and claims in his lawsuits that they fail to establish sufficient evidence of any wrongdoing to justify seizing the ballots.

“That’s all the more compelling reason that these warrant packages should be made public, that people should be able to see them for themselves,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. “It should be the rule, not the exception, that warrant packages are open to the public.”

Bianco refused, despite the now-public nature of the investigation, and said 90 percent of the warrants he’s obtained in his thirty-year law enforcement career are sealed. He chastised reporters for treating the investigation differently than “a domestic violence case, a murder case, a robbery case.”

“Don’t act like this is unusual,” he said. “You’re all making it political. We’re doing the same thing we do every day, and I’m not going to justify it to people who have no idea or who make things up to make it look like we’re doing something unusual or illegal or covert or whatever. This is normal law enforcement.”

Anat Rubin and Kayla Michalovich contributed reporting.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.