San Bernardino DA Pulls Spitzer Endorsement, Too. No Major County Endorsements Remain.
Jason Anderson, the District Attorney of San Bernardino County, California’s 5th most populous county with over 2 million people, has withdrawn his endorsement of Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, following a newly surfaced video of Spitzer repeating the N-word three times during a keynote address to Iranian American Bar Association.
“I have withdrawn my endorsement,” Anderson said to OC Watch.
Mr. Anderson told OC Watch that the N-word should not be repeated in any context. When OC Watch asked Mr. Anderson what he would say in a scenario where he was presenting to a group about Hate Crimes Cases where a defendant used the N-word, Mr. Anderson said: “You just don’t say the word. That’s just all there is to say about it.”
The video of Spitzer emerged in the wake of a controversy last week involving Spitzer allegedly riffing about why Black men date white women during the course of a recent meeting over whether the office should seek to execute a Black man. He also said that while in college, he “knew for sure that this black student did so on purpose to get himself out of these bad circumstances and situations.”
Earlier this week, a 29-year-veteran of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office also alleged in a lawsuit Spitzer assigned a prosecutor to a case “because she was African-American,” and, in a separate incident, told a room full of senior prosecutors, “I need a brown or a black face there” to go with him to a meeting with the NAACP.
As these controversies mount, the California chapter of the NAACP called for Spitzer’s “immediate resignation”. So has The National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial, along with the Los Angeles chapter’s President and CEO, Michael Lawson. “He has lost the trust of those he is sworn to serve and must step down,” Urban League President Morial said.
The California Women’s Leadership Association, a Republican political action committee rescinded their endorsement of Mr. Spitzer earlier this week. Spitzer also has faced a flood of elected prosecutors retracting their endorsements. The current Spitzer retraction list includes:
San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan
Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin
Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley
San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe
Amador County District Attorney Todd Riebe
Humboldt County District Attorney Maggie Fleming
Inyo County District Attorney Tom Hardy told OC Watch that he never endorsed Spitzer in the first place, despite Spitzer listing him as an endorser on his campaign website.
Additionally, what appears as a series of silent un-endorsements have also hit Spitzer. Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, who also serves as president of the powerful California District Attorneys Association, and San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow have been removed from Spitzer’s endorsements page on his campaign website. Neither of these elected prosecutors have responded to OC Watch’s multiple requests for information about their endorsement status.