As an attorney, Bill Essayli represented two January 6 defendants, arguing that men accused of crimes outside the U.S. Capitol were merely expressing their First Amendment rights. Now that he’s representing the Trump administration as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he has a very different perspective on some of the protesters opposing mass deportation.
“They are injuring our officers. It is out of control, and since the state of California, the governor, can’t control his state, then yes, the federal government is going to step in. The National Guard is on its way, and we will have peace and order in Los Angeles,” said Essayli, who is serving as Donald Trump’s interim U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.
Elected in 2022 as a Republican state assembly member representing California’s Inland Empire, the junior legislator rose quickly to a prized Justice Department post. Despite passing little legislation in his two terms in Sacramento, Essayli elevated his profile in the MAGA world by introducing bills seemingly designed to grab the attention of the far-right media world — and defending these extreme proposals loudly on Fox News.
Now he represents Trump administration’s interests in federal court in Los Angeles, where Essayli has hit demonstrators who took to the streets to protest Trump’s deportation campaign with conspiracy charges that carry stiff sentences, while claiming that he supports the right to peaceful protest.
Trump has yet to formally nominate anyone to serve as the U.S. attorney on a permanent basis. If he does tap Essayli, whose temporary appointment expires at the end of July, activists in California are calling on the state’s two U.S. senators to block his confirmation using an obscure privilege known as the “blue slip” process.
“This tradition was made for exactly these kinds of things, where an attorney is just not acceptable as an appointee. He’s not there for justice but for partisan purposes,” said Jacob Daruvala, the director of the Stop Essayli campaign and a former constituent involved in LGBTQ+ advocacy.
Essayli did not respond to a request for comment sent through his office.
Steep Charges
Essayli was sworn in as the interim U.S. attorney in Los Angeles on April 2, following his appointment by Attorney General Pam Bondi under a federal statute that allows him to stay in the post for 120 days.
He brought to the post more experience than some of the administration’s other interim appointments — such as Ed Martin in Washington, D.C. — having previously participated in the office’s prosecutions of the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting attack as an assistant U.S. attorney.
Since his appointment, however, Essayli has quickly alienated career prosecutors, protesters in Los Angeles, and top politicians across the state.
One of his first moves was to sign his name to a rare post-trial plea deal for a sheriff’s deputy who had already been convicted of excessive force for pepper-spraying a woman outside a supermarket. Soon thereafter, several federal prosecutors withdrew from the case and resigned from the office, according to the Los Angeles Times.
As the demonstrations over ICE raids in Los Angeles heated up over the past month, Essayli was out front on local media defending the administration’s aggressive response.
At one press conference, Essayli said the administration had “no choice” but to send in the National Guard.
“Our agents and our law enforcements were overwhelmed,” he said.
He also made charging decisions that riled up elected officials and grassroots protesters alike. His office slapped union leader David Huerta, the state SEIU chief, with charges that carry a six-year maximum for confronting federal agents at a worksite raid on June 6.
The charges against Huerta galvanized state Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, who was briefly detained after attempting to question Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at a June 12 press conference. Essayli was present as Secret Service agents ejected and handcuffed Padilla, who was released without being arrested. In an interview this week, Essayli accused Padilla of perpetrating a “stunt” and blamed him for the incident.
“He’s a very large person,” Essayli told Fox 11. “He’s very tall, he’s got a big demeanor. And he started charging, pushing his way through the security, shouting. We didn’t know he was here. We didn’t know who he was at the time. And then he started shouting, and then he was dragged out.”
Federal prosecutors have cast their eye well beyond powerbrokers such as Huerta. Another high-profile charge came against a member of a community organizing group called Centro CSO who was allegedly spotted on news cameras handing out face shields to demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles.
The man, Alejandro Orellana, faces charges of conspiracy to commit civil disorders and aiding and abetting civil disorders that carry up to five years in prison. As Fox News and other outlets whipped up an online frenzy about the face shield distribution — seeing it as evidence of a well-funded conspiracy behind the immigration protests — FBI agents zeroed in on Orellana and raided his house.
In a statement, a group supporting Orellana said he was guilty only of “providing aid to the community being tear-gassed.” Essayli defended the charges in the same interview with Fox 11.
“He wasn’t handing them out at the beach. He was there in downtown Los Angeles, and he’s handing them out to people who are dressed and behaving similarly to the people who have been committing riots. These are people hiding their faces, wearing black from top to bottom,” Essayli said. “Why would a peaceful protester need a face shield?”
Seeking to diminish the popular outrage over ICE raids, national Republicans have floated claims that various groups are the hidden hand funding the protests. Essayli sounded a similar note in his interview, promising that prosecutors would go after protest funders.
“We’ll get to the bottom of that,” he said.
Essayli said last week that he has already brought about 20 charges.
Defending J6
In a prior life as an attorney in private practice, Essayli espoused radically different views about the protesters who gathered around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
For a time he represented Alan Hostetter, a former police chief who came to the Capitol with a hatchet in his backpack and joined protesters who pushed through a line of police officers defending the building.
Essayli criticized prosecutors after Hostetter was charged, noting that the indictment did not directly accuse him of violence.
“He was there to support the objection to the election, which members of Congress did do. I am concerned because we are getting to a dangerous place where we’re trying to criminalize political differences,” Essayli said.
Hostetter would go on to represent himself at trial. He was convicted and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
Essayli made similar arguments in defense of Brandon Straka, a social media influencer charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct in connection with the Capitol riot.
“Defendant and others present on January 6 were engaged in a protest to express their dissatisfaction with the manner in which the 2020 presidential election was conducted and certified,” he wrote in one legal brief. “Doing so in a peaceful manner was well within their First Amendment rights.”
Prosecutors never accused Straka of entering the Capitol, but they said he helped whip up the crowd with statements on social media and in person. In a sentencing memo, Essayli accused federal prosecutors of trying to load far too much responsibility for the breach of the Capitol onto his client’s shoulders.
“There was no conspiracy. This was a demonstration that unfortunately spiraled out of control,” Essayli said.
Straka and Hostetter would go on to receive pardons from Trump.
Targeting Trans Rights
Essayli served only two and a half years in the California State Assembly, where he represented Corona and other suburbs east of Los Angeles and became the body’s first Muslim member.
During his time in the state capitol, Essayli raised his public profile despite little legislative success.
He recorded one of the highest rates in the Legislature for missed votes. Explaining his own meager track record of legislation, Essayli said he used his bills to “communicate issues” and spark debate.
His style, as much as his conservative beliefs, rankled colleagues across the aisle. He once called some Democrats in the state Legislature “pedophile protectors” for blocking his bill to end sanctuary state protections for people convicted of sex crimes against minors.
“If he can use it for political theater, he is going to do it, no matter who it hurts.”
In the Assembly, Essayli also pursed a forced outing bill for transgender students that had little chance of passing. When it went nowhere, he went on a tour of southern California school districts urging them to impose similar policies requiring staffers to inform parents if their children use names or pronouns that differ from their sex assigned at birth.
It was during the debate over that bill that Essayli and another lawmaker, Democratic Assembly Member Corey Jackson, got into a verbal confrontation that resulted in another lawmaker physically preventing Jackson from moving toward Essayli, the Sacramento Bee reported.
In an interview last week, Jackson said he had heard from some of Essayli’s Republican colleagues that they were glad to have him gone.
“At the end of the day, this guy is an ideologue, and all of his decisions are based upon ideology,” Jackson said. “It’s based upon key MAGA principles. It is that that guides his actions, not the law.”
“If he can use it for political theater, he is going to do it, no matter who it hurts,” Jackson added.
Lacking in power in the Democrat-controlled Assembly, Essayli turned to Fox News, where he became a frequent late-night guest. Weeks after Trump’s election to a second term, he appeared in the 11 p.m. slot denouncing Democratic jurisdictions that were promising not to cooperate with mass deportations.
Rare Power for Senate Democrats
Under Senate tradition, members of the home-state delegation are given an effective veto over U.S. attorney nominees via the “blue slip” process. That means Essayli’s chance of winning the nomination could rest on convincing Padilla and his fellow Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, according to University of Richmond law school professor Carl Tobias, an expert on the confirmation process.
“If either senator says no from California, it’s over for this nominee. That may be the hardest obstacle,” Tobias said. “That’s what the White House has to work with: Padilla.”
Padilla, Schiff, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
“I think Donald Trump was trying to choose the most anti-California person he could, and that was Bill Essayli.”
LGBTQ+ activists have been among those urging Padilla and Schiff to block Essayli if Trump formally nominates him for the job on a permanent basis.
Daruvala, the Inland Empire resident mounting the Stop Essayli campaign, said he was motivated by Essayli’s position on trans kids’ rights. He believes Essayli received the interim appointment essentially to anger state Democrats.
“I think Donald Trump was trying to choose the most anti-California person he could, and that was Bill Essayli,” he said.
Even if Essayli never receives Senate confirmation, however, he could find himself rewarded by Trump. Martin, the short-lived U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., received an appointment as the Justice Department’s top pardon attorney after receiving pushback in the U.S. Senate.