Lawsuit: San Francisco DA carried firearm on commercial flights, fired whistleblowers

by DCG

 

SF DA George Gascon: Hypocrite and Bully

This is so typical of the political elite: Do As I Say, Not As I Do.

George Gascon is the demorat district attorney for San Francisco. He was appointed by fellow gun grabber Gavin Newsom in January 2011 to succeed gun-grabber Kamala Harris and was elected DA of San Francisco in November 2011.

He is also a rabid gun grabber.

In 2013, Gascon wrote a piece for Politico entitled, “Time to ban large gun clips.”

An excerpt from his piece proves he has mastered the fear-mongering, gun-grabber terminology: “These “assault magazines” are devices that hold more than 10 bullets. They were designed and manufactured for military use to allow soldiers to kill the maximum number of enemy combatants without reloading.”

He supports San Francisco’s latest stab at the Second Amendment which includes banning the possession of firearms at gatherings like parades or protests, even when they are relatively small.

Now SF Gate reports that the Gascon flew commercial while carrying a firearm and fired whistleblowers who reported his unlawful actions to TSA. From their report:

A former senior investigator says he was fired for blowing the whistle on his boss, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who he alleged carried a gun while flying — in violation of federal law.

Gascón reacted with a “pattern of retaliation and harassment” that culminated in the termination of senior investigator Henry G. McKenzie on Oct. 30, 2017, according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

In the Nov. 24 filing, McKenzie says that Gascón — who is also the city’s former police chief — took a gun on board commercial flights repeatedly after becoming D.A. in January 2012.

According to the suit, members of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office Investigators Association, which included McKenzie, discussed the “need to blow the whistle” on Gascón’s potential criminal violations in early 2017.

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Sometime that spring, an investigator in the district attorney’s office contacted the Transportation Security Administration to report Gascón’s alleged unlawful travel with a firearm.

“The issue is flying armed while not being a peace officer, and flying armed when there was no need to” for law enforcement purposes, McKenzie’s attorney, Fulvio Cajina, told us.

Under federal law, peace officers who are armed while traveling are required to state that they are doing so for good reason — a reason related to their work — under penalty of perjury. The investigators believed that, as district attorney, Gascón was no longer an active peace officer and had no need to travel with a gun.

In the months after the TSA was notified, five of the Investigators Association’s seven-member governing body were either terminated or reprimanded. In all, according to the suit, “nearly half of the district attorney’s investigative department — or about 14 staff members — “were either terminated or forced to resign under intense pressure within a five-month span,” the suit said.

At a Sept. 5, 2017, training day at the Lake Merced shooting range, Gascón allegedly told the entire investigations staff that “there was a ‘cancer’ growing in the Bureau of Investigations and he was going to cut it out,” according to the suit.

In what was described as a rant, Gascón told the group that if anyone was going to talk to The Chronicle’s Matier & Ross, “they better make sure they had their facts straight” and that he would “be around a lot longer than anyone else” at the bureau.

The next day, on Sept. 6, 2017, McKenzie says he was placed on administrative leave and that an internal affairs investigation was pending.

McKenzie alleges he was removed from his job because he “was either a whistle-blower or had aided a whistle-blower.”

He was fired the next month, and in late February, McKenzie’s termination was upheld by the D.A.’s office after an administrative review. McKenzie has since found a new job.

In the meantime, according to the lawsuit, “federal authorities have launched a criminal investigation into defendant Gascón.”

TSA spokeswoman Lorie Dankers declined comment, saying the agency “cannot provide any additional detail beyond what is in publicly available documents.”

Read the whole story here.


I wonder if this case has anything to do with Gascon choosing to not seek re-election. Being exposed as a flaming hypocrite and bully can certainly end one’s political career.

DCG

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