Two months before November’s general election, Supervisor Todd Spitzer announced the launch of a “seven-figure” television advertising campaign in his effort to unseat 75-year-old Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas.
Spitzer’s campaign highlighted one ad that focuses on the supervisor’s “work to keep kids out of crime and homeless off the streets.”
A second ad “delivers a devasting blow to Rackauckas, who has allowed an abusive culture of sexual misconduct in his office,” according to Spitzer campaign consultant John S. Thomas.
This short feature notes how the DA dismissively responded to rampant office sexual affairs and parties by saying, “Boys will be boys.”
Rackauckas is peddling his own video claiming the public can’t trust his “unhinged” opponent and lamely implying he’s guilty of some sort of embarrassing sexual wrongdoing, which isn’t the case.
While the scandal-scarred incumbent DA has spent the last 20 years in office and wants a sixth four-year term, Spitzer, 57, served as a state assemblyman, prosecutor and county supervisor.
According to campaign finance disclosure reports for activity through June 30, Spitzer’s cash on hand totaled more than $707,000; Rackauckas possessed just under $36,000.
Earlier this year at a campaign event, the DA openly mocked the constitutional rights of pre-trial defendants, slammed the California Court of Appeal for its blistering criticism of his ethical woes and declared negative news coverage of his scandals won’t make him walk “on eggshells.”
In June’s primary leading to the general election faceoff, Rackauckas narrowly finished first with 38 percent of the vote; Spitzer startled the DA’s staff by capturing 35 percent.
Including the tally for two other candidates, more than 61 percent of voters wanted someone other than Rackauckas in the job.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.