Supervisor D’ohh! Goes Bonkers on Nick Gerda

By
Greg Diamond
– December 26, 2023Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice

Credit where it’s due: our obstinate and truculent commenter Eric Neshanian clued me into this story — and it’s such a lovely sendoff to what may be both the end of Supervisor Andrew Do’s political career and the launch of his new adventures as possibly both a civil and criminal defendant. Let’s start with the recent demands and accusations issued by Supervisor Doug Chaffee’s bosom ally on that board.

YOW! Do Calls for firing of Nick Gerda over alleged forgery!

Let’s go ahead and add those links that you may have fruitlessly tried to click in the above graphic!

Gerda’s original LAist article

What Do alleges is a forged tax form

What Do alleges is the real tax form

This allegation is shocking if true. Yes, I have had a couple of problems with Nick Gerda in the past — he was too slow to adopt the masterful techniques I had developed in addressing local election results, and he insisted that Democrats controlled the BOS after the election, which he should be pretty clear by now is not the case, thanks to Do’s buddy the execrable (yet somehow not yet excreted!) Doug Chaffee. But, in my experience, he’s always been honest and fair. Yet this accusation of FORGERY would be the worst thing to happen to LAist since it failed to jettison whiny lugubrious narcissistic self-serving self-celebrating glory-hogging libertarian Larry Mantle (charming heartthrob of countless late-70s San Fernando Valley women who love his reedy, wheedling voice) the moment that it swallowed up 91.7 FM KPCC and forbade the use of that former name except where legally required! But this would be worse (sort of)!

(Yes, I admit, I am getting a few things off of my chest here. My spell-checker, after 100 straight attempts to convince it that “LAist” was not a typo, asked me if I wanted to bring back Clippy for more intensive care. When I declined, it started rendering “waist” as “WAist.”)

Did Nick Gerda commit forgery? [Nah.]
Did Andrew Do commit fraud?
Well, for now let’s just conclude that he committed aggravated bullshit.

The Orange County Press Club posted a reply — a role that I didn’t know it had! — noting that the OC Register (known in these pages as the “Orange Lady”) had investigated the matter itself and said:

As part of a much larger piece, Gerda’s story links to two tax returns, one from the 2021 calendar year and one from the 2022 calendar year. The 2022 form lists Supervisor Do’s daughter, Rhiannon Do, as vice president of the organization. According to Gerda’s past reporting, Rhiannon Do’s LinkedIn profile indicated her title was “president” of the organization from July 2021 onward, though this was changed amid LAist’s ongoing reporting.

Here’s where Supervisor Do, or whoever did his research for him, appears to be confused. Stay with us, as this gets into the weeds.

The 2022 form linked by Gerda does, in fact, say “2021” in the upper right hand corner of the document. But it also says “For the 2021 calendar year, or tax year beginning 01-­01-­2022 , and ending 12­-31­-2022.”

This editorial board searched ourselves for Viet America Society’s tax returns.

Nonprofit ProPublica shows the 2022 tax returns for Viet America Society with “2022” clearly marked in the upper right hand corner. The only apparent discrepancy is the year in the top right corner. Otherwise, the figures and information contained in the tax return linked by Gerda and the one linked by ProPublica for the same year appear to be identical.

We next searched Guidestar.org, which also contains financial information on nonprofit organizations.

Sure enough, the 2022 return on Guidestar.org includes the same quirk as the document linked by Gerda: “2021” is included in the upper right corner of the document, while also saying, “For the 2021 calendar year, or tax year beginning 01­-01-­2022, and ending 12­-31­-2022.”

Supervisor Do, in other words, appears to at best be confused and worst seizing upon a minor glitch in a document available from a reliable clearinghouse on nonprofits in order to distract from all that Gerda has dug up.

Good going, OC Press Club! But the situation is actually worse for the Do camp than you suggest, because — in my opinion as a lawyer who has spent an unfortunate amount of time looking at financial documents — this could not be an innocent error!

What should you do if you have two versions of a document, one of which was allegedly forged? The first thing you do is line them up next to each other and see where they differ! And I don’t mean in some ancillary way — I mean substantively! I didn’t have to go past step 1 of that investigative process: I turned (somewhat arbitrarily, after I ascertained that it would provide a sufficient test) to Part X (as in “10”) of each form, which showed its assets at the beginning and end of each year. And look what I found!

Here’s the supposedly “forged” version

And here’s the “official” version of purportedly the “same document,” from the IRS website.

Yes, they both say “2021” — but if you compare them there is a clear relationship between them. Can you find it? That’s right: the “end of year” figure in the top document is the sane as the “beginning of year” figure in the bottom document. In other words, these documents came from two successive years! The former is obviously not, extremely obviously not, a forgery of the latter.

So: either Do’s researchers — and of course he himself is an attorney — didn’t do any sort of even rudimentary evaluation of the content of these documents, or they did do such an analysis and chose not to report the information that completely gutted their allegation. Either way, it sure looks like there is enough material here for a defamation suit by Gerda — one that could allow him to make substantial charitable contributions to both KPCC (yeah, I said it!) and to the Voice of OC.

Now we’re not going to jump in and examine Do’s contentions about what did and didn’t happen between his official acts and the charity in question. There’s already a really good piece on that. But, as much I don’t share Vern’s penchant for reaching out to sources, I just might seek out a comment from Doug Chaffee on that.

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)