What Game Is Supervisor Bartlett Playing?
Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett is gunning for California State Senator Pat Bates seat in 2022 when both of them are term-limited out of their current positions. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the problem is how Bartlett is trying to clear the deck ahead of time, namely with the coordinated hits on current Assemblyman Bill Brough, who I can only assume she thinks wants to take a run at the same seat, even though he could serve another 4 years in the Assembly at the point of the 2022 election. Maybe he is interested in it, I have no idea, but I’ve never seen it mentioned. Let’s dive into some of the timelines of what is happening, stick with me, it’s worth it.
Bartlett has a mountain of issues from her time on the TCA board and having her contract signing authority revoked and her campaign consultant who she got a job with the TCA who was recently removed, but only after receiving nearly $6 million in consulting fees. On June 17, 2019 Lisa Bartlett resurfaced her 2011 allegation against Bill at the OCGOP meeting. Bill had requested the Party’s endorsement that night. It was on the consent calendar until Bartlett — with Jennifer Beall, who has huge problems of her own, at her side — resurfaced the allegation. The Brough endorsement was tabled, which you can read about in this OC Register article. Less than 2 weeks later, Bartlett held a fundraiser to launch her campaign for State Senate:
Was Bartlett’s 8-year old allegation part of her strategy to eliminate Bill as a challenger? The Dana Point city attorney investigated at the time and cleared Brough and I will attach the scans of that letter at the end of this article. What I find interesting in the city attorney letter is that Bartlett has 3 different stories of what happened in that version and then in the aforementioned Register article, she has yet another version. The problem I have with the story, in general, is that even if you believe it happened, it was two work colleagues at some dinner function and one asked the other if they wanted to get a drink. She now claims to still be traumatized over the event, however, if you go through the history of her newsletters, you see many pictures of her with Brough at events, standing next to him for photo ops when she could have had people between them. These pictures go up until the first quarter of 2019, so that seems to fly in the face of the case she is making.
Bartlett is not to be trusted and should retire after her current term as a Supervisor is over and keep her from creating any more damage in Orange County. Now, as promised, the city attorney letter from the 2011 incident:
