Orange County's best-known political watchdog says a tangle of relationships among aides to the county's two top law enforcement officers is compromising Dist.t Atty. Tony Rackauckas' investigation of Sheriff Mike Carona's campaign organization.
Activist Shirley L. Grindle, author of Orange County's 1978 campaign finance law, asked Rackauckas in March to investigate allegations that a Carona supporter improperly reimbursed donors to the sheriff's 2002 campaign.
Now Grindle says it is improper for GOP operative Michael J. Schroeder -- Carona's point man on the controversy -- to serve as campaign advisor to both the sheriff and the district attorney.
Further complicating the picture is Schroeder's marriage to Susan Kang Schroeder, a deputy district attorney who is chief spokeswoman for Rackauckas.
"How can you have the same guy working for the prosecutor who is investigating his other [client]?" Grindle asked. "How is this acceptable?"
Schroeder conceded that the political connections could raise questions, but denied any conflict of interest.
"It's a legitimate thing to ask a question, but it's irresponsible to assert there's a conflict if there's absolutely no evidence," he said of Grindle's concerns. "I have no title with the district attorney's office, and I've never participated in their operation."
Schroeder said that although he served as Rackauckas' campaign chairman in 2002, he has no formal connection with the district attorney today because Rackauckas hasn't said whether he will run for reelection in 2006. And he dismissed as "frivolous" any concerns about his wife's role as a top aide to the district attorney.
A spokesman for the state's top law officer characterized the political entanglements of Schroeder, Carona and Rackauckas amid an official investigation as troublesome, but said they did not amount to a legal conflict of interest.
At most, "there's an appearance of a conflict of interest," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, who told Carona by letter in April that the matter was best handled by the district attorney. "The problem is all the overlapping relationships."
The controversy began in the spring, when Carona hired Schroeder -- a lawyer and former chairman of the California Republican Party who supported the sheriff's 1998 and 2002 campaigns -- to probe whether Newport Beach businessman Charles Gabbard was laundering contributions to the sheriff's campaign.
