By Susan Bassi, Fred Johnson and Faith Strader
In mid-February, the most powerful law enforcement officer in Northern California stood before his staff and county supervisors to declare a crisis. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen warned that looming budget cuts would cripple his office, claiming domestic violence victims would go unprotected, criminals would go free, and people might die. It was a dark and sweeping speech, delivered with the gravity of a man under siege.
Omitted from Rosen’s speech was the fact that county taxpayers were paying a fully credentialed, Columbia Law School-educated deputy district attorney roughly $222,000 annually to sit at home and do nothing.
Not because the prosecutor had done anything wrong and not because he wasn’t willing to work, but because Rosen, according to a new lawsuit, refuses to let him work.
The same day Rosen delivered his infamous speech, his office presented the Karyn Sinunu-Towery Courage Award to the victim of former San Jose City Councilman Omar Torres. A victim of child sex abuse related to a case resolved not through trial, but through a police recorded phone confession and a no-contest plea. Rosen’s office claimed the victory.
The award bore the name of a former prosecutor whose departure from the DA’s office was shadowed by criticism she had failed to prosecute San Francisco 49er football players. Allegations of selective prosecution, critics say, never really went away, they just found new targets.
That is the world Jeff Rosen has built over 16 years at the helm of the largest district attorney’s office north of Los Angeles. A place where, rather than advocating for victims of crime, public safety is political, loyalties are rewarded with public funds, personal prosecutions are prioritized, and the bill for all of it lands on the taxpayers of Santa Clara County.
NEW LAWSUIT- FAMILIAR STORY
A March 2026 taxpayer lawsuit was filed by McManis Faulkner, one of the Bay Area’s most established litigation firms, on behalf of a San Jose homeowner and county taxpayer. It names Rosen and Santa Clara County as defendants and seeks to stop what it calls an ongoing waste of public funds. The action is brought under California Code of Civil Procedure section 526a, which allows any taxpayer to sue government officials to stop them from illegally squandering public money.
The complaint alleges that Rosen has refused, without legal justification, to allow Deputy District Attorney (DDA) Daniel Chung to perform the prosecutorial duties he was reinstated to perform, despite orders from both an independent arbitrator and the Santa Clara County Personnel Board directing that reinstatement happen. The complaint alleges that from 2022 to 2025, the county paid Chung approximately $314,596. Today, Chung’s biweekly pay of $8,525.84 climbs to nearly $222,000 per year.
The lawsuit does not just allege bad management. It alleges something more troubling: that Rosen made a deliberate choice to waste county money rather than allow a prosecutor he dislikes to return to work, and he did so even as he publicly warned of catastrophic cuts to public safety programs.
The attorneys bringing the case are no strangers to this territory. McManis Faulkner represented the winning side in the 2007 Naymark lawsuit. A case involving similar allegations of public waste the firm brought against the county, as well as the cities of Los Gatos and San Jose. The legal groundwork is familiar. So are the players.
SAN JOSE MERCURY OP-ED THAT STARTED EVERYTHING
The 2026 lawsuit begins on Valentine’s Day 2021, when DDA Chung published an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News. He wrote about the surge in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic and called for a balanced approach to criminal justice reform — one that protected victims while addressing the roots of crime.
Chung published the piece as a private citizen. He did not identify himself as a representative of the District Attorney’s Office. (DAO). He did not name Rosen or the office. The Mercury News referenced his professional background as context, but the op-ed was personal.
Santa Clara County Chief Assistant District Attorney Jay Boyarsky. Photo by Susan Bassi
According to the lawsuit, Rosen read Chung’s article the day it was published and was furious. That same evening, he emailed Chief Assistant District Attorney Jay Boyarsky, listed his objections to the content of the piece, and ordered Boyarsky to reassign Chung from the prestigious Violent Felonies Unit to the less prominent Mental Health Court.
Rosen also instructed that an email be sent to the entire office, pointedly, to make clear that Chung was being singled out, and directed that Chung receive a formal notice of administrative investigation.
What followed was years of escalating discipline and related lawsuits where taxpayers paid to defend Rosen from the prosecutor he had hired, praised and decorated with awards.
Chung was reassigned twice, suspended without pay, placed on paid administrative leave, escorted out of the building by armed investigators, and ultimately fired — twice.
Both firings were reversed.
An independent arbitrator found in 2022 that the county lacked just cause to terminate Chung and ordered his reinstatement. The Santa Clara County Personnel Board reached a similar conclusion in May 2025, overturning Chung’s second termination, ordering him reinstated with back pay and prior classification by June 23, 2025.
Rosen complied with the letter of both orders. But according to the complaint, he reinstated Chung in name only, ordering him not to appear in court, not to take prosecutorial or investigative assignments, not to come to any DA’s office location, and denied him access to a laptop, email, business card, and the office’s internal communications systems. The county, the lawsuit alleges, has been paying Chung not to work for years.
In essence, the County pays Chung not to come to work.”- Taxpayer Waste Lawsuit filed March 25, 2026
ROSEN’S BUDGET FEAR MONGERING THREATS
The same week that Chung’s latest reinstatement was quietly taking effect last summer, Rosen was raising alarms about the county’s financial health. By February 2026, those warnings had reached a crescendo.
At his annual State of the Office address on Feb. 17, Rosen painted a picture of impending catastrophe. Facing a county-wide $470 million budget deficit, he warned that his office would be forced into unprecedented layoffs, and that cuts would threaten the prosecution of domestic violence cases, sexual assault cases, mental health diversion programs, anti-truancy work, and community outreach services.
“Public safety costs money,” Rosen told the assembled prosecutors and county supervisors watching from the audience. “Justice is expensive. Money is finite. There is less money. And so, there will be less justice.”
He went further: “Will people get hurt? Will they be killed? Will criminals go free? I don’t know.”
The San Jose Spotlight and other outlets reported the speech in detail. What they did not report, and what the new lawsuit makes explicit, is that at the same time Rosen was warning the public about resource scarcity, his own office was maintaining a policy of paying a senior prosecutor at full salary to perform no prosecutorial work whatsoever.
The math is jarring. At $8,525.84 biweekly, the county is spending approximately $222,000 a year for a deputy district attorney not to appear in court. That is money that could, by Rosen’s own logic, fund victim services, support domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse prosecutions, or prevent the layoffs he warned were coming.
For context, the Davis Vanguard reported in March 2026 that Rosen’s office budget rose to $185 million this fiscal year — up from $177 million the prior year — even as staffing projections trended downward.
This was not the first time Rosen’s office had warned of domestic violence funding shortfalls. As early as 2024, the San Jose Spotlight reported that the DA’s office had pulled prosecutors from other teams to handle a 142% surge in family violence cases since 2019 — 76 cases per prosecutor then, 184 per prosecutor by 2023. A funding gap was cited then too. A prosecutor being paid not to work was qualified, trained and willing to handle those exact cases. By Rosen’s own math, keeping Chung out of the courtroom meant he was unable to prosecute 184 domestic violence cases per year.
PERSECUTION OVER PROSECUTION
To understand the present lawsuit, is to understand where Rosen came from — and who held his story.
In April 2013, NBC Bay Area’s investigative unit broke a story that would trigger a civil investigation by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris. The investigation found that Rosen had directed the alteration of hundreds of timesheets and given thousands of hours of administrative leave to select high-ranking prosecutors who had supported his political campaign. A workaround, critics argued, for a bonus cut those attorneys were required to absorb under a collective bargaining agreement.
The County Executive’s office called the practice a potential “gift of public funds.” Harris, who at the time had endorsed Rosen for re-election, investigated and ultimately cleared him, though the county moved to cap administrative leave at 40 hours per employee per year. The episode generated minimal coverage in the Mercury News.
That last detail matters. The San Jose Mercury News has endorsed Jeff Rosen every election cycle since his first run in 2010. The paper has not reported critically on Rosen in major ways, including during the 2013 AG investigation that was first exposed not by the Mercury but by NBC Bay Area.
In 2012, Rosen hired Mercury News investigative reporter Sean Webby — twice named Northern California’s Investigative Reporter of the Year and a three-time Pulitzer nominee — as his public communications officer. Webby has served in that role ever since.
The paper that has been Rosen’s primary public relations vehicle gave the story of the AG investigation, only passing attention. The same paper has given Rosen endorsements in every race he has run.
Since 2010, the Mercury News has endorsed Rosen in every election. His public information officer is a former Mercury News reporter. The paper did not break the story of the AG investigation — NBC Bay Area did.
THE SINUNU TOWERY AWARD- IT’S COMPLICATED
During the same ceremony where Rosen delivered his 2026 budget doomsday speech, his office gave out its annual awards. The top felony trial attorney honor went to a homicide prosecutor. The Karyn Sinunu-Towery Courage Award, the office’s recognition for a crime victim who showed exceptional bravery, went to the child sex abuse victim of former San Jose City Councilman Omar Torres.
Torres, who represented downtown San Jose from 2023 to late 2024, had been convicted in April 2025 after entering a no-contest plea to charges of sodomy and oral copulation by force, and lewd and lascivious acts on a minor under the age of 14. He was sentenced to 18 years in state prison. The case, while devastating in its details, required no trial. Torres confessed to the abuse in a recorded phone call with his victim. He then pleaded no contest in court. Rosen’s office did not obtain a courtroom conviction; the case was resolved by admission.
The award bears the name of Karyn Sinunu-Towery, a former senior prosecutor in the DA’s office who hired and helped mentor Rosen early in his career, and who, along with her husband Jim Towery, then an attorney at the Hoge Fenton law firm, lobbied for and supported Rosen’s election.
Jim Towery represented Rosen in a legal matter involving a campaign statement in the Mercury News.
As Rosen was under investigation for misusing public funds early in his political career, Sinunu-Towery left the DA’s office after years of criticism, including allegations that the office had failed to prosecute 49ers players accused of violent crimes and sexual assault. Critics say those patterns of selective enforcement — shielding those with political or social connections while punishing those who speak out — have continued under Rosen’s leadership.
The irony of giving the Sinunu-Towery award to a child sex abuse victim at the same event where the DA was warning about funding cuts, while simultaneously paying a qualified prosecutor not to work, was not lost on those watching.
Congressman Eric Swalwell’s endorsement of Jeff Rosen’s campaign. Screenshot by Susan Bassi
A POLITICAL NETWORK UNDER PRESSURE
Rosen is running for re-election in 2026. His opponent is Daniel Chung — the same deputy district attorney at the center of the taxpayer waste lawsuit. That detail transforms the entire landscape of the litigation, and the local election. This is not simply a labor dispute. This is a sitting DA using county resources to sideline the man running against him.
Rosen’s endorsement list is a showcase of Bay Area political power: the Speaker of the Assembly, multiple state senators and assembly members, county supervisors, and the Santa Clara County Sheriff. Among his listed endorsers is Congressman Eric Swalwell.
Swalwell, who had been a front runner in the 2026 California governor’s race, is now at the center of a collapsed campaign. CNN and the San Francisco Chronicle reported on April 10 that four women have accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who alleges rape. Swalwell denied the allegations. Within 24 hours, he lost all 21 of his endorsements from Democratic colleagues in Congress. The Manhattan District Attorney confirmed it has opened an investigation. House Democratic leaders called on him to immediately end his gubernatorial campaign. By April 12, Swalwell had announced on social media he was withdrawing from the race.
As of publication, Swalwell’s name remained among Rosen’s listed endorsers.
Chung ran against Rosen before in 2022. He and a third candidate, Sajid Kahn, were defeated in the primary. However, the election was notable not only for its outcome but for an incident at a candidate forum in San Jose. Two candidates, including Chung, alleged that Rosen intentionally tripped Chung at the end of the event, an allegation Rosen’s team called an accident.
The moment, captured on video, became a small symbol of a larger dynamic: in a race where Rosen had overwhelming money, establishment backing, and the Mercury News behind him, he still appeared to view Chung as a threat serious enough to warrant, at minimum, unapologetic petty dominance.
A LAWSUIT BUILT TO WIN
The legal team behind the new taxpayer waste lawsuit has done this before. McManis Faulkner, the San Jose firm representing the taxpayer plaintiff, Sarah Scofield, prevailed in the 2009 Naymark appellate decision, a case that involved similar questions of public waste in Santa Clara County.
Under California law, section 526a allows any taxpayer to sue to enjoin, or legally prohibit, what they allege is an illegal waste of public funds. The lawsuit asks the court for three things:
One: A permanent injunction stopping public waste.
Two: An order requiring the DA to let Chung do the work he’s paid for.
Three: A declaration that paying a salaried prosecutor not to work, against the orders of an arbitrator and the Personnel Board, is a waste of public money.
On its face, the legal argument is simple: the county is spending real money to accomplish nothing against the orders of two independent tribunals, in service of a personal and political vendetta. The lawsuit does not need to prove that Rosen is corrupt. It needs to prove that the money is being wasted. The complaint does that in the opening paragraphs.
WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY
At $8,525.84 biweekly, Chung’s annual salary works out to be approximately $221,672. The lawsuit notes that from 2022 to 2025 alone, the county paid him approximately $314,596.21 to perform no prosecutorial work. The total continues to climb.
For a DA who stood before his staff in February 2026 and asked — on the record, in front of county supervisors — whether budget cuts would cause people to be hurt or killed, that number requires an explanation.
If domestic violence, child abuse and sexual assault prosecutions are in jeopardy because of budget constraints, and if a fully qualified prosecutor is being paid not to prosecute, then the crisis Rosen is warning about is, in part, one he is manufacturing.
The lawsuit is blunt about this: “Defendants would rather let Chung — a highly-educated, highly qualified attorney — sit at home to prove their point: Don’t cross Rosen.”’
PRICE TAG FOR JEFF ROSEN’S PUBLIC SERVICE
Rosen did not respond to a request for comment. His office issued no statement regarding the lawsuit prior to publication. The County of Santa Clara also did not respond before deadline.
What is clear from the public record is this: a man whose political career began with an AG investigation into the improper use of public funds is now facing a taxpayer lawsuit over the improper withholding of public services, all while warning the public that there is not enough money to protect them.
The June 2 primary is weeks away. The taxpayer lawsuit is now in court. The bill for the past four years has already passed $314,000 and is growing every two weeks.
Editorial Note: The McManis Faulkner law firm is representing Daniel Chung in his litigation against Jeff Rosen and Santa Clara County.
