Tale of Two Counties: Power, Politics and the Judge Married to a Convicted Felon  

By Susan Bassi, Fred Johnson and Faith Strader

The American system of government rests on separation of powers. The executive branch runs the government, the legislature writes the laws, and the courts decide disputes independently. Those are not symbolic roles. They are the walls that keep any one institution from accumulating enough power to escape accountability. When those walls hold, the public has recourse. When they are allowed to erode, the people are left standing in the rubble.

Across California local governments have been quietly eroding those walls for years. Not through dramatic confrontations, but through political appointments, quiet marriages, and conflicts of interest that nobody was required to disclose.

In Santa Clara and Orange County, the erosion has gone furthest, lasted longest, and cost the most in terms of tax dollars and public trust.

Andrew Do was an attorney who became a county supervisor and stole millions of dollars meant to feed elderly residents during a pandemic. Jeff Rosen is a district attorney who has held office for 16 years and was recently removed from a criminal prosecution of student protestors because he used the case to raise money for his political campaign. Both men held public trust and exploited it. Both were married to judges. Neither judge faced any formal public oversight.

The walls between the branches of government did not just lean in these two counties. They came down.

Photo: Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do (left) was sworn into office in 2021 by his wife, Orange County Superior Court Judge Cheri Pham (right).

ANDREW DO: THE PROSECUTOR WHO STOLE FROM THE PEOPLE HE SWORE TO SERVE

Andrew Do understood the law from the inside. He had been a deputy district attorney for Orange County before winning a seat on its Board of Supervisors in 2015, eventually becoming the board’s chair and one of the most powerful elected officials in Southern California. When he was first sworn into office, his wife, Superior Court Judge Cheri Pham, stood before him and administered the oath. She did it again in 2021. The image of the judge swearing in the supervisor was not just ceremonial. It was structural. The courthouse and county chambers had been joined at the top, and nobody in authority seemed to think that was worth examining.

Starting in 2020, Do began secretly steering COVID-19 relief money toward a nonprofit his then-19-year-old daughter had just created, Viet America Society (VAS). The money, more than $10 million of it, was meant to feed elderly and disabled residents during the pandemic. He never disclosed the family connection.

Federal prosecutors established that he accepted more than $550,000 in bribes in return. Of the $9.3 million sent to VAS for a senior meal program, only 15 cents of every dollar reached the people it was meant to serve. The rest paid for his daughter’s home, covered property taxes on houses he co-owned with his wife and funded the family’s bills.

Prosecutors announced in October 2024 that Do had agreed to plead guilty to federal bribery conspiracy. He resigned immediately from the Board of Supervisors and forfeited his pension for the years he spent stealing. U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada called it “Robin Hood in reverse.”

A federal judge sentenced him to five years in prison. California’s State Bar disbarred him six months later.

JUDGE PHAM: THE COURT HIS WIFE RAN WHILE HE WAS STEALING FROM IT

While Andrew Do was stealing from the public he was elected to serve, his wife, Judge Cheri Pham, held the second-highest position in the Orange County court system.By 2022, her fellow judges had elected her Assistant Presiding Judge of the Orange County Superior Court. She managed the court’s $250 million annual budget, oversaw complaints filed against other judges, and was next in line to become Presiding Judge: the top administrator of the court responsible for prosecuting county officials and resolving lawsuits about county contracts. The same county contracts her husband was manipulating.

Public records obtained by LAist showed that the man at the center of the bribery scheme supervised renovation work on the couple’s shared home in 2021, the same year the bribes were flowing. Federal court records confirmed Do used bribery money to pay property taxes on homes he and Judge Pham owned together. When federal agents searched their home in August 2024, she was the court’s second-most senior officer.

Emails obtained under public records law showed Judge Pham was copied on a press statement Do’s team drafted to attack the journalism that eventually exposed him.

No charges have been filed against Judge Pham. The California Commission on Judicial Performance has announced no public inquiry. The conflict that her position created was not theoretical. It was institutional, and it reached every courtroom in the building.

ONE JUDGE’S MARRIAGE DISQUALIFIED AN ENTIRE COURTHOUSE

The full weight of the conflict was publicly exposed in civil proceedings. Andrew Do testified in a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court without disclosing he was married to the court’s second-in-command.

The presiding judge declared a mistrial the moment he found out. He said from the bench he could not be impartial. The problem was not his opinion of Do. The problem was that Judge Pham’s institutional authority over the court made the conflict structural rather than personal.

The county’s civil lawsuit against VAS was not reassigned to a different Orange County judge. It was sent to a San Diego County judge entirelybecause the entire Orange County Superior Court was institutionally disqualified. In law, this is called a whole-bench disqualification.

Judge Pham stepped back from the Presiding Judge succession. She now hears domestic violence, divorce and custody cases in family court. She has not been publicly disciplined. She is up for re-election in 2028.

THE SUPERVISORS REWARDED THEMSELVES

Four days after Andrew Do was sentenced to prison, the four remaining supervisors voted themselves a 25 percent raise without public hearing and without independent review. The raise was buried in the last lines of two items inside the county’s $10.8 billion annual budget. Their base pay rose to $244,000 a year, more than the Governor of California earns and more than members of Congress. At the time, the county was under a hiring freeze and facing an estimated $400 million in liability from the Airport Fire.

The Orange County Grand Jury investigated and published five findings in December 2025: the raise was hidden from public view; no independent review existed; public trust had been damaged; and the investigation was stonewalled. Staff could not recall who proposed the raise or why it was buried in the budget.

The grand jury had jurisdiction over the supervisors and used it. It has no jurisdiction over the courts. That gap between two oversight systems is where the conflict operated without consequence.

SANTA CLARA COUNTY: THE SAME WALLS, COMING DOWN SLOWER AND FALLING DEEPER

What happened in Orange County has a clear shape: one corrupt official, one bribery scheme, one federal conviction. What has been unfolding in Santa Clara County is harder to see and harder to stop precisely because it is not one person’s crime. It is the slow accumulation of entanglements between elected officials, judges, county political boards, and the attorneys who move between all of them, building a network so familiar with itself that disclosure stopped feeling necessary.

The center of that network is a marriage. Jeff Rosen has served as Santa Clara County’s elected district attorney since 2010 and is running for a fifth term. His wife, Judge Amber Rosen, was appointed to the bench by then-Governor Jerry Brown in 2017.

DA Rosen’s prosecutors appear before the same court system where Judge Amber Rosen sits. Jeff Rosen attends professional and social events with his wife alongside the judicial colleagues his office appears before. The conflict that creates does not require bad intent. It is structural, the same way the conflict in Orange County was structural, and it raises the same question: how many cases over the years required a disclosure or a recusal that never happened?

Photo: Judge Amber Rosen (front) and Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen (center) following DA political debate at Stanford University in 2022. Photo by Susan Bassi.

DA ROSEN DISQUALIFIED: WHAT IT TAKES TO CATCH ONE CONFLICT

How political the conflict in DA Rosen’s office has become was documented when the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office (PDO) recently filed a formal motion to disqualify him and his entire staff from retrying five people charged with vandalizing Stanford University’s president’s office during campus protests in 2024. Local media dubbed it the Stanford Five case.

The first trial ended in a hung jury. Jeff Rosen, facing re-election and budget cuts, had his office try the case again.

The PDO’s motion documented that DA Rosen’s campaign website, jeffrosen.org, featured a prominent link to “The Stanford Protest Case” alongside a “Donate to Jeff” button.

During the original trial, the prosecutor told the jury that the defendants’ decision to exercise their constitutional right to a jury trial was “nothing more than an extension of their protest,” treating a legal right as a political act deserving punishment.

The San Jose Mercury News published a  May 1  article about the upcoming election, reporting Jeff Rosen’s thoughts on the costly prosecution, “To walk away from the case at this point…would be me giving in to a small number of loud voices”. DA Rosen added, “I am not looking to send somebody to prison… what you should do is accept responsibility for what you did, apologize for it and make restitution.”

Social media exploded with criticism of a prosecutor who has been in office for 16 years claiming he was not looking to send somebody to prison.

Daniel Chung, who is running against Jeff Rosen in the upcoming June election, has repeatedly stated the Stanford Five case is emblematic of Rosen’s leadership.

Deputy Public Defender Avanindar P. Singh declared in court documents he believed the conflict prohibiting DA Rosen from prosecuting the case extended to his entire office.

Superior Court Judge Kelley Paul agreed. She ruled on May 7, 2026, that the conflict was “so grave as to render it unlikely that the defendants will receive fair treatment.” The California Attorney General’s Office will now prosecute the retrial.

The disqualification of Jeff Rosen and the entire District Attorney’s Office required a full trial, a hung jury, months of litigation, and a published court order to document one conflict in one case. The public is entitled to know how many other cases in 16 years warranted the same scrutiny and received none of it. No oversight body has publicly asked that question.

JUDGE AMBER ROSEN: POLITICAL BOARDS, DEPENDENCY COURT, AND THE CONFLICTS NOBODY COULD SEE

While DA Rosen was building political power in the courthouse, his wife, Judge Amber Rosen was building institutional ties to the county government her court was supposed to check. County supervisors appointed her to the Child Abuse Prevention Council (CAPC), a commission currently led by Supervisor Sylvia Arenas that sets county child welfare policy and allocates funding for elderly and child protection programs.

The agency is under state investigation following the recent death of a two-year-old child dubbed by the media as baby Jaxon.  DA Rosen has announced criminal prosecution in connection with the child’s death, a prosecution he is promoting on his political website, raising questions about future tainting of a child sex abuse and death case.

Judge Rosen served on the CAPC while presiding over dependency court, the division of the court that decides civil child abuse and neglect cases originating from that same county child welfare system. Prosecutors from DA Rosen’s office appeared in that same dependency court.

Dependency court is closed to the public. Families involved in those proceedings have no access to the record and no way to know who else their judge has been serving alongside on county political bodies. Judge Amber Rosen resigned from the CAPC in April 2023, weeks after this news organization published reporting on judicial board memberships in Santa Clara County. No Commission on Judicial Performance public inquiry followed.

Judge Amber Rosen has since moved from dependency court to civil court, where she now hears probate matters, public records disputes, long-cause divorce trials, and civil proceedings that can overlap with criminal and child welfare cases. DA Rosen’s prosecutors continue to appear before the same court system where she sits.

POLITICS OF JUDGES IN FAMILY COURT

The entanglement between judges and county political bodies was not limited to Judge Amber Rosen. Judge Cindy Hendrickson, a former prosecutor in DA Rosen’s office, was appointed to CAPC and the Domestic Violence Council (DVC), a county board that sets domestic violence policy, collaborates with law enforcement and distributes county funding for domestic violence programs.

Hendrickson kept her seat after her election to the family court bench in 2018. Private family law attorney Nicole Ford served on the DVC alongside Judge Hendrickson and the family court’s supervising judge, Julie Emede. Ford handles domestic violence, child abuse, and other civil family matters in her private practice.

The overlap between Judge Hendrickson’s judicial role and her DVC membership created exactly the kind of conflict California’s Code of Judicial Ethics exists to prevent. Nicole Ford appeared in family court cases before Judge Hendrickson.

Judge Hendrickson appointed Ford as minors counsel in cases she herself was deciding. As previously reported, minors counsel is a court-appointment position funded by taxpayers, like alternate public defender appointments.

A review of more than 100 of Judge Hendrickson’s cases found no disclosure of her political appointments as she worked as a public court judge.  A disqualification motion was filed against her in at least one case specifically because of the undisclosed political relationship with Ford.

Judge Hendrickson resigned from the bench in April 2026, two years before the end of her term.

Nicole Ford’s service on the county DVC and her appointments as minors counsel have been highly controversial. This news agency has reported extensively on Ford’s relationship with Los Altos based nonprofit WomenSV, on Ford’s failed 2024 political campaign for judge and on Ford’s social media activity.

Screenshot of comments related to photos Nicole Ford published on social media as she campaigned for Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge in 2024.  

Presently Ford is an objecting party in a probate case set for hearing in June 2026. The case involves Gladys Smith, a 92-year-old former attorney who needs court approval of trust modifications to fund in-home elder care. Ford filed an objection as a claimed beneficiary after being removed from the trust in 2023.

Judge Charles Adams recused himself moments after Ford appeared in the case via Zoom with attorney Andrew Calvert.  Ford’s objection and Judge Adams’ recusal resulted in a two-month delay to an elderly woman, and former attorney, in need of accessing the local courts.

The case is now before Judge Amber Rosen with a hearing set for next month.

Both Ford and Judge Amber Rosen were appointed to local county political boards with prosecutors from the office managed and supervised by DA Jeff Rosen.  Whether that shared political service and Jeff Rosen’s historical support of Nicole Ford creates a conflict requiring Judge Amber Rosen’s recusal is a question the court must answer. If she recuses, Gladys Smith, at 92, will continue to wait for her day in court.

REAL COSTS TO TAXPAYERS AND PUBLIC TRUST

In Orange County, the courts that should have been the final check on abuses of power were conflicted because the judge who ran them shared a home with the elected official doing the stealing.

Andrew Dowent to federal prison for stealing from the poor. The Board of Supervisors gave themselves a raise. Judge Pham hears family court cases and is up for re-election in 2028.

In Santa Clara County, taxpayer-funded minors counsel fees flowed to an attorney who served on a political board alongside the judge who appointed her, without disclosure to the families in those cases.

A 92-year-old woman waits for a trust approval she needs to stay in her own home because the attorney who filed an objection is entangled with too much of the courthouse.

DA Jeff Rosen was removed from one case because he turned a prosecution into a political fundraising tool.

Judge Amber Rosen sits in a courthouse where the prosecutors managed and supervised by her husband appear in daily.

Judges resigned from county political boards only when reporters showed up.

No oversight body has publicly investigated any of it.

Every pillar that holds the structure of democratic government upright depends on the others. When the courts lean toward the governments they are supposed to check, through marriage, political appointment, and years of undisclosed association, the whole foundation shifts. The people who need the courts most are the ones with the least power to demand that the walls be rebuilt.

The walls are load-bearing. Without them, the whole structure comes down.

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