Trump's Man in L.A.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP AND HIS WIFE, MELANIA, were standing up to leave a Pacific Palisades fire station in January of 2025 when the president’s longtime adviser Ric Grenell waved over a junior California legislator. 

“Mr. President,” Grenell told Trump. “I want you to meet….Bill Essayli.”

Essayli was a former federal prosecutor who had just begun a second term as an assemblyman from Corona; he was known less for his legislative victories than his pugnacious, camera-ready antics.

Decades younger than Trump and Grenell, he shared many of their attributes: a refusal to back down or cede any ground to opponents, an affinity for hurling bombastic, even outrageous, barbs online and off, and a preternatural ability to transform attention into power.

"He's been with you from the beginning," Grenell continued while Essayli, clad in dark slacks and a white dress shirt, folded his hands together.

Grenell, at times pointing his index finger, sketched the salient points: “He's Muslim.” “He’s a killer.” “He’s MAGA.” 

A “Palisades Strong” banner hung behind the trio and cameras kept rolling as Grenell made his objective explicit: "I want him to be U.S. Attorney." Grenell continued, "I promise you, you will be so proud of him."

Essayli retrieved a business card from his pocket and handed it to the president.

Ten weeks later, Attorney General Pam Bondi named Essayli to serve as the interim top federal prosecutor in Southern California, catapulting the tough-talking MAGA legislator into the most powerful law enforcement post this side of the Mississippi River. 

From that perch, leading the country's second-largest U.S. Attorney's office, Essayli has the authority to bring the force of the federal government against anyone in the region, with broad discretion to choose whom to investigate and charge and whom to let off. 

During the last 12 months, Essayli’s tenure has remade — and his numerous critics say, diminished — a powerful office that once took down the Sheriff of L.A. County; imprisoned the Orange County doctor who orchestrated a $1 billion health care fraud; and dismantled corruption rackets in L.A.'s City Hall and Department of Water and Power.

More than any U.S. Attorney in L.A. in recent memory, Essayli embraces partisanship, alienating the dozens of prosecutors in his office who’ve left. He often acts like a politician in other ways too: He delivers press conferences in which he blasts Gov. Gavin Newsom, and in case after case, he has used pending charges to pillory the state’s Democratic establishment.

Now, one year into his term, Essayli has said he’s turned the might of his office toward prosecuting fraud. California, Essayli told Fox News earlier this month, “has a massive fraud problem” and is “quickly becoming a failed state.” Newsom, he added, is “the fraud king.” In the first two weeks of April, Essayli posted more than 25 times on X about fraud, often calling Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta out by name. 

But despite his constant drumbeat on the topic, there is one fraud case Essayli almost never talks about: the time he partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union to help defeat a prosecution brought by the office he now leads. A prosecution that targeted several members of his own family. 

This case is little known, but it exposes a political irony for Essayli as he strives to position himself and his office as the MAGA bulwark against fraud: One of the greatest victories of his legal career was a case in which he fought the federal government on fraud charges and won. 

This story is based on a review of thousands of pages of court documents, along with interviews with more than two dozen people familiar with Essayli and his life, with most speaking on condition of anonymity, citing a fear of personal or professional reprisals. Essayli declined multiple requests for an extended interview but briefly spoke to L.A. Material; he did not respond to written questions. Multiple Essayli relatives did not respond to messages seeking comment or declined to comment. 

An Espionage Probe in Orange County

The case that united the brash MAGA acolyte and the ACLU started with concerns about the government’s counter-terrorism operations against Muslims. 

In the fall of 2019, Essayli had recently left his job as chief of staff to the mayor of San Bernardino and set up shop as a private attorney in Newport Beach. It was, by all appearances, a waystation gig. He had done time as an associate in a white-shoe law firm, served about four years as a federal prosecutor, and run an unsuccessful race for a state Assembly seat. Before launching another campaign, he had joined forces with a classmate from Chapman University’s law school to form Essayli & Brown LLP.  

One of their first clients was a relative of Essayli, Abdallah Osseily, a Lebanese immigrant and Irvine businessman who had been charged with falsely inflating his business’ income on credit card and loan applications, and then lying about those alleged lies during an immigration interview, according to the indictment. 

Essayli thought the federal charges were excessive. A bank had denied Osseily’s loan application and therefore suffered no financial loss. But the government had proceeded anyway, charging him with crimes that could result in years in prison followed by likely deportation. 

The former federal prosecutor also thought the case smacked of an abuse of power, according to court filings. Essayli’s relative, a green-card holder, had earlier filed a civil suit against the Trump administration to hasten his citizenship application. In return, Essayli said, the government had retaliated by engaging in “bad faith” and subjecting him to “endless investigation.”

As the young lawyer began to pore through the evidence, he noticed something else: The government had several audio recordings of Osseily. But the material prosecutors turned over during discovery did not include any sort of search warrant indicating how or why the government had obtained those recordings. 

Essayli suspected that a wiretap had been secured through FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that creates a classified legal pathway to monitor and listen to spies, terrorists and other bad actors on U.S. soil. 

How might Essayli’s relative, a businessman from Irvine, have gotten wrapped up in a national security case? By 2019, the FBI had a bad reputation among Muslims in Orange County following a controversial operation the government had launched in the years after September 11. The FBI had sent an undercover agent into several Orange County mosques — a man who pretended to be a convert to Islam and recorded private conversations in residents’ homes and offices, according to court filings. The ACLU sued on behalf of Orange County Muslims who say their rights were violated. Litigation over the spying has already been to the Supreme Court and is ongoing.  

In the Osseily case, Bill Essayli also turned to the ACLU for help. They teamed up to demand to know on what legal grounds Osseily had been surreptitiously recorded. Was the Lebanese immigrant a target of a terrorism probe or were his conversations swept up in a larger dragnet? 

Secrecy shrouds FISA and accessing the information the government puts forth to get authorization for such surveillance is nearly impossible because the government presents it in a special, secret court. The judge’s order is secret, as are all the records related to the order. 

Since FISA was instituted in 1978, virtually no criminal defendant has successfully penetrated the FISA veil. 

But Essayli, with typical brash ambition, was determined to try. 

Starting in November of 2019, Essayli, later with the support of lawyers from the ACLU, filed a series of briefs that amounted to a full scale attack on his former and future employer. 

“It is well documented that systematic, intentional misconduct has been pervasive in the Department of Justice,” Essayli wrote in one filing, citing an inspector general report on misconduct around the 2016 election and other cases of unethical behavior that intruded on civil liberties. 

But before the judge issued a decision over the FISA records, there was another twist in the case. 

The U.S. Secret Service — which investigates financial crimes in addition to its more commonly known task of protecting the president — seized a FedEx package addressed to Osseily containing about $250,000 worth of Target gift cards.

What had started off as a minor bank and immigration fraud case was swelling into a massive, multi-state investigation, probing the idea that Osseily was at the center of a multi-million dollar scheme to steal from Target. 

And it wasn’t just Osseily who was facing legal peril. In August 2020, prosecutors unsealed a sweeping, 139-page indictment against Osseily; Essayli’s cousins, Adam and Nassim; and nine others. 

Prosecutors alleged that Osseily, Nassim Essayli and his brother, Adam, were part of a nationwide ring that systematically defrauded Target from 2014 through 2020 by manipulating discounts for veterans, would-be parents, soon-to-be-married couples and Target employees to fraudulently purchase millions of dollars in electronics. Prosecutors also accused the Essayli family members and others of fraudulently re-using coupons hundreds of times to stockpile gift cards with steep discounts.

One day in March 2017, for example, Nassim Essayli visited five Target stores in Florida, and used the same $10 off coupon hundreds of times, paying just $1,235 for nearly $8,000 worth of gift cards, according to the indictment. The day before, he had purchased $7,650 worth of gift cards for roughly $1,585 by swiping the same $5 off coupon hundreds of times. 

In another excursion detailed in the indictment, in April 2018, Nassim Essayli and his younger brother, Adam Essayli, traveled to Minnesota to buy Apple watches and iPads, the indictment states. The duo went to seven stores in one day for $24,500 worth of electronics, but they paid only about $18,800 by applying employee discounts and wedding discounts.

Each day, Nassim Essayli texted photos of receipts to Osseily with an update, according to court records. 

“Thank you guys, you did great and amazing work,” Osseily replied later adding, “Fedex receipt plz.” 

The men shipped 321 pounds of merchandise back to Osseily, who typically resold the electronics through his two companies, according to the indictment. 

The prosecution, if successful, would have devastated Essayli’s close-knit family. Osseily, whom prosecutors would label a “serial fraudster,” faced more than 100 years in prison, and Essayli’s cousins, Adam and Nassim, faced years behind bars. 

Surveying the encyclopedia of evidence investigators had amassed against his relatives, pieced together from years of text messages, credit card transactions, Target receipts, and travel logs, some young lawyers might have despaired. 

Essayli pressed forward. According to Mark Windsor, a defense attorney who represented a low-level member of the alleged theft ring, Essayli helped cook up “a whole approach” to counter the government’s case. And it was audacious. 

“I was surprised at how aggressive he was with the prosecution, and how certain he was that he was going to make this go away,” Windsor recalled. Windsor said that he “sat back” and watched Essayli’s strategy play out.

A young conservative in a ‘snooty’ profession 

Anyone familiar with Essayli’s biography would not have been surprised by his cocksure aggression.

Essayli, after all, was a man whose legal career began on an Orange County highway when he was just 17 years old. In 2003, he smashed his mom’s grey Toyota Corolla into a white Honda CRV, which then struck a white Ford Ranger.

Police cited him for speeding. Then, the state Department of Motor Vehicles moved to declare him a negligent driver, add two points to his record and suspend his license for a month. 

Essayli responded by suing the DMV. He represented himself — in a case he filed shortly after his 18th birthday. He argued that the DMV was double penalizing him for the same offense; one point was sufficient. A Riverside County judge sided with Essayli, reversing the DMV’s penalty. 

Although the DMV won on appeal — Essayli’s two points were reinstated by 2005 — the episode was neither the first nor the last time he would lean hard into a fight, even if the deck was stacked against him. 

When he broke an apartment lease in 2013 and his landlord penalized him with a $1,242 charge, Essayli took the landlord to court, claiming the landlord breached the lease first by failing to disclose noise from a freight train. (A judge denied the claim, twice.)

Unlike many of the lawyers who toil in the U.S. Attorney’s office, Essayli does not have an elite pedigree. Born in Anaheim to parents who immigrated to Southern California from Lebanon, Bilal Essayli, known to close friends as Billy, grew up in Corona, surrounded by cousins, aunts and uncles who traced their lineage to Yater, a village near Lebanon’s border with Israel. The wider family practiced Islam, embraced America, and remained committed to their home village, which was occupied by Israel until 2000. 

Essayli graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with a degree in political science and, while a student, worked in the district office of Rep. Ken Calvert, former chair of Riverside County’s Republican party. 

At Chapman University’s law school, where he enrolled in 2007, Essayli chaired the California Republican Lawyers Assn., worked briefly in the White House under President George W. Bush, and studied under Professor John Eastman, the scholar who gave Trump a legal rationale for attempting to overturn the 2020 election and has since been disbarred. 

Around 2009, his resume reached the desk of Stephen Berry, a partner at the Orange County office of Paul Hastings, one of the top law firms in the world. 

“I met Billy and was frankly blown away,” Berry said in an interview, remembering the student as sharp and mature. “He laid out this kind of vision for his future career in politics.”

Berry knew that hiring Essayli could be difficult. Paul Hastings typically recruited from the Ivy League and other top law schools; Chapman’s law school ranked at around 100. 

Berry won over the hiring committee. After a summer, he offered Essayli a full-time job following graduation.

In interviews, Essayli has framed his tenure at Paul Hastings as a calculated step to becoming a prosecutor.

“I never really wanted to go into Big Law,” he said on a podcast. Explaining that the legal field was “a very snooty profession,” he worked for a large firm because in the eyes of those hiring at the U.S. Attorney’s office, “it’s seen as, well, that’s what good law students do.”

Around 2012, Essayli received an offer to be a prosecutor in the Riverside County District Attorney’s office.

“I tried to talk him out of it,” Berry said. “I wasn’t confident it was the best move. But to his credit, he said, ‘My goal is to get into politics, and I think this is the best way to do it.’” 

By 2014, Essayli had been selected to become an Assistant U.S. Attorney, one of the hundreds of rank-and-file lawyers who shepherd federal cases from arrest to conviction and sentencing. 

Essayli did not hide his conservative views. When Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, Essayli was onboard, said those who knew him then.

Like most junior prosecutors, he toiled far from the complex, high-profile cases that grab headlines.

That has not stopped Essayli from latching onto others’ career-defining moments.

One of the most high-profile cases that passed through the office while he worked there was the prosecution of those connected to the perpetrators of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack. None of the dockets in the relevant cases bear Essayli’s name, but displaying a politician’s knack for taking as much credit as possible, he has claimed, including on his law firm’s website, that he was “entrusted with working on some of the nation’s most serious cases,” including the “terrorist attack in San Bernardino.” Essayli was among dozens of prosecutors who did behind-the-scenes work related to the cases.

In early 2018, Essayli launched his first political campaign, challenging then-Assemblywoman Sabrina Cervantes for an assembly seat representing Corona and neighboring communities. 

He lost and ultimately opened his own law firm. 

Almost immediately, Essayli’s dogfight with the Department of Justice on behalf of his own family began.

Case Dismissed 

In February of 2022, Essayli walked into the First Street Courthouse in downtown L.A. for a make-or-break moment. 

A standard criminal defense tactic is to challenge how the government has obtained the evidence it has against a defendant. 

That had been the heart of the strategy on the FISA warrant: Try to prove that the government had no legal basis for its intrusive surveillance. But despite two years of fighting, Essayli and his co-counsels had made scant headway on piercing the classified veil on that. 

But the legal team had another card to play. 

Scrutinizing a 2019 search warrant the government had used to get access to Osseily’s Gmail account, they noticed that the FBI agent who authored the warrant had appeared to confuse two accounting concepts. 

The agent’s search warrant had claimed that Osseily had falsely inflated his business’ “gross income,” telling a bank and credit card company that his business earned about $450,000 more in income than what his tax return showed.

But the agent had confused “gross income,” which is the amount of money a person or business earns after expenses, with “gross receipts,” which is the total revenue a person or business takes in.

Essayli and his colleagues pounced and called it a “reckless, if not intentional” sleight-of-hand. They wanted the search warrant tossed. It was from Osseily’s Gmail, after all, that agents had uncovered so much of their incriminating evidence about the Target scheme. 

Prosecutors fought the move. They countered that there was no effort to mislead the judge, that the warrant accurately described Osseily’s alleged fraud, and that it was “inevitable” that the Target fraud ring would have been uncovered.

To boost their argument, prosecutors opened their files to reveal more incriminating evidence about Osseily. In 2018, a Pennsylvania state trooper had submitted a report to the FBI about suspicious activity at Target stores in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The trooper detailed how Osseily had purchased more than $150,000 in electronics from 40 Target locations in four days and suggested it could be linked to an identity theft and credit card theft ring in the area.

Separately, a member of Osseily’s own alleged ring had twice contacted the FBI’s tip line in 2019 to turn in his alleged accomplices, court records show.

Finally, prosecutors pointed to an email Bill Essayli himself had sent to prosecutors after the U.S. Secret Service intercepted the $250,000 package of gift cards, which prompted investigators to seek data from Target about Osseily’s use of employee discounts. 

U.S. District Judge John Kronstadt allowed Essayli and his team to question the FBI agent, an IRS agent, and a bank representative in February 2022. Their testimony revealed embarrassing lapses in drafting the search warrant. 

Timothy Scott, a San Diego-based defense attorney who had joined Osseily’s legal team, grilled the IRS agent. Scott read a key phrase from the search warrant: that Osseily had submitted “a falsified tax return that fraudulently inflated his income.”

“Is that a true statement, as you sit here?” Scott asked.

“That is not accurate,” the IRS agent replied. The agent also acknowledged he did not tell the FBI agent or prosecutor about the problem. 

In a rare move, Kronstadt tossed out the warrant and all the incriminating evidence gathered from it.

The case was effectively dead. In 2022, prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges against Osseily and others.

Kronstadt never ruled on whether Essayli could review the FISA materials in the case. Nassim and Adam Essayli did not respond to questions submitted through their lawyers. 

“The case collapsed after we proved that the FBI built it on lies,” said Marcus Bourrassa, the lawyer who worked alongside Scott to fight for the warrant to be dismissed. “Abdallah Osseily is a devoted family man who represents the best of our community. … Abdallah simply asks to be left alone to enjoy the American Dream he has built with his wife and children.

Essayli declined to discuss the specifics of the case, citing “confidentiality obligations.”

“I can’t talk about that case in detail, but look, the DOJ is imperfect,” he said. “That’s why we have systems in place, that we have checks and balances … and we have systems in place that can right wrongs.” 

‘This Is Not What We Do In America’  

A week after Osseily’s charges were dropped, Essayli won a seat representing the 63rd Assembly district, including his hometown of Corona — although he actually lived several miles outside the district in Anaheim, where he owns a townhouse. 

Up in Sacramento, the new legislator quickly made it clear that he was a lone wolf. 

“He wasn't trying to make friends. He wasn't trying to make friends even within the Republican caucus,” said Matt Rexroad, a Republican strategist. “He was doing his own thing and looking for opportunities to get press.”

For years, Republicans had been utterly outplayed by a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature. The GOP in California has generally taken a pragmatic approach to using what scant leverage they have to achieve wins at the margins, like paring back bills or securing amendments.

Essayli had no patience for this accommodating, go-along-to-get-along approach, and advocated for open conflict. 

“They don’t know how to win,” Essayli said of state Republican leaders on the California Underground podcast. 

“I’m not a career politician,” he added, “I don’t need this job, so I can afford to take positions, and you know what, if I don’t get reelected, so be it; I go back to doing what I need to do.” 

He seized on the idea that the transgender rights movement had led to unfairness in women’s sports, and assailed school districts and activists for sidelining parents. He sponsored a bill that would prevent trans students from playing on sports teams or using bathrooms that don’t align with their gender assigned at birth. 

In Sacramento, he gained a reputation as a provocateur who relished confrontation. Democratic leaders began to mute him in hearings and debates. One night on the Assembly floor, after his mic was muted, he pounded on his desk several times and screamed, “I have a goddamn right to speak.” When Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin of Santa Cruz muted Essayli during a 2024 hearing, he continued yelling, and later confronted Pellerin, “So you are like the dictator here in this democracy?”

He eventually compiled video clips of the muting episodes into a supercut. He posted it on Facebook with the caption, “What Democracy looks like in the CA State Assembly.” 

Still, despite the acrimonious exchanges he jumped into for the cameras, Essayli was cordial in person. Lawmakers who ran into him aboard the Southwest flights from John Wayne Airport to Sacramento noted he was friendly and personable. 

During his time in Sacramento, Essayli’s support for Trump became more and more unwavering. Several of those charged in connection with storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 were residents of Southern California and Essayli personally represented two such people in their criminal cases. 

After Trump was convicted in New York in connection with a hush-money payment, Essayli said he was donating to Trump’s campaign and vowed to support him as a delegate at the Republican convention.

“This is not what we do in America. We do not lock up our political opponents,” Essayli said.

‘Law and order is back’

Essayli keeps a mug with Trump’s mugshot in his office in the federal courthouse downtown. It’s a symbol of his belief in the MAGA gospel: that under the Biden administration, the Department of Justice targeted Trump and his supporters and allowed crime to proliferate. In this telling, he is a necessary corrective.

“They were busy going after conservatives, Republicans, the president,” Essayli said in a brief interview. “We don’t do that here.”

What the office has done, under his tenure, has prompted widespread tumult. On immigration, Essayli struck an aggressive tone, telling a local Fox News affiliate, “Law and order is back.” He said he wanted to “neutralize those sanctuary state policies.”

Seasoned fraud prosecutors were reassigned to immigration-related cases. His office filed more than 100 cases over alleged misconduct related to anti-ICE demonstrations and immigration raids, particularly after waves of protests disrupted downtown L.A. and Santa Ana last summer. 

Although 29 defendants in these cases took plea deals, those who gambled and went to trial have secured acquittals in at least nine cases. The string of losses is embarrassing and rare; in fiscal year 2024, less than half a percent of all federal criminal cases ended in  acquittal, according to federal court data.

“He’s got to know exactly what he’s doing, and that just makes it worse,” said Windsor, the  defense attorney who worked with Essayli on the Target case that involved some of his relatives. 

“It’s not about justice. It’s not about the evidence. It’s about the agenda of the Trump administration — that is his compass,” Windsor added. 

Some have questioned whether Essayli even has the power to still run the office. By law, U.S. Attorneys must be confirmed by the Senate or, if the post is vacant, appointed by the federal judiciary. Essayli has neither stamp of approval. Instead, he was named “interim” U.S. Attorney, a 120-day appointment, then named “acting” U.S. Attorney before the term expired. Last fall, a judge ruled that he could no longer legally call himself the “acting” U.S. Attorney; instead, he is the “First Assistant.” But with the top job vacant, Essayli is the de facto U.S. Attorney. 

In the months after Essayli took over, dozens of experienced hands resigned or retired, including the head of the criminal division — a seasoned corruption prosecutor — as well as the head of public corruption along with the head of the immigration unit. The office typically has about 250 prosecutors, but an estimated 100 lawyers have left the office since early 2025, according to press reports, LinkedIn pages and interviews.

In case after case, former prosecutors and lawyers said in interviews, the U.S. Attorney’s office appears uncharacteristically disorganized and dysfunctional. 

This month, U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr. — the former U.S. Attorney during the Obama administration — chastised federal prosecutors for failing to turn over evidence to the defense in a case where the trial was underway. Prosecutors said they were relatively new to the case, had not been aware of the evidence, and that another former prosecutor “inadvertently” failed to include it in the case file, according to a court filing. 

“You’ve got to be ready for prime time and you’re not,” the judge said, the L.A. Times reported. “The government has tried numerous cases like this, I’m just surprised that there wouldn’t be a check to see ‘Has everything been turned over?’”  

Birotte dismissed the case — in which two people were each accused of assaulting a federal officer — with prejudice, which prevents prosecutors from refiling charges.

Essayli insists his tenure is going well. 

“We’re focused on making the public safer,” he said in a brief interview. “What we do is bread and butter.…It’s violent crime. It’s human trafficking on Figueroa. It’s getting violent criminal illegal immigrants off the streets.”

And then there is his very public, often overtly political campaign against the fraud that he says Democratic leaders have allowed to become endemic in California.

On “X,” Essayli tagged the governor on April 8 with a post that read, in part: “You are the Fraud King.” Newsom has punched back, accusing him and Trump of pardoning and commuting fraudsters. 

Other California officials — once so willing to spar with Essayli when he was a Republican assemblyman — have fallen silent. 

Numerous Democratic elected officials declined to comment on the record about Essayli. Three people close to prominent officials said — anonymously — that they are acutely aware that the man once regarded as a junior legislative troll now wields incredible power, including the power to sweep them up in any number of criminal probes. 

Essayli seems to revel in it.

“We’re providing the oversight that’s been missing from California for a very long time,” he said earlier this month. 

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