Far-right US thinktank to give award to extremist sheriff leading ‘disaster’ office

The rightwing Claremont Institute will present its 2023 Sheriff Award to the California sheriff Chad Bianco, a former member of two far-right “patriot movement” groups, and whose Riverside county department (RCSD) has been branded a “disaster” by local media amid criminal allegations and a state investigation into death rates in its jail.

Bianco’s award will be presented by the former attorney general Jeff Sessions, who served in the Trump administration, just before the commencement of Claremont’s 2023 Sheriffs Fellowship – a secretive annual program that experts say coaches law enforcement officers in far-right “constitutional sheriff” ideology, which posits that their authority overrides that of the federal US government.

Sessions’ involvement shows the increasing merger of far-right groups and thought with the Republican party under the influence of Donald Trump, who remains the overwhelming favorite to win its 2024 presidential nomination.

Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors and researches extremist groups, said that Bianco was one of many sheriffs who “use the far-right ‘constitutional sheriff’ mythology to paper over law enforcement abuses of power”.

Burghart added: “The Claremont Institute’s efforts to elevate far-right sheriffs like Bianco continue a trend that started during the pandemic: the mainstreaming of the ‘constitutional sheriffs’ mythology.”

In an email last month, the Claremont Institute invited subscribers to the 9 November dinner at the Hilton hotel in Huntington Beach, California, which will “honor the work of longtime patriot and tireless defender of America’s founding principles, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco”.

Then attorney general Jeff Sessions, right, with former president Donald Trump. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

The advertised ticket price is $450, and the dinner comes two days before the start of the sheriffs fellowship, set for 11-17 November and for which no physical location has yet been made public.

The Claremont Institute has been described as the “nerve center of the American right”, coming to greater prominence after the senior fellow John Eastman became one of the main faces of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Eastman has since been indicted alongside Trump and 17 others in Georgia in a prosecution related to those efforts.

In recent months, the Guardian has reported on Claremont’s links to the hard right, including the board chair Thomas Kligenstein’s calls for a “war” on “woke communists”; Claremont’s support of a secretive, men-only lodge founded by a would-be “warlord”; and some Claremont fellows’ promotion of authoritarian “red Caesarism” as a solution to what they see as a decadent US.

In response to a request for comment on Bianco’s speech, Claremont’s senior communications director, David Bahr, wrote in an email that the institute is “pleased to honor Sheriff Bianco, who won re-election last year in Riverside County with nearly 60 percent of the vote, with our American Sheriff Award”.

Bahr added: “Sheriff Bianco’s fidelity to the Constitution and his desire to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life, is something we think worth celebrating.”

The Guardian also contacted Bianco for comment but received no response.

John Eastman, left, with Rudy Giuliani, ex-president Donald Trump’s personal attorney, at the Trump rally in Washington DC on 6 January 2021. Photograph: Jim Bourg/Reuters

While Claremont prepares to honor Bianco, the Press-Enterprise, the newspaper of record in Riverside county, last month described his administration as a “complete disaster” in an editorial, citing a long string of incidents involving deputies, and lawsuits arising from a wave of deaths in custody in the county’s jail system.

Bianco is a defendant in at least half a dozen lawsuits filed on behalf of people who died while incarcerated in Riverside county’s jail system, including three filed last month, according to media reports and federal court records.

The plaintiffs include the family of a transgender woman who was placed in a cell with a sex offender who murdered her; in that case, deputies took an hour to notice the homicide had taken place.

In 2022 alone, 18 people incarcerated in Riverside county’s jails died – the largest number of deaths in the county’s system since 2005; another nine people died in custody this year, according to county records.

In February, California’s department of justice announced a probe into in-custody deaths in the county. The Guardian emailed the department to ask about the status of that investigation but received no response.

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Meanwhile, several deputies have been arrested for alleged criminal acts carried out while they were on duty. In September alone, three correctional deputies, who staff the county’s troubled jail system, were arrested and charged with serious crimes.

On 13 September, Brent Bishop Turnwall was arrested after being discovered under the influence of and in possession of a drug while on duty at a jail. On 16 September, Christian Heidecker was arrested and charged with extorting four incarcerated women and sexually assaulting one of them. On 17 September, corrections deputy Jorge Alberto Oceguera-Rocha was charged after being arrested with more than 100 pounds of fentanyl in his car; he was allegedly working for a drug-trafficking organization.

He’s just really shitty at his job. He isn’t making Riverside county any saferRadley Balko

Last April, meanwhile, Riverside county narcotics investigators allowed a suspected drug trafficker to escape with nearly 60 pounds of methamphetamine they had used in a failed undercover sting.

And in August, Riverside county paid $136,000 to an older couple whose house was searched without a warrant in August 2021.

While Bianco has been criticized locally over his performance in office, he has been feted and courted nationally by the far right over his anti-immigrant stance.

In June, immigrants’ rights groups criticized Bianco for being one of only two California sheriffs to sign a letter circulated by Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, which announced a “coalition” of sheriffs “united in the struggle to keep our communities safe from the ravages of our collapsed southern border”.

Bianco was a Claremont sheriffs fellow in the inaugural intake in 2021. He also has had associations with far-right “patriot movement” groups: the Oath Keepers, and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA).

When the Oath Keepers experienced a data breach in 2021, reporters discovered Bianco’s address in leaked email information. Bianco said at the time he could not remember joining in 2014, when he was a lieutenant in RCSD, and did not attend any of the group’s meetings. He nevertheless defended the group, even in the wake of their participation in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021.

The Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy, becoming one of 14 Oath Keepers imprisoned over their role in the Capitol riot.

Bianco is also reportedly a supporter of the CSPOA, an organization founded in 2011 by Richard Mack that holds that sheriffs should refuse to enforce state and federal laws they deem unconstitutional, and which rallied members against enforcing public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Commenting on Bianco’s Claremont honor in his Substack newsletter, the journalist and criminal justice commentator Radley Balko wrote that Claremont was “celebrating a sheriff who has not only tolerated abuse [and] overseen rampant misconduct … he’s also just really shitty at his job. He isn’t making Riverside county any safer.”