Assemblyman Bilal Essayli is under serious consideration for appointment as the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, the Sentinel has learned.
Essayli (R-Riverside) in 2019 served as former San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia’s chief of staff.
Essayli, who no longer goes by the first name Bilal but rather Bill, is philosophically and politically aligned with the Trump Administration.
Foremost, as a Republican in the Golden State, he is severely out of step with the Democratic majority in Sacramento which for the better part of a generation has dominated California politically. Most pointedly, as member of California’s lower legislative house, Essayli has not only been thwarted with regard to legislation he has proposed while in the Assembly and positions he has taken, but been treated with disrespect and contempt by his Democratic counterparts, who hold supermajorities in the Assembly and the California Senate along with every other constitutional position in California state government, such s governor, lieutenant governor, California attorney general, California secretary of state, California treasurer, California controller, California superintendent of schools and California insurance commissioner.
In March 2023, barely three months after he joined the Assembly, he coauthored with Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), Assembly Bill 1314, which would have required school districts throughout the state to notify parents in writing within three days if a student began “identifying at school as a gender that does not align with the child’s sex on their birth certificate” in 2023. Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, the Democratic chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, used parliamentary prerogative that was his based on the Democrats’ control of the full Assembly to deny a hearing date for AB 1314, guaranteeing it would not get beyond his committee and thereby effectively killing it without granting it consideration by the state’s legislative bodies.
Prior to his election, Essayli, an attorney, had represented former Fontana Assistant Police Chief Alan Hostetter after he was indicted by the federal government and arrested by the FBI in June 2021 for having participated in what federal prosecutors said was the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol that day and a fiery speech he made in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building the previous day in league with Donald Trump’s friend and supporter Roger Stone. In that speech and his organizational activity relating to the January 6 protests, Hostetter maintained that the Democrats in a massive and well-orchestrated conspiracy had “stolen” the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. Ultimately, Hostetter, who had served as the police chief of La Habra after he left the Fontana Police Department, upon foregoing representation by an attorney or legal team, was convicted at trial and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. Hostetter was issued a pardon by President Trump earlier this year.
In his role as Valdivia’s chief of staff, Essayli faced the challenge of formulating a strategy that would allow Valdivia to recreate the administrative authority that formerly existed in the San Bernardino mayor’s position but which had been taken away by the passage of a revamped city charter in 2016, two years before Valdivia assumed the mayoral post. This was complicated by a slow erosion in Valdivia’s support on the city council, which he initially controlled by virtue of a ruling coalition he had assembled, as his relationships with three of that panel’s members soured during the first year of his tenure. Ultimately, recognizing that his association with Valdivia, who at one point was seen as a climber in San Bernardino County’s Republican-dominated political atmosphere but whose welcome diminished as his immersion in the pay-to-play political horsetrading ethos of local governmental operations became overwhelmingly apparent, Essayli moved back into his private law practice and concentrated on kindling his own political career.
The son of immigrants from Lebanon who fled that country during its civil war in the 1980s, Essayli is the first Muslim ever elected to the California State Assembly. He represents California’s 63rd Assembly District, consisting of Canyon Lake, Corona, Eastvale, Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Norco, Riverside, Temescal Valley and Woodcrest. He graduated from Cal Poly Pomona and obtained a law degree from the Chapman University School of Law.
At the age of 22 in 2008, he served as a White House intern during the George W. Bush Administration. He passed the bar in California after leaving Washington, D.C., practicing labor law for a short time before going to work as a deputy prosecutor in the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. He moved into the U.S. Attorney’s Office, becoming the Assistant United States Attorney for the Central District of California, in which capacity he was involved in the investigations and prosecutions that followed from the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, in which his religion was utilized to ward off or blunt criticism of bias against the two Muslim extremist perpetrators of the attacks.