Defying not only the predominate political currents in the Golden State but convention and the odds that our nation’s chief executive would choose a Muslim to head up the justice department in one of the largest metropolitan districts in the county, Bilal Essayli has been appointed to be the U.S. attorney for the justice department’s Central District of California.
As a consequence, Essayli was required to, and on Tuesday April 1, resigned his position as the Assemblyman representing California’s 63rd Assembly District.
On Wednesday, April 2, he was sworn in as U.S. Attorney by U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee.
“I am honored that President Trump and Attorney General [Pam] Bondi have placed their trust in me to serve as United States Attorney for the Central District of California,” Essayli stated afterward.
Unlikelihood has been a watchword throughout and even preceding Essayli’s personal existence.
In 1981, within Lebanon, fighting between Lebanese Christian militias, which had been forced together by Bachir Gemayel, and Palestinian insurgents backed primarily by the Palestine Liberation organization intensified. In 1982, the skirmishing erupted into a full-blown war, with forces that included the Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims, pan-Arabists, and leftists, backed by Syria and Iran, taking on the Christians, who had formed an alliance with Israel. That same year, Gemayel was elected, at the age of 34, president of Lebanon, making him the youngest president-elect in that country’s history. He did not take office, as he was assassinated before being installed as president. Instead, his older brother, Amine Gemayel, became Lebanon president.
The bitter conflict intensified as the Siege of Beirut dragged on. In 1983 the war moved on into the county’s mountain region and became general throughout the country. The United States sent Marines in to act as peacekeepers. In October 1883, 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French military personnel along with six civilians were killed when two Islamic militants drove an explosive filled truck into the Marine compound and detonated it. There was Arab and international outrage as the Lebanese army, acting in concert with the Israelis in Beirut and elsewhere, were accused of or shown to be engaging in mass arrests of the population, displacing civilians, slaughter and other war crimes.
Despite the general circumstance in Lebanon, Essayli’s parents were able to leave the county and emigrate – legally – to the United States. This came despite their Islamic religious affiliation.
Essayli was born on November 24, 1985. He attended Cal Poly Pomona, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cal Poly’s Kellogg Honors College. He began taking law classes at Chapman University, and worked, briefly, as an intern in the George Bush White House’s counsel’s office. Thereafter, he completed his studies at Chapman University of Law, obtaining a juris doctor degree. In December 2010 he passed the California Bar.
His first legal job as a professional lawyer was done as a deputy prosecutor in the Riverside County District Attorney’ Office under then District Attorney Paul Zellerbach. The office at that time, however, had been shaped largely by the two previous district attorneys, Grover Trask and Rod Pacheco, Republicans perceived as “conservative” in their orientation as opposed to Zellerbach, who had embraced and worked to facilitate the Democratic State Legislature’s efforts at “realignment,” which aimed to ease overcrowding in the state’s penitentiaries by lowering sentences for some crimes and shifting prisoners into county jails. Essayli, who took a hard line against crime nevertheless thrived in the district attorney’s office before he left there to become an assistant United States Attorney for the Central District of California, which includes Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
In the aftermath of the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino by a husband-wife team, both Islamic extremists who were killed during the San Bernardino Police Department’s response, Essayli was assigned by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to the follow-up prosecutions of the attackers’ associates and enablers, in some measure because his Islamic faith would blunt any suggestions that the prosecutions were biased.
At that point, Essayli was strongly identified as a Republican dedicated to conservative causes or at least what is commonly associated with being conservative causes.
In 2018, as a Republican, he challenged Democrat Sabrina Cervantes for Assembly in the 60th Assembly District. This necessitated, under the Hatch Act, that he resign from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He went into private practice as an attorney at that point, specializing in labor and real estate law. He lost in the election to Cervantes.
In the same November 2018 election however, John Valdivia emerged victorious in his race for San Bernardino Mayor. At that point, Valdivia, who had been on the San Bernardino City Council since 2012, was perceived as an up-and-coming Republican. Essayli went to work for Valdivia as his chief of staff shortly after the latter was installed as mayor. There followed, however, a series of scandals as Valdivia immersed himself in pay to play politics in which there were demonstrable transactional relationships between money provided to the mayor by donors to Valdivia’s campaign fund and action by the San Bernardino City Council advocated by Valdivia which benefited those donors. As Valdivia’s council colleagues began to openly relate how they were being pressured by the mayor to vote in accordance with his wishes and the interests of his most generous political backers, there followed a period during which those involved in the Republican Party in San Bernardino County debated about whether it would be prudent or not to continue to stand by Valdivia, Essayli opted to resign as the mayoral chief of staff to concentrate on his legal career. Shortly thereafter, Pacheco, who had been the Republican leader in the California Assembly in 1998 and 1999 and was serving as Valdivia’s attorney in his efforts to ward off multiple accusations of unethical conduct, likewise removed himself from the Valdivia bandwagon. In 2022, Valdivia, despite an overwhelming financial advantage among seven candidates running for mayor, was unable to muster enough votes to remain in office, finishing in a distant third place.
In 2022, after the 2021 redistricting of state Assembly districts based on the 2020 census, Essayli ran for the state Assembly in the newly drawn 63rd Assembly District, representing Canyon Lake, sections of Corona, Eastvale, Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Norco and parts of Riverside. He defeated Eastvale Mayor Clint Lorimore in the primary and entrepreneur Fauzia Rizvi in the general election to become the first Muslim in the California Assembly.
Essayli was comfortably reelected in 2024 by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin against his Democratic opponent.
Essayli, with virtually no effort, has turned into a lightning rod of controversy with regard to cultural issues. Despite being at a significant numerical disadvantage to the opposition Democrats, who hold supermajorities in the California Senate and Assembly and every constitutional state office in Sacramento from governor to lieutenant governor to attorney general to secretary of state to state controller to state treasurer to superintendent of public schools to insurance commissioner, Essayli despite being parliamentarily outmaneuvered at virtually every turn, always seems to register a victory of some sort, usually one in the realm of rhetoric, wider public perception or in some other fashion.
In 2021, prior to his successful run for the Assembly, Essayli 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 March 2023, barely three months after he joined the Assembly, Essayli 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 legislative 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.
Nevertheless, inspired by Essayli’s bill and his action, several school districts throughout the state, including in the Chino Valley Unified School District, replicated the essence of Essayli’s bill into parental notification policies applicable in those districts, which invited from the state legislature the passage of a law preventing school districts from enacting parental notification polices. That law is now being challenged in court by the Chino Valley Unified School District. The Chino School District’s policy also resulted in a lawsuit against it brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, which sought to prevent parental notification. The district, by rewording the notification requirement to specify that parents were to be told of students altering their scholastic records and transcripts rather than specifying gender identification, fashioned a notification policy found constitutional by the courts that essentially meets the underlying notification goal.
Muratsuchi is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2026, and finds himself having to defend his action in preventing the legislature from having considered a parental notification bill, in a state where polling shows Republican adults of voting age overwhelmingly and Democrat adults of voting age by a less pronounced but still substantial majority support the concept of parents being kept informed of the gender identity their children assume at school.
In other, slightly different but similar legislative contexts, Essayli has succeeded in goading or baiting the Democratic opposition into action which to disinterested, casual, better informed or even fully informed observers comes across as extreme, unfair or contrary to democratic principles.
In 2024, Democratic Assemblyman Corey Jackson, (D-Moreno Valley) grew physically confrontational when Essayli, protesting his microphone being turned off during legislative discussion, likened the majority Democrats to “the Chinese Communist Party” after his microphone was shut off for being ruled out of order.
The Democratic chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee, Jesse Gabriel based on his chairmanship and the Democrats supermajority in the Assembly, booted Essayli offi the budget committee in a unilateral move.
Similarly, after Essayli sought passage of a bill he authored that would have eliminated sanctuary state protections for convicted child sex abusers and the Democrats in the Assembly Judiciary Committee declined to consider it, meaning it had no chance to advance to a full vote of the lower house or to be considered by the California Senate, Essayli publicly stated that the Democratic party in general and certain Democrats who were members of the legislature were engaged in efforts to protect pedophiles, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas removed Essayli from the Assembly Judiciary Committee.
As a member of a grossly outnumbered minority party in Sacramento, Essayli has been fated to being a dissident for the last two years and four months, even if that has meant he has made a more accentuated display of his dissent than virtually anyone else.
That has now been changed, maybe even rewarded, by the Trump Administration’s decision to elevated him to head the U.S. attorney’s office in what is the largest federal judicial district in the country. In that capacity, he will enforce the law among a population of 19.83 million people and oversee a staff of 253 lawyers,
For the most part, state law is trumped by federal law and the California legislature, which did not see eye-to-eye with him regarding illegal immigration into this country and California in particular, disregarding his deep respect for his parents who despite their desperate need to make their exodus from war-torn Lebanon still managed to abide by the rules when they emigrated to the United States, has indicated he is ready to broadly interpret U.S. immigration law within California’ Central District, which is to include deeming those who have not registered as immigrants and applied to go through the immigration process are to be deemed as criminals, subject to immediate deportation. Moreover, he said, he is to make it a “top priority” to “find and prosecute violent criminal illegal immigrants and those aiding and supporting them. The days of sanctuary protections for criminals in California are over. I intend to implement the President’s mission to restore trust in our justice system and pursue those who dare to cause harm to the United States and the People of our nation.”
-Mark Gutglueck