Behind the smoke and mirrors of Los Angeles County politics, where power deals cross city and county lines as easily as the smog drifts over the 405, a forgotten recording has crawled back out of the shadows and it’s once again putting Supervisor Hilda Solis exactly where she never wants to be: in the middle of the conversation.
The 2022 audio leak , part of the now-infamous, racially charged meeting between City Council members Nury Martinez, Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo , captures more than gossip. For over an a hour, the chatter veers from petty personal digs to a full-blown strategy session on how to contain the political fallout from the Mark Ridley-Thomas bribery scandal . And sitting right in the center of their whispered crisis management? Hilda Solis.
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As Ridley-Thomas gets ready to serve his three-and-a-half-year federal sentence for funneling more than $100,000 in campaign cash to cover his son’s USC tuition in exchange for county contracts, the recording makes one thing clear, Solis wasn’t a distant bystander. She was close enough to feel the heat.
Martinez recounts a panicked call from Solis: “Hilda called. You know he used to f*** with Hilda a lot.” The line lands like a spark in dry brush, half rumor, half confession. Martinez presses: “Well, I get it, Hilda, pero cuídate, because, I mean, were you voting on this s*** too?” Then de León drops the real bomb: “I know because the FBI visited me.” The laughter that follows is the nervous kind, the kind people use when they know the walls are starting to close in.
Solis’s reaction was immediate, call for an audit. A county-wide review of “all this s***,” as Martinez repeats, aimed squarely at contracts touched by Ridley-Thomas. On paper it looked like reform; in practice it looked like panic. Martinez even walks her through how to build the votes: “You need Barger, you need Holly, you need Sheila, you need Janice… The old guard is gonna be against it.” Translation: get the board behind you before the feds connect the dots.
The audit did happen. What never happened was transparency. When the Board of Supervisors received the final report in October 2024, they quietly shelved it. No press conference, no release, no accountability. Every Public Records Act request since has come back redacted into uselessness. County watchdogs tell The Current Report it’s a classic County play, stage the optics of oversight, bury the evidence before anyone reads it.
That pattern tracks perfectly with Solis’s political career. She’s been skating on the thin ice of ethics her entire climb, from Congress to Obama’s Cabinet to the Hall of Power on Temple Street. As Labor Secretary, she failed to disclose her husband’s tax-ridden business ties to federal contractors. She hopped a private jet owned by a union under investigation for embezzlement and never reported it. And when she jumped back into local politics in 2014, a federal inquiry trailed her over allegations she pressured staff to campaign for Obama’s reelection, a blatant Hatch Act violation if proven. She called it “politically motivated.” Of course she did.
Fast-forward to the present, and even her own allies are saying the quiet part out loud. “Hilda was under FBI investigation,” de León blurts out on the tape. For anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s not a surprise, it’s confirmation. Solis has been in the game long enough to perfect the art of surviving scandal by pretending it doesn’t exist.
Her alliance with Ridley-Thomas ran deep. Together they built L.A. County’s so-called “progressive” empire, billions in taxpayer dollars funneled into nonprofits that doubled as political incubators. When Ridley-Thomas was indicted in 2021, Solis rushed to join Supervisors Barger and Mitchell in ordering an independent audit of his contracts. The conclusion? “No pattern of corruption.” The catch? That conclusion is buried in the report they refuse to release.
The pattern of concealment doesn’t stop there. During COVID, Solis personally pushed no-bid testing contracts to Fulgent Genetics, the same company Sheriff Alex Villanueva publicly warned had ties to the Chinese Communist Party . The feds took interest. She went quiet.
Nury Martinez, far left, Hilda Solis, far right. Now, with the MRT case settled and the tape back in circulation, her second “audit” push reeks of desperation. Why revisit the same contracts unless the first audit exposed something she doesn’t want anyone to see? And why, if she truly believes in transparency, is the 2024 audit still sealed tighter than County Counsel’s lips?
The leaked audio isn’t just a peek behind the curtain, it’s a rare, unfiltered look at the machinery of power that has ruled Los Angeles for decades. Martinez’s dismissive “I’m not involving myself in your s***” isn’t just self-preservation, it’s an indictment of an entire political ecosystem built on trading favors, protecting allies, and selling “reform” while quietly looting public trust.
Solis’s legacy mirrors Los Angeles itself, ambition dressed up as progress, corruption dressed up as compassion. Every audit, every motion, every photo-op about accountability is just another performance to keep voters looking the other way. The U.S. Attorney’s Office needs to widen the scope of the MRT probe to include Solis’s voting record, her communications with the council members on that tape, and her handling of the hidden audit. Because in a County where corruption is practically a line item in the budget, the only way to find the truth is to drag it into the light.
Until Hilda Solis releases that 2024 audit, her silence says everything we need to know. In Los Angeles politics, silence isn’t protection…it’s confession.
