California Republican Assembly candidate pleaded guilty to welfare fraud

STOCKTON, California — Denise Aguilar Mendez, a Republican candidate running for a California Assembly seat, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of welfare fraud in 2020, court records show.

Mendez is a conservative activist who founded the anti-vaccine group Freedom Angels and attended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. She is challenging Democrat Rhodesia Ransom in the race for outgoing Democratic Rep. Carlos Villapudua’s Stockton-area Assembly seat.

Documents obtained by POLITICO show Aguilar was charged with three felonies in 2019 — aid by misrepresentation, perjury and grand theft of personal property — for allegedly cheating the San Joaquin County Health Services Agency out of $10,984 in public funds between 2016 and 2018. Aguilar initially pleaded not guilty to the charges before agreeing to a deal in September 2020 that saw the charges dropped to misdemeanor welfare fraud, according to records.

The court ordered Aguilar to repay the funds, assessed $385 in fines and sentenced her to 120 hours of community service at the Stockton Homeless Shelter and 40 days in jail. Her sentence was later reduced to 20 days, which she served in February 2023, according to records.

Aguilar posted to X shortly after The Sacramento Bee first reported the story . In her post, she dismissed the story as a “stupid article” but did not deny the substance of the reporting. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment from POLITICO.

“I wasn’t always a politician and yes I have things in my past that these fools think will shift the conversation,” she wrote. “It won’t.”

Aguilar was already unlikely to win in November as the district leans strongly Democratic.

The documents also show Aguilar missed court dates. The San Joaquin Superior Court issued a felony arrest warrant for Aguilar after she failed to appear for her arraignment in July 2019 with bail set at $15,000.

She appeared in court for arraignment hearings later that year, but her attendance problems continued, according to records. Aguilar’s conditional probation was revoked in January 2022 after she missed a court hearing to review her community service. Her probation was later modified in January 2023 before she served her jail sentence, the records show.

Aguilar is still eligible to run for office because the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor. California election code bars a candidate from pursuing state or local office only if they are convicted of felony embezzlement, extortion or theft of public money, bribery, perjury or “conspiracy to commit any of those crimes.”