LOS ANGELES — A top official from the Los Angeles County district attorney's office is asking a judge to toss out 11 felony charges filed against her by state prosecutors, with her attorney arguing in a court filing that the allegedly confidential files she's accused of misusing were actually public records.

In April, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta accused Diana Teran, then a top advisor to Dist. Atty. George Gascón, of illegally using confidential records about 11 sheriff's deputies when she flagged their names for inclusion in a database used by prosecutors to keep track of officers accused of misconduct.

Within hours of Bonta's public announcement, Teran's attorney, James Spertus, said that his client had done nothing wrong and that the records in question were likely all public in existing court filings.

But because state prosecutors asked to keep the deputies' names secret, for two months Spertus couldn't prove it. Then last week, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge unsealed a key document, including an unredacted version for the defense filed under seal.

The public version of the document — an affidavit used to justify the charges against Teran — revealed the names of two deputies, both of whom had disciplinary histories easily found through a Google search. According to Spertus' latest court filing, the unredacted version revealed that records relating to the nine other deputies were already public as well.

"From the moment this case was filed, I was suspicious of what the motive [for filing it] was because there's no crime and release of the affidavit confirms that," Spertus told The Times late Monday. "The underlying theory is that she stole public information."

The California Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

Teran had been scheduled to enter a plea Monday morning. But the judge rescheduled after state prosecutors said they needed time to respond to Spertus' filing.

Much of the brief hearing focused instead on the hundreds of pages of attachments Spertus filed, which he said were all publicly available court records. State prosecutors questioned whether Spertus was allowed to file them publicly based on his knowledge of the nine redacted names.

Prosecutors did not address the substance of Spertus' filing but accused him in court of making an end run around a protective order. The judge decided to leave those attachments sealed for the time being.

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