Republican candidate for Minnesota House District 2A and former Hubbard County Sheriff’s Deputy Bidal Duran. Courtesy photo.
A Republican candidate for a state House seat who is running on his experience in law enforcement was excoriated by a state judge last fall for “intentionally or recklessly mischaracterizing the truth” on a pair of affidavits in a felony drug case.
House candidate Bidal Duran was a deputy with the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office last year, when he requested permission to search the cell phones of two men arrested during a traffic stop that turned up a large quantity of meth and thousands in cash.
Duran first said the suspects were pulled over in a routine speed trap on a quiet county road but later said he was tipped off by a confidential informant, leading the judge to deny the search warrant and accuse him of “lying” about the existence of the informant.
“The conduct of Agent Duran could be insidious and has hopefully not spread to other officers in the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office,” Minnesota Ninth District Court Judge Eric Schieferdecker warned in an Oct. 2 judgment.
The denial led to the drug case falling apart, and Duran was investigated for misconduct after the judge’s order. The disciplinary investigation ultimately cleared Duran of violating department policy, but details of the investigation raised questions about Duran’s thoroughness and work-ethic as a law enforcement officer.
Last fall, Duran was also given a written reprimand for turning off his body camera twice during an interaction with a member of the public, who told investigators Duran threatened them with jail unless they answered his questions.
Duran’s employment with Hubbard County was terminated last month. The county and Duran declined to say why, but Minnesota House Republican Campaign Committee spokesman Andrew Wagner said it was part of a medical retirement.
“For the past 9 months, I have been pursuing a medical retirement. During this extensive process, I exhausted the entirety of my medical leave, and as a result was terminated from employment,” Duran said in a statement shared by Wagner.
Duran is a Marine corps veteran who was deployed on a combat mission to Afghanistan in 2010, according to his campaign website. He became a police officer for the city of Bemidji in 2013 and then joined the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office in 2020.
Duran is favored to beat Democrat Reed Olson, a restaurateur, homeless shelter operator and former Beltrami County commissioner in the Republican-leaning House District 2A that covers a large stretch of northern Minnesota from Bemidji to the Canadian border.
Voters in the district elected outgoing Republican Rep. Matt Grossell four times, even after he entered into a court diversion program following a drunken incident at a St. Paul hotel bar.
Olson said in a statement that he is a firm believer in the Constitution and its protections against unwarranted search and seizure: “A violation of anyone’s rights is a potential violation of everyone’s rights.”
‘It looks pretty bad’
Duran, who served on the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force, started his quest for a search warrant after two other deputies stopped a vehicle on a rural road near Park Rapids in late December 2022 for going 33 mph in a 30-mph zone.
Deputies smelled marijuana and searched the vehicle, finding 118 grams of purported meth, 15 grams of marijuana and $7,292 cash. Law enforcement believed the men were on a mission to sell the meth, and Duran wanted the judge to allow him to search their cell phones.
In his first search warrant application in March 2023, Duran said the two men were caught in a speed trap that the sheriff’s deputies set up because of community complaints about speeding.
Schieferdecker denied Duran full access to the suspects phones because police didn’t have enough probable cause. Instead he granted a narrow warrant to access the phone’s web history, search history and location data, according to court records.
A few months later in June, Duran resubmitted the search warrant seeking all the communications on the cell phones. This time, he included new information about a confidential informant, who had tipped him off to a driver bringing large amounts of drugs to the area.
This affidavit aligned with what Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Agent Dan Skoog, who was also involved in the stop, would say during a later investigation: that the car was pulled over because of information Duran said he had from a confidential informant, not from a speed trap.
Schieferdecker, apparently surprised by the existence of a confidential informant, circled the paragraphs about the informant and asked Duran over email if he had this information when he wrote the first affidavit and if the speed trap was set up because of that information. Duran emailed back “yes” to both questions.
“I had previously advised you not to jerk me around about on probable cause in search warrants. That had no effect on your practices. I am very disappointed,” Schieferdecker replied, according to an email thread included in the disciplinary investigation.
He said Duran would have to submit all of his search warrants to the sheriff before he would review them and would inform other judges and the suspect’s attorney about his concerns.
Months later, in his October order denying the search warrant, Schieferdecker wrote that the omission of the confidential informant made him unsure if there were even more details left out of either affidavit about the traffic stop. After Duran submitted his first search warrant, Scheiferdecker asked him if he had included all of his probable cause, and Duran said yes.
“Intentionally misleading the Court in pursuit of a search warrant is extremely serious and inexcusable,” Schieferdecker wrote.
After Schieferdecker’s order denying the search warrant, the Hubbard County Attorney’s Office dropped felony charges of methamphetamine possession or sale and driving while intoxicated.
“It looks pretty bad on my behalf,” Duran said in an interview with the Reformer.
But Duran said there’s more to the story. He told the Reformer to ask the Hubbard County Attorney’s Office what legal advice they gave him.
“Because if I was given bad advice and I was told to move forward with the search warrants .. is that me?” Duran said.
Duran would not elaborate on what that advice was. Asked if the prosecutor told him not to mention the confidential informant at first, Duran said there was “no need to because the information provided during that case did not need for that.”
Hubbard County Attorney Jonathan Frieden did not respond to requests for comment on what legal advice he provided Duran. He told the officer in charge of investigating Duran for misconduct that his office did not review the first warrant application but did review the second warrant, to which he added detail.
Duran also suggested digging deeper into why the judge ruled the way he did, as well as “the judge’s history.”
“Then we can actually have a real good conversation once you get all the facts straight,” Duran said.
The candidate didn’t elaborate on the judge’s “history,” and said he would share his side of the story after the Reformer found out more information. Then he said goodbye and hung up.
Investigation finds no policy violations
Following the judgment, the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office opened a misconduct investigation into Duran.
The investigative file isn’t public under Minnesota law because the complaint didn’t result in discipline, but the file was shared with the Reformer by Wagner, the Minnesota House GOP campaign spokesman.
Wagner pointed out that the review, which was conducted by an outside investigator with the Becker County Sheriff’s Office, determined Duran didn’t do anything wrong.
But the investigation also revealed sloppy police work and poor communication, and the investigator said he understood why Schieferdecker would feel Duran was not being truthful, even if he did not intentionally lie.
Frieden, the Hubbard County attorney, and Assistant County Attorney Jonathan Olson, who was the lead prosecutor on the drug case, told the investigator the first warrant application looked like it was copied and pasted from other police reports.
They said they thought Duran “was being somewhat lazy and not wanting to fully complete his work and not wanting to add more detail into the warrant application.”
Frieden and Olson also said they had concerns with other warrant submissions from Duran and had previously talked to him about being more transparent and specific. Still, they said they didn’t believe Duran did anything wrong.
Skoog, the BCA agent who was involved in the stop, told the investigator that police commonly leave confidential informants off of search warrant applications.
The investigator also interviewed the Paul Bunyon Task Force commander at the time, Joe Klezyzk, who also said task force officers commonly withhold information about a confidential informant on a search warrant unless the deputy is specifically asked if there is an informant involved.
After Duran submitted his first affidavit, Schieferdecker did email him to ask, “Is this the entirety of your [probable cause]?” according to court records.
Duran replied, “It should be. I hope I sent the right one?” but did not mention the confidential informant.
In his order, Schieferdecker made clear he did not think it was appropriate for officers to withhold information about confidential informants and noted the state has a process for protecting their identities.
Schieferdecker declined to comment through a spokesman and also declined an interview with the Becker County investigator.
The Hubbard County attorney could have appealed Schieferdecker’s judgment denying the search warrant. But he told the disciplinary investigator that they decided not to because he felt it would “open a big can of worms” by siding with Duran over the judge.
Frieden, in an interview with the Reformer, said without the search warrant it would be too difficult to prove that the drugs belonged to the two suspects.
“Just because something’s in a vehicle does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone in that vehicle was aware of it. And even if they were aware of it, that they actually possessed it,” Frieden said.
Frieden said he wouldn’t have any problem putting Duran on the witness stand in future cases.