Honig Confirms Indictment, Calls It Plot to Oust Him : Education: Schools chief denies wrongdoing, accuses Atty. Gen. Lungren of politically motivated probe. Charges involve funds used by Honig’s wife’s firm.

SAN FRANCISCO —  State schools chief Bill Honig confirmed Thursday that he has been indicted by a state grand jury on felony conflict-of-interest charges, but he denied any wrongdoing and said he is the victim of a right-wing “cabal” seeking to force him from office.

According to Honig’s attorneys and state sources, the charges involve alleged misuse of state funds in connection with a nonprofit educational service used by hundreds of California schools and until recently run by Honig’s wife out of the Honig residence here.

At a news conference, Democrat Honig denied any wrongdoing and accused Republican Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren of conducting a politically motivated investigation into the Honigs’ financial affairs.

“There is a cabal trying to do me in,” Honig told reporters. “This is politics at its worst, using the criminal justice system to settle political debts.”

Honig was indicted late Tuesday on as many as four felony counts of violating a state ethics code that prohibits an elected official from receiving financial benefit from a contract his office oversees, his attorneys and Sacramento sources said.

Lungren refused to comment on the indictment Thursday, but his office notified Honig’s attorneys of the indictment earlier in the week.

Honig said he will turn himself in to authorities today in Sacramento, where he will be booked and released on his own recognizance.

The three-term state schools chief, credited with major reforms during his nine years in office, said he ultimately will be cleared of the charges and has no intention of stepping down. Honig’s term ends at the end of 1994.

“I’m going to do the job that people elected me to do,” he said. “When it’s all over I will be vindicated because I have done nothing wrong, and then people are going to have to ask some hard questions about really what was behind this whole exercise.”

The indictment stems from the receipt of $222,590 in federal funds channeled through the state Department of Education that were used to start Nancy Honig’s Quality Education Project programs in Chula Vista, Pasadena and Fremont.

The goal of QEP is to improve education by increasing the involvement of parents.

A federal audit of QEP concluded last year that Honig and his wife improperly benefited from the federal funding because it freed up money the organization could spend for other purposes--including Nancy Honig’s $108,000-a-year salary. The auditors recommended that the funds be repaid to the federal government.

Honig contends that he and his wife never received any of the federal money. In fact, he said, the organization raised $8 million from private sources and donated the money to set up the program in schools in California, Indiana and Mississippi.

At his press conference, Honig produced a large chart showing how money traveled independently from the federal government and QEP to the four employees at three school districts.

“Not one dime of this money went into my pocket, into my wife’s pocket, or to QEP,” he said. “The taxpayers’ money was spent for exactly what it was supposed to be spent for. It’s a good deal for California kids. I can’t see how this is a crime.”

Honig has maintained that he is under attack by the attorney general and other conservatives because of stands he has taken, such as encouragement of the teaching of evolution in biology classes, insistence on bilingual education and opposition to a ballot proposal for vouchers that he believes would gut funding for public schools.

“The right wing does not like what I have done,” he said. “ . . . They have an agenda and they are strongly supporting Dan Lungren. He’s doing their bidding, in my estimation. If they can bring me down they can get their way. It’s frightening to me how much power they do have.”

David Puglia, a spokesman for Lungren, declined to respond to Honig’s charges saying, “We have not commented on the case and we cannot comment at this point.”

Many educators and others connected with schools said the criminal charges will undercut Honig’s effectiveness in his job.

Michael Kirst, a professor of education at Stanford University who served on the State Board of Education with Honig from 1975 to 1981, said the indictment will “hinder his ability to sell people on his educational programs. They will be wondering, ‘How long is he going to be around?’ ”

Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers, said Honig “has been an advocate of effective change, for bringing in the business community and forming a consensus in pursuit of higher educational standards. Now, that voice is going to be muted a bit.”

Kirst said Honig is a “national figure who has brought to California a lot of foundation grants and a lot of federal money. But a lot of that, especially the federal money, is highly competitive. It’s questionable how much California will get without him.”

Several educators said the indictment will weaken Honig’s position in the current struggle to protect education spending in the face of yet another multibillion-dollar state budget deficit.

There are reports that some legislators have agreed to cut the public school budget by about $1 billion, a move that some people believe Honig would oppose vigorously, and perhaps successfully, were he not under the cloud of indictment.

Others predicted that the indictment would sour what has been a relatively good relationship between Honig and Gov. Pete Wilson.

“Lately, it seems Wilson has begun to distance himself from Honig and to oblige the right wing of the Republican Party,” Kirst said. “The reappointment of Joe Carrabino was nothing but a right-wing political payoff, in my view.”

He referred to Wilson’s recent reappointment of Joseph D. Carrabino, a political conservative and retired UCLA management professor who has been one of Honig’s principal opponents in a long-running feud between the superintendent and the state board over who should decide California educational policy.

On Thursday, an atmosphere of gloom permeated the fifth floor of the Department of Education building, three blocks from the state Capitol, where Honig and his top aides have their offices.

Several top assistants agreed with Honig that the indictment was part of a conspiracy of religious conservatives, political conservatives and those interested in spending public money on private schools.

Those who see a conservative conspiracy recall that supporters of creation theory warned Honig that they would retaliate for his leadership in the fight to stress evolution, and ignore creationism, in the state’s new biology textbooks.

Honig also fought to keep the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, Calif., from gaining state approval--another action that angered members of the religious right.

Last summer, the National Assn. of Christian Educators, a conservative organization, circulated a “prayer list of God’s will for like-minded prayer warriors,” which included, as one of 32 prayers, “God’s will for the future of Tom Payzant and Bill Honig.”

Payzant, superintendent of schools in San Diego, is a strong Honig supporter.

Besides Honig’s positions on bilingual education and the voucher initiative, many conservatives also object to efforts to stop the campaign to place the “Channel One” television news program, with commercials, in the state’s classrooms.

But one of his top assistants said Honig was “at least naive” to have allowed QEP to operate from his home and to have apparently taken actions to help his wife’s program land contracts with California school districts.

“I have no doubt the religious right and the political right were out to get Bill,” the person said, “but he handed them a golden opportunity.”