Joe Dunn, the former top executive at California’s state bar, told a judge Tuesday that he never misled bar leaders about a 2014 trip to Mongolia that left the lawyer-regulating agency with thousands of dollars in unpaid travel bills.

Testifying at a State Bar Court hearing in Los Angeles, Dunn said he briefed the bar’s board of trustees in late 2013 about the trek, which was aimed at helping the Asian country’s developing judiciary set up a regulatory system to govern its lawyers. No one raised questions about the costs, he said, because while trustees approved the agency’s annual budget, managers such as him were in charge of day-to-day spending decisions.