Show Notes
Gavin Newsom, the sitting governor of California and a likely Democrat contender for president in two years, is a magnet for crooks.
There’s no other way to explain the parade of his corrupt associates, cronies and hangers-on who have been investigated, indicted, disbarred, convicted, or sent to prison from his orbit over the years.
“Time and time again, he’s hired or appointed people who later get charged with very serious crimes,” says author and GAI Research Fellow Jedd McFatter. “Whether or not he himself is involved directly with these people in these crimes,” he added, “he’s the one who’s putting them in the positions to commit these crimes. He keeps doing it, and there’s nothing there’s no evidence that he won’t continue to surround ourselves with these types of people.”
McFatter and Susan Crabtree are the co-authors of Fool’s Gold, the 2025 blockbuster book that exposed corruption throughout California politics. They recently wrote an op-ed with Chris Rufo cataloging ten corrupt appointees of Newsom’s for The California Post.
According to the article, Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud. London Breed, a Newsom protégé who succeeded him as San Francisco mayor, committed multiple ethics violations. Mohammed Nuru was a public works official while Newsom was mayor. In 2022, Nuru pleaded guilty to federal charges and was sentenced to seven years in prison. As governor, Newsom appointed Tom Girardi, a high-profile trial attorney, to his Judicial Selection Advisory Committee. Within a year, Girardi was accused of embezzlement in 2020, then disbarred in 2022 and found guilty in 2024 of four counts of wire fraud. The US Department of Justice says he embezzled tens of millions of dollars. The article’s list continues.
“We had to narrow it down for one article to ten, and it’s pretty eye popping,” Crabtree says on the most recent episode of her podcast, On Background. As a California resident and national political correspondent for RealClearPolitics, she covers Newsom and the state’s politics as a regular beat.
“This story is about the long trail of corruption connections that Gavin Newsom has tied to him. These are former aides, people he appointed to different boards in the city of San Francisco. He inherited a corrupt system from the former mayor, Willie Brown, who was one of his benefactors and, of course, also Kamala Harris’s benefactor,” with whom she had a romantic relationship while Brown was still married.
Which of his associates are the most troubling, and why,” co-host Eric Eggers asks.
“It might be Tom Girardi because it turns out that while he was donating a lot of money to Gavin Newsom and other politicians, he was stealing money from his clients,” McFatter says. “People who are burn victims and crash victims.”
“It’s despicable what [Girardi] did to his clients,” agrees Crabtree, “but I honestly think it’s this Mohammed Nuru character. He was the deputy director of the Public Works Department in San Francisco, later became the director under Newsom.”
Nuru, Crabtree believes, may have won Newsom the election. It’s described in detail in Fool’s Gold.
“He coerced street cleaners to go out and solicit absentee ballots for Gavin Newsom in his run for mayor. And It turned out Gavin Newsom won by only 25,000 absentee ballots” she says. “This became a big city level scandal.”
The other continuing story is a federal tax investigation into Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. As discussed on the previous episode of the On Background podcast, Governor Newsom solicited more than $4.8 million worth of donations since 2020 for the nonprofit his wife co-founded, called California Partners Project. According to the Sacramento Bee, more than a third of that — $1.8 million — came from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which operates the Graton Resort & Casino in Sonoma County and regularly lobbies lawmakers on legislation.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom runs the non-profit California Partners Project and a for-profit filmmaking company, Crabtree explains. “She slides a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars each year between that nonprofit and her for-profit company, called Girls Club Entertainment. It’s unclear which side is actually making the movies.” Unclear enough that it could be the focus of the IRS investigation.
McFatter also referenced a recent article in the New York Post about into how much money Newsom has made from his wine company, but noted, “there hasn’t been much of an investigation into how much money he’s made with the wines he’s trademarked in China. He did wine tastings over there and everything to promote them. But I haven’t heard anyone looking into that much.”
Eggers says he has seen “reporting from Mark Halperin that suggests that this could be enough of a story, whether it leads to criminal charges or not that dissuades Gavin Newsom from running for president. Are you hearing that?”
“I think if Dana Williamson had anything to do with this… it could get ugly because she worked out a plea agreement last month,” Crabtree says. “She says that she did not provide any information about Gavin Newsom, even though the federal investigators were asking her that question,” Crabtree notes.
“But that doesn’t mean that her associates didn’t, and that she somehow worked out a plea agreement based on this,” Crabtree says. “We don’t know.”
Eggers closes asking McFatter whether there are implications for California after the success of Democratic Socialists of America candidates in New York congressional primaries.
“I think it will. There are already places in California where there’s almost really no need for the DSA because it’s already there functionally,” he quips.
