California’s political establishment learned this week that the FBI didn’t merely investigate Gavin Newsom’s inner circle from the outside. It recruited from within. According to an exclusive report in the New York Post, Democratic power broker Alexis Podesta secretly recorded conversations for federal investigators as far back as June 2024, gathering evidence in the corruption probe that brought down Dana Williamson, the governor’s former chief of staff.
“Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not,” said Williamson’s attorney, McGregor Scott, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, the same office now investigating Newsom and his wife.
The revelation matters for reasons that go well beyond Newsom’s bruised pride. It explains why Sacramento insiders and lobbyists received startling FBI letters last fall informing them their calls had been intercepted, many despite having no connection to Williamson at all.
Republican Assemblyman Josh Hoover, one recipient, said it sounds like investigators “cast a pretty broad net across the Capitol community.”
And it lands squarely on Xavier Becerra, the former attorney general and Biden HHS secretary who now leads the field to succeed Newsom, because the money at the center of the entire scheme flowed out of accounts bearing his name.
The Scheme That Bought Three Guilty Pleas
The underlying fraud is no longer alleged. It is admitted. Federal prosecutors charged that roughly $225,000 was siphoned from Becerra’s dormant campaign account and disguised as consulting fees to pad the income of Sean McCluskie, Becerra’s longtime chief of staff, after McCluskie took a pay cut to follow his boss to Washington.
All three charged defendants have pleaded guilty. McCluskie admitted to conspiracy and agreed to repay the full $225,000. Lobbyist Greg Campbell acknowledged in his plea documents that the group’s financial maneuvers amounted to “laundering money.” And Williamson, once Newsom’s feared enforcer, pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, subscribing to a false tax return, and lying to the FBI.
Podesta enters the story as Williamson’s chosen successor. When Williamson left private consulting to run Newsom’s office in late 2022, she handed her client portfolio, including the Becerra account, to Podesta. Campaign finance records reviewed by CalMatters show the dormant Becerra committee paid Podesta Company a total of $180,000, mostly in tidy $10,000 monthly installments, through 2023 and 2024.
Podesta, identified in court filings as Co-Conspirator 2, has not been charged. Her attorney says she didn’t know the payments were improper and began cooperating once she discovered wrongdoing by others. Perhaps so. But her cooperation, and her recordings, helped build the case that cracked open the governor’s office.
Becerra’s Shifting Story
Becerra insists he knew nothing of the fraud, and the indictment does not accuse him of wrongdoing. Yet his own explanations have wobbled. Days after the indictment broke, he told FOX40 he was aware of and had authorized the payments, describing the charges as a gut punch. Months later he told CNN and the McClatchy editorial board the payments occurred outside his vision.
Both things cannot be true, and voters are entitled to ask which version they’re being sold. A former attorney general of the largest state in the union either supervised six figures in outflows from his own committees or he didn’t.
The scrutiny hasn’t stopped with the federal case. In May, an anonymous complaint filed with the Fair Political Practices Commission accused Becerra of violating state law by paying Williamson’s firm more than $74,000 from his dormant attorney general account after he left for Washington, payments that may have run afoul of California’s surplus-funds rules.
The FPPC, which opened a separate conflict-of-interest investigation into Williamson in February, does not comment on matters tied to ongoing criminal cases. Becerra’s campaign, for its part, waves it all away as political attacks. His rival Tom Steyer has been less charitable, hammering what he plainly calls a corruption scandal.
The System Protecting Its Own
Meanwhile, the woman who wore the wire remains on the public payroll. Newsom appointed Podesta to the board of the State Compensation Insurance Fund in January 2020, and she sits there still, collecting nearly $61,000 a year from taxpayers. Asked why, the governor’s office called it a personnel matter and declined to elaborate. That is the sound of a machine protecting itself.
The court record also shows how casually the line between state business and private clients dissolved. Williamson, while serving as chief of staff, shared confidential government information with Podesta about a corporate client identified in reporting as Activision Blizzard, then the target of a state sexual harassment lawsuit.
The two were captured strategizing over how to respond to a public records request about that litigation. California settled the case for $54 million in December 2023.
This is what one-party government looks like after enough decades without meaningful opposition, when the consultants, the regulators, and the regulated all drink from the same trough and answer to the same friends.
Newsom’s response has been to declare himself a political martyr, blaming President Trump for a probe whose wire predates the current administration by many months. Deflection is easier than reform, and fundraising off an FBI investigation is easier still, which is precisely what the governor did within hours of announcing it.
For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:14)
Sacramento’s power brokers assumed their arrangements would stay in the dark. One of their own was recording. Whatever the FBI ultimately finds in the governor’s orbit, the lesson is already written for California voters weighing Becerra’s candidacy. The question is not merely whether he broke the law. It is whether a man whose inner circle produced three federal felons, a wired informant, and a trail of unexplained payments possesses the judgment to lead a state that desperately needs leaders above reproach rather than adjacent to indictment.
Then, there’s the Becerra connection which should be fully played out before the gubernatorial election.
