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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bork. And I am joined by the great, the one and only Chris Catalago, executive editor. I just want to make sure I get that right. Executive editor for all of California for Politico.
- [00:15]
B
That's right. You got it. You nailed it. First time, first take, first take.
- [00:18]
A
Stein. That's what they call me. We're here to talk about Gavin Newsom, who apparently is being investigated by the Trump doj. In a sort of interesting twist, Newsom ran out the information as opposed to the doj, I think. I guess that's like the new common thing for a Democrat is to quickly move ahead of the ball and get the news coverage on your terms as opposed to their terms. But there's a lot of unknowns right now. So we're recording this at like 3, 4:50pm on Eastern Standard Time. But, Chris, what do you know that you can tell us?
- [00:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple ways to look at this. One is at least the way Newsom's looking at it, which is there is no knowns to know. Right. There is zero, from his perspective, legitimacy to this. And he is starting off from that standpoint. He has put this story out essentially himself, gotten ahead of the news, as you said. He has experience doing this. Like, right. He's been. They've tried to recall him twice. He faced this sort of barrage of Elon Trump, everybody else attacks just as fires were hitting Southern California. Like, this is Newsom's playbook, is to just come right back at it and say, like, this is as big a political witch hunt as you can get and that none of the details here matter. This is a political stunt, basically. And we've seen Democrats fairly recently. I mean, look at Mark Kelly. You fight these things, you can really, really benefit. Obviously, there's sort of an obsession on Trump's part with Newsom. It recurs, it comes back, it recedes. In terms of the details here, obviously, it seems to involve the First Partner, which is the term they call the first lady in California. And she is a filmmaker. She's made a number of movies. She has a nonprofit in the state, California. Not to sort of get ahead of things, but California has something called behested payments, where outside groups that governors in. More basically, you can make a contribution on behalf of an individual to a group. That is something that's gotten heavy traction. Been written a lot about the finances of the first Partners nonprofit in conservative media, in the New York Post and these other things. And so from The Newsom perspective, basically, the Trump administration has taken a sort of right wing meme, a storyline in conservative media and sort of brought that, mainstreamed it by launching an investigation with no merit. And that is their sort of, you know, first, second and third point here. Yeah, or that is the point of the Newsom side.
- [03:04]
A
Let's read from the Times. The New York Times got the story, or I should say probably handed the story first. We're going to read from the Times and then we'll get to the video that Newsom put out. But this is around what they, this is just to give people a sense of what is going on here, like what the crux of this might be. Several people associated with the news with the Newsoms have been contacted by federal agents the past week, according to the governor's office. Mr. Newsom's aides believe the agents have also subpoenaed banking records, but said they have seen no written evidence of that. Chris, this is to your point, you're very Donald Rumsfeldine, the no Knowns and the unknown knowns. Ms. Siebel Newsome, who calls herself California's first partner, is a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on special impacts of sexism. She founded a nonprofit organization called the Representation Project that advocates for gender equity in part by developing educational materials based on missible. Newsom's documentaries also owns a film production company called Girls Club Entertainment. It is listed as a contractor of the Representation Project on the non profits tax returns. Tax records show that the Representation Project makes annual payments to Girls Club Entertainment 2020 for the non profit paid Girls Club Entertainment 161,250 for film production work. So the allegations, and this is Sam speaking now, more or less, are like, oh my God, this is insider dealing. They're like taking non profit money and they're shuffling it to her film production company and it's just a misuse of funds. This is like the generous interpretation of why they would do an investigation. The very un, non generous, but probably also, you know, seeped in logic, explanations that Newsom's an enemy of Trump and he's a 2028 Democrat and Trump launches these, the Trump DOJ has launched these investigations on a number of different people. And you just can't sort of remove that context from this either.
- [04:47]
B
Yeah, I wonder how many other 2028 prospective candidates are sitting there going, please, Mr. President, investigate me, investigate me. Is there anything, is there any more rocket fuel than you can get? And I don't mean to sort of skip past all of these details. Obviously, we are working on all kinds of tracks here at Politico. Right. You try to run down as much as you can about the investigation, but the sort of the political story here is so obvious, which is Newsom is a top Democrat. And, you know, the timing here with Blanche and the fact that the DOJ that folks around Newsom, I think, have told us already this started to heat up, people started to hear from from folks in the federal government sort of last week, and that was just around
- [05:36]
A
the time they think it's the Blanche stuff, that Blanche is getting in or is being nominated, needs to show off.
- [05:42]
B
I mean, I think they think that the timing is not that there's something to the timing here with Blanche is what we've heard directly on the Newsom side of things. Now, there is a it does seem to me that folks within the administration, within the White House have clearly tried to get out there this idea that this investigation had been initiated locally. So in la, somewhere in California, that is something that folks around the governor are saying is very much in dispute. Right. They're saying, well, sure, the White House might be saying that the administration might be saying that we have reason to believe that this was initiated, you know, if not in Washington at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and that this is purely political. And so there's.