Gavin Newsom has been under federal criminal investigation for nearly a month now, and the transparency he keeps promising is starting to look a lot like the opposite of transparency. As USA Journal reported, California's governor has quietly hired a private criminal defense attorney whose identity he refuses to disclose, while simultaneously failing to produce five years of tax returns he swore he would release. Nothing says "I have absolutely nothing to hide" like hiring a secret lawyer and sitting on your financial records.
Let's rewind. In mid-June, Newsom announced (unprompted, which is always a great sign) that he and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom were under DOJ investigation. He immediately went with the classic playbook: witch hunt, politically motivated, agents "abusing the grand jury process," dawn door knocks on innocent people, and of course the iron-clad assurance that there is nothing to see here.
Then came the tax returns, or rather, the continued absence of them. On June 19th, his spokeswoman said they were being "prepared for transparency" and added, with maximum smugness, that "unlike Donald Trump, the Governor has nothing to hide." Three weeks later a reporter asked the obvious follow-up question: where are they? Newsom's response was to get defensive, claim he had already released "20 years" of taxes, pivot to Trump (naturally), and then accidentally refer to the outstanding documents as "new" tax returns.
The years in question are 2021 through 2025. Those are not new. Those years have happened. An accountant prepares those returns by looking at records that already exist. The only reason a politician calls completed tax years "new" is if the final version of those documents is still being workshopped, which is a creative process nobody wants their governor engaged in.
The actual track record here is something. Despite annual promises of full transparency, Newsom only produced complete returns for 2017 through 2020, and only because California law required it for his re-election ballot. He dodged 2021 by filing an extension. He has been stonewalling journalists on the remaining years ever since.
Meanwhile the federal investigation appears to be touching every tentacle of the Newsom family operation: Jennifer Siebel Newsom's nonprofits and tax filings, the Plumpjack wine and hospitality business run by his sister and first cousin, a blind trust managed by his best friend's wife, a $9.1 million Marin County mansion purchased through a family LLC, and a web of nonprofit board members who happen to also be personal friends, business associates, and campaign allies. Federal investigators have reportedly been knocking on doors across this network for months.
Newsom described the people being visited as "poor and innocent." They are, by all available evidence, neither poor nor demonstrably innocent. They are the interconnected financial and political infrastructure of a man who has spent two decades making the line between personal enrichment and public office increasingly blurry.
Subpoenas are reportedly expected. Indictments are being whispered about in Sacramento. The mystery lawyer is on retainer. The tax returns remain missing. If this is what having nothing to hide looks like, one has to wonder what having something to hide would look like, because it is getting hard to tell the difference.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
