Tag: california

Newsom’s Former Chief of Staff Indicted on Public Corruption Charges

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was indicted by a federal grand jury on 23 charges related to public corruption, according to a Nov. 12 statement from the Department of Justice.

U.S. Attorney Eric Grant alleged that Williamson, 53, of Carmichael, California, committed bank and wire fraud, conspired to defraud the government and obstruct justice, filed false tax returns, and made false statements to investigators.

“This is a crucial step in an ongoing political corruption investigation that began more than three years ago,” Grant said in the statement. “As it always has, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will continue to work tirelessly with our law enforcement partners to protect the people of California from political corruption.”

According to the charges, Williamson allegedly helped divert about $225,000 in funds from a “dormant political campaign” to an associate’s personal account using a money laundering scheme to fund a “no-show job” between February 2022 and September 2024.

She is also charged with conspiring to create illegitimate, backdated contracts to thwart a federal investigation into Paycheck Protection Loans made to a business he owned.

Williamson also allegedly filed false tax returns, deducting luxury purchases of home goods and handbags, as well as private jet flights and hotel stays, according to the indictment.

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DISQUALIFIED! — Congressman Eric Swalwell Names Washington DC Home as ‘Principal Residence’ and Has No California Address

California Representative Eric Swalwell has faced a barrage of controversy in recent years, from his alleged ties to the Chinese spy “Fang Fang,” to his removal from the House Intelligence Committee over national security concerns, to his infamous on-air mishap during a 2019 interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Now, a new revelation raises even more serious questions about Swalwell’s integrity and eligibility to serve in Congress.

Despite serving as a Congressman from California’s 15th District and claiming Hometown: Livermore on his official House profile, Swalwell has declared his Washington, DC property as his “principal residence.”

A public Deed of Trust for Swalwell’s DC home at 209 S Street NE, dated April 18, 2022, confirms the property is designated as his “principal residence” as a condition of the loan.

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Dem-run city hires inspectors to snoop in residents’ garbage cans to make sure they’re recycling properly

Residents in a California city can expect to see trash inspectors lifting their garbage cans in the early morning hours as the city continues to crack down on recycling. 

Officials are sending teams of Compliance Officers or ‘lid lifters’ to walk through neighborhoods before trash collection and monitor whether residents are properly sorting their trash and recycling. 

The initiative in San Diego was launched following the passage of a law in the California State Senate (SB 1383), which established a new organic waste recycling program. 

The city will not issue citations to those who violate the recycling rules, but instead will place an ‘oops’ tag on the bin, notifying the owner that they made a mistake. 

Some bins may have a ‘do not collect’ sticker on them, which requires homeowners to sift through their trash and call the city for a new pickup.  

The lid lifters won’t be sifting through garbage cans and are only tasked with inspecting what they can see after looking inside the bins. 

City Waste Reduction Program Manager Alexander Galasso told local ABC affiliate, KGTV: ‘Waste doesn’t end when you come to the trash can.’

‘There is a life after waste and we want to make sure that these are sorted correctly, because not only does it impact our staff and trucks, but it impacts what goes into our landfill.’

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DOJ Launches Investigation into UC Berkeley over Antifa ‘Mob Violence’ at TPUSA Event

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it is investigating the University of California, Berkeley, a day after “mob violence” from Antifa protesters occurred outside of a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event.

In a post on X, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon shared a letter that was addressed to UC Berkeley Police Chief Yogananda Pittman. In the letter, Pittman was asked to “preserve all records” in her possession that are “relevant to the agency’s preparation, execution, and response to the Turning Point event held” at the campus on Monday, along with related protests.

“The @CivilRights Division, under @AGPamBondi’s leadership, has asked UC Berkeley Police to preserve all records regarding their response to the mob violence at UC Berkeley’s TPUSA event,” Dhillon said in her post. “Every American has the right to speak at and attend events without fear.”

The letter stated, in part, that the situation at TPUSA’s event “may implicate the University of California’s commitment to provide adequate security”:

The U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division has recently become aware of concerning incidents occurring on your campus at the University of California (UC), Berkeley on or about November 10, 2026. These events may implicate the University of California’s commitment to provide adequate security pursuant to a 2018 settlement agreement in Young America’s Foundation, et al. v Napolitano et al., U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 17-02255. Our office previously opened investigations of the University of California System for potential violations of Title VI and Title VII based on other events. We will determine whether the events of November 10 should also be included in those investigations. We are also determining whether recent events provide a basis for additional investigation of violations of federal rights, including, without limitation, violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Dhillon’s letter also explained that the request to preserve all records related to the response to the violence at the TPUSA event, included but was “not limited to” all written or electronic communications from UC Berkeley Campus Police regarding the incident or TPUSA, “generally in the last year,” along with “minutes and communications of any pre-event planning either internal or with outside groups” relating to the event, among others.

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They Did It Again! CBS Affiliate Gets Scorched for Calling TPUSA Event Violently Disrupted by Antifa “Mostly Peaceful” Before Showing Footage of What Actually Happened

The corporate media literally copied their playbook from the BLM riots back in 2020 and applied it to last night’s TPUSA event in Berkeley, California, which Antifa terrorists invaded.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, a bloody fight broke out at a TPUSA event at UC Berkeley after Antifa terrorists crashed the gathering on Monday night. Antifa terrorists and other far-left protestors turned the TPUSA event into a war zone.

The confrontation erupted at around 4:30 PST. During one brawl, two men were seen fighting each other, one of whom had blood gushing from his face.

Local police had difficulty containing the agitators and were seen putting on shield masks and gathering batons.

In another fight, Antifa terrorists ripped the shirt off pardoned J6 protester Jon Mellis and burned his MAGA Hat while cops stood by and did NOTHING.

CBS News Bay Area reporter Amanda Hari, though, had a different take on what occurred last night.

She remarked on how “lively” agitators were while assuring viewers that the protest was “mostly peaceful.”

If this rings familiar, it should. While covering a BLM riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, CNN’s Omar Jimenez called </> the incident “fiery, but mostly peaceful” while standing in front of burning cars set ablaze by the rioters.

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Brave black lesbian instantly silences baying woke mob while confronting Democrat senator about encounter with trans creep in female locker room

A lesbian singer banned from her LA gym for complaining about a transgender woman in the female locker room eloquently silenced a woke mob while grilling one of California‘s most powerful Democrats.  

Tish Hyman confronted state senator Scott Wiener, who represents parts of San Francisco, about the alleged encounter in the women’s locker room at Gold’s Gym in Beverly Hills.

The dispute gained national attention after a video of her screaming about ‘grown men with big d**ks’ in the gym’s locker room went viral.

She was referring to Alexis Black, a 32-year-old trans woman who told the Daily Mail that she still has male genitalia and previously went by the name Grant Freeman.

Hyman spoke to Wiener, who is gay, because he is running for Nancy Pelosi‘s seat in the House of Representatives. If he wins, he would have more power to legislate on the issue of women’s safety in female-only spaces.

‘I want to support you. I have millions of people behind me, watching this right now and we want to know, are you going to protect women?’ she asked. ‘Not trans women. Women. Women and trans women are a different thing.’

When an audience member interjected that ‘trans women are women’, Hyman dared to step on the third rail and declare: ‘No they are not, they are men.’

As the crowd began to boo and jeer, she stood up and stood her ground, shouting: ‘He broke his wife’s jaw so bad she needed reconstructive surgery’, referring to Freeman’s criminal history. 

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California’s Fast-Food Minimum Wage Hike Is Killing Jobs

In 2023, California adopted a law that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour. It also created a Fast Food Council with the power to further increase wages by dictate every year. Twenty bucks an hour is a nice, round number which is probably why state lawmakers picked it—though it’s not clear why they stopped there. After all, if you’re going to create prosperity by command, why not shoot for the moon and make all the Golden State’s fry cooks millionaires? But it’s just as well that they didn’t go further—that hike to $20 per hour is killing jobs as it is.

One Law Kills 18,000 Jobs

“On April 1, 2024, California raised its minimum wage from $16 to $20 per hour for fast-food workers employed at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide,” Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, and Jonathan Meer write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that was first addressed by Reason‘s Peter Suderman in the November print issue. “Our median estimate suggests that California lost about 18,000 jobs that could have been retained if AB 1228 had not been passed.”

The authors initially calculate that “employment in California’s fast-food sector declined by 2.7 percent between September 2023 and September 2024 relative to fast-food employment elsewhere in the United States.” But they make the point that, prior to the passage of A.B. 1228, the bill hiking the minimum wage, fast-food employment was rising faster in the state than elsewhere in the country. Allowing for that, and for changes in the overall labor market, they estimated the real decline in California’s fast-food employment at 3.6 percent to arrive at 18,000 lost jobs.

That’s a lot of missing opportunities for Californians to get a foothold in the work world, make money, and pay their bills. It also squares with other estimates of the attempt to legislate prosperity.

In September, the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) drew on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data to estimate “15,988 fast food jobs lost since the law went into effect in April 2024.” The group added, “California’s fast food job loss rate (-3.3% of jobs lost) more than doubled the losses in fast food restaurants nationally (-1.6% of jobs lost) since September 2023.”

That EPI memo built on a November 2024 study that found “more than 4,400 California fast food jobs have been lost since January,” based on federal data. That study also found “10.1 percent menu price increases by April 2024 since the law’s passage in 2023.”

A February 2025 paper from the Berkeley Research Group (BRG) found the fast-food sector “lost 10,700 jobs (-1.9%) between June 2023 and June 2024.” The researchers added, “this decline sharply contrasts with the sector’s historically compounded annual growth rate of 2.5% and marks the only December year-over-year decline in fast food employment this century–excluding the Great Recession (2009) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020).” That report also found that “menu prices at California’s fast food restaurants increased by 14.5% between September 2023 (the month AB 1228 was signed into law) and October 2024, nearly double the national average (8.2%).”

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Forget Pelosi, Here’s Why You Should Fear Her Likely Successor

It was a good day this week when Nancy Pelosi announced her intention to retire at the end of this term. There has been speculation for years that she would retire soon, and it is finally happening. The problem? Her replacement may actually be much, much worse than her.

The man who has been looking to replace her in Congress in State Sen. Scott Weiner. His record is so radical that we’ve actually discussed him many times here at PJ Media. He checks all the boxes for the radical left: fanatically obsessed with climate change lawsuits, a champion for “trans refuge” policies that upend families and public safety, and always eager to line up with the most extreme social experiment the Sacramento swamp can devise.

Pelosi’s announcement that she won’t seek reelection has all but cleared the path for Wiener, whose campaign website is already up and running, and features a pride flag as part of his branding.

Earlier this year, Wiener authored legislation giving wildfire victims a blank check to sue oil companies for “climate change-related damages.” Instead of holding the real culprits accountable for California’s wildfire crisis — years of mismanagement, neglected forests, and feckless bureaucracy — Wiener wants to let trial lawyers loot Big Oil in the name of justice. The bill does a neat job of distracting from government failure, while inviting a legal circus that rewards people for blaming anyone but the inept officials actually responsible.

Wiener’s zeal for legislating the culture war is unmatched. In 2023, he pushed AB 957, rewriting California’s Family Code so that if a parent doesn’t “affirm” his or her child’s “gender identity,” a judge could deny the parent custody of their child during divorce proceedings.

This isn’t Wiener’s only foray into pushing the sexual boundaries that the left favors. He’s the architect of SB 145, dubbed the “pro-pedophile” bill, which essentially decriminalizes sex with certain minors under the guise of “equity” for the LGBTQ community.

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Some Kids Getting Double or Triple Vaccinated, California Nurse Says

Babies and children who lack paper vaccination records sometimes receive two or three times the number of vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to experts who spoke with The Defender. Children whose parents immigrated to the U.S. and who don’t speak English are at the greatest risk.

Many medical providers assume that if there’s no record of a vaccination, the best way to ensure that a child receives the recommended vaccine is to readminister it, according to Rena Maculans, a registered nurse in California. “That’s the mentality of the providers,” she said.

Maculans — who spent 10 years as an emergency department (ER) nurse and later processed autism treatment claims — said urgent care and ER staff typically follow protocols that tell them to vaccinate a child if there’s no documentation of a prior vaccination.

Maculans said she followed those protocols before she realized that vaccines can cause harm. “We were all under the impression, well, if you double up on it, it’s a good thing. You have extra protection.”

Now, Maculans, whose daughter was injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, urges people to carry their immunization record with them. “That’s why I tell people, anytime you go to the doctor or urgent care, bring your immunization records with you.”

Maculans said she began piecing things together while processing medical claims for Partnership HealthPlan of California, a healthcare provider that serves over 900,000 Medi-Cal members in Northern California.

Medi-Cal is the state’s Medicaid program that provides free or low-cost health coverage for low-income individuals and families.

Maculans was a “utilization management nurse coordinator,” which meant she processed medical claims for continuation of services, including autism treatment services. It was her job to determine whether a patient should continue receiving autism treatments, including speech therapy visits, or whether the patient no longer needed the treatments.

She noticed that a highly disproportionate number of the claims were submitted by families that spoke only Spanish. In other words, more Spanish-speaking children reported having continued or increased autism symptoms that required treatment, compared to English-speaking or bilingual kids.

Knowing the link between certain vaccine ingredients and increased autism risk, she suspected that Spanish-speaking Medi-Cal families — such as migrant workers — may experience increased vaccinations due to language barriers and not having their children’s immunization records on hand to prove prior vaccination to medical staff.

California has among the highest autism rates in the country — 1 in 12.5 boys, according to the latest available CDC data.

Maculans acknowledged that she is speculating and that, under HIPAA laws that protect patients’ private health records, she could not take screenshots of the claims that she said would reveal the trends she observed.

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California Teachers Forced into LGBTQ ‘Loyalty Test’ that Labels Christian Beliefs as Bigotry

In accordance with a recently passed law in 2023, the California school system is now requiring all 7th–12th-grade teachers and certificated school employees to undergo annual LGBTQ “cultural competency” training and testing. Developed by activist organizations, the training labels those with traditional Christian beliefs about sexuality and biological sex as “homophobic” or “transphobic.” It instructs employees to protect students’ “privacy” from their own parents and to use so-called “preferred pronouns” such as they/them or ze/zem. The training concludes with a test to ensure school employees repeat the state-approved beliefs about sexual orientation and gender ideology. (Image via Pixabay)

An alarmed former elementary school principal, Brett Loring, and current Director of Student Services at a TK–8 district in Northern California, is one of several concerned Christian educators who have reached out to the California Family Council. “It’s not training; it’s programming,” Loring said. “It’s telling teachers what to think and how to respond to students, no matter what their own beliefs or the parents’ beliefs are.”

The curriculum, mandated by the California Safe and Supportive Schools Act, AB 5 and AB 130, was funded with $2.4 million in taxpayer dollars. These funds support online courses designed by LGBTQ advocacy groups in partnership with the California Department of Education and the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Organizations such as the ACLU, Equality California, the Trevor Project, OUT for Safe Schools, the California Teachers Association, and the California State PTA helped craft the training outline—called PRISM—but school board members and parents have struggled to access the full material.

CFC has spoken with several school board members who have been denied access to PRISM training in their districts. One Southern California school board member was even told by his superintendent that the Department of Education will not allow school board members to view the material.

Recently, however, CFC obtained a recording of a teacher taking the LGBTQ “cultural competency” training and final exam as promoted by AB 5 and PRISM. While the PRISM website allows districts to create their own “substantially similar” version of the course, the content must still meet the same ideological standards. (read the ED code for details) Yet since the PRISM online training is free to school districts, it is assumed most school boards will opt for the no-cost version.

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