Gavin Newsom’s Circle of Corruption — The People He Promoted Keep Going to Prison.

A single corrupt appointee is a mistake. A dozen of them, spread across three decades and two of the most powerful offices in California, is a pattern. That is the case a June 2026 City Journal investigation — reported by Christopher F. Rufo, Jedd McFatter, and Susan Crabtree — lays out against Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA): not one scandal, but a network of the people he hired, promoted, and appointed who later pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal crimes.

The list reaches from the mayor’s office Newsom ran in San Francisco to the governor’s suite he occupies today. A chief of staff who pleaded guilty to fraud. A public-works director sentenced to seven years for a bribery racket. A celebrity trial lawyer Newsom put on a judicial-vetting committee — now in federal prison for stealing from injured clients. The through-line is not that Newsom was charged with anything. He has not been. The through-line is proximity: who keeps ending up around him, and where they keep ending up.

This page walks the circle person by person, with the federal sentence or plea attached to each name, and then draws the line carefully between what is proven and what is mere association. The crimes are documented in DOJ press releases and guilty pleas. Whether they say something about the man at the center is the question voters weighing a possible 2028 run get to answer for themselves.

• ~11 associates — appointees, employees, and associates of Newsom (D-CA) implicated in ethics violations or crimes across his three decades in office, per the City Journal investigation · Source: City Journal (Rufo / McFatter / Crabtree)
• Guilty plea, 2026 — Dana Williamson, Newsom's chief of staff (2023–2024), pleaded guilty May 14, 2026 to bank/wire-fraud conspiracy, a false tax return, and a false statement · Source: DOJ / Fox News; CalMatters
• $225,000 — siphoned from a dormant campaign account belonging to Xavier Becerra in the scheme Williamson admitted to · Source: CalMatters; Courthouse News
• 7 years — federal sentence for Mohammed Nuru, the San Francisco public-works director under Mayor Newsom, for a bribery-and-kickback racket; he admitted taking $1M+ in bribes over 12 years · Source: DOJ, Northern District of California
• 87 months — prison term for Tom Girardi, whom Newsom appointed to his Judicial Selection Advisory Committee in 2019, for swindling injured clients out of tens of millions; $2,310,247 restitution · Source: DOJ, Central District of California
• $180,000,000,000 — stolen from California taxpayers across programs on Newsom's watch, per City Journal's companion 'Empire of Fraud' investigation · Source: City Journal

The defense of any one of these cases is always the same: a powerful official hires hundreds of people over a career, and some of them turn out to be crooks. That is true, and fair. The City Journal team’s argument is about volume and proximity. Reviewing records back to Newsom’s tenure as San Francisco mayor, they documented roughly eleven appointees, aides, and associates implicated in ethical violations and criminal offenses — several of them serious federal felonies, with prison time already served or being served.

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What makes the cluster notable is that it is not random staff churn. It includes a sitting chief of staff, a department head Newsom elevated, commission presidents he appointed, and people he personally chose to vet judges and advise on policy. These are positions of trust handed out by Newsom himself. The question the investigation raises is not whether Newsom committed their crimes — he did not — but what it says about his judgment, his vetting, and the political culture he has presided over that so many of his picks ended up in the dock.

The most recent and most proximate name is Dana Williamson, whom Newsom appointed chief of staff in January 2023 — the highest unelected post in the administration. She left the governor’s office in November 2024 as a federal corruption probe closed in. On May 14, 2026, facing a 23-count indictment, she pleaded guilty to three federal crimes: conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and making a false statement to federal agents.

According to prosecutors, the scheme drained roughly $225,000 from a dormant campaign account belonging to Xavier Becerra — California’s former attorney general, then serving as President Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary — with monthly payments routed to a Becerra aide for personal use. Williamson was separately accused of claiming more than $1,000,000 in personal expenses (private-jet travel, designer handbags, vacations) as bogus business deductions. Her plea deal requires restitution including $500,000 to the IRS. Twenty other counts were dropped.

The deepest vein runs back to San Francisco, where Newsom was mayor from 2004 to 2011. The marquee case is Mohammed Nuru, the Public Works director, arrested in January 2020 at the center of a sprawling City Hall corruption probe. Nuru admitted to a bribery-and- kickback racket spanning at least 12 years, taking more than $1,000,000 in cash, trips, jewelry, and favors from contractors. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years in federal prison.

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The Nuru web pulled in others Newsom had elevated. Rodrigo Santos, whom Newsom promoted to president of the city’s Building Inspection Commission in 2004, was later sentenced to 30 months for defrauding clients of $775,000 through altered checks and tax evasion. Harlan Kelly Jr., a high-ranking utilities official under Mayor Newsom, drew four years in federal prison; his co-defendant Victor Makras — a Newsom appointee to the city’s Retirement Board — was convicted in a $1,300,000 fraudulent-loan scheme. Permit expediter Walter Wong, tied to a Newsom development-fund investment, pleaded guilty to wire-fraud conspiracy and repaid the city $1,450,000.

The pattern did not stop when Newsom moved to Sacramento. In 2019, the new governor appointed celebrity trial lawyer Tom Girardi — the “Erin Brockovich” attorney and reality-TV husband — to his Judicial Selection Advisory Committee, the body that helps vet candidates for the bench. Girardi was, at the time, secretly running his law firm like a Ponzi scheme. A federal jury convicted him in 2024 on four wire-fraud counts for swindling injured clients out of tens of millions; he was sentenced to 87 months and ordered to pay $2,310,247 in restitution and a $35,000 fine.

That same year, Newsom named former Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas to a homelessness advisory team. Ridley-Thomas was later convicted of a bribery-and-fraud scheme — steering county contracts to USC in exchange for graduate-school admission, a scholarship, and a professorship for his son, plus a channel to funnel $100,000 in campaign funds — and sentenced to 42 months and a $30,000 fine. A third Newsom appointee, Orange County Fair Board member Melahat Rafiei, pleaded guilty to attempted wire fraud over a cannabis-bribery scheme and was sentenced to six months.

“There is simply no justification for monetizing a public office.”

U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer, sentencing Newsom appointee Mark Ridley-Thomas, 2026

Two names belong in a different category — alleged, not adjudicated — and the distinction matters. Former San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D), whose political rise Newsom helped launch, was fined nearly $23,000by the city’s Ethics Commission in 2021 for campaign-finance, ethics, and gift-law violations, including gifts tied to Nuru. Reporting has indicated federal scrutiny of her conduct, but she has not been charged with a crime, and an ethics fine is a civil matter, not a conviction.

Similarly, Rudolph Dwayne Jones, a deputy chief of staff in Newsom’s mayoral office, was charged in 2023 in a separate bribery matter. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Under this site’s standards he is presumed innocent: we list him because the City Journal investigation does, and because the indictment is a public fact — not because guilt has been established. The honest version of the circle keeps the convicted and the merely accused in separate columns.

Fairness requires naming the limits. Newsom has not been charged in any of these cases. There is no public evidence he ordered, profited from, or knew about the schemes his appointees ran. A governor and a big-city mayor make thousands of personnel decisions, and the law judges the individuals who broke it, not the executive who hired them. The convictions belong to Williamson, Nuru, Girardi, Ridley-Thomas, Santos, Kelly, Makras, Rafiei, and Wong — not to Newsom.

But the documented facts are not nothing. The man at the center of this chart chose these people for positions of public trust — chief of staff, department head, commission president, judicial vetter. They did not drift into his orbit; he pulled them in. When that many trusted picks across that many years end up convicted of fraud and bribery, “bad luck” stops being a sufficient explanation, and questions about judgment, vetting, and the surrounding political culture become legitimate. That is the precise claim the City Journal investigation makes — and it makes it with court records, not innuendo.

Gavin Newsom’s “circle of corruption” is not a single scandal but a roll call: a chief of staff who pleaded guilty in 2026, a public-works director doing seven years, a judicial-committee appointee doing 87 months, a homelessness adviser doing 42, and a string of commission presidents and aides convicted of bank fraud, bribery, and tax crimes — against a backdrop City Journal pegs at $180,000,000,000in fraud across California programs on his watch. None of it has been pinned on Newsom in a courtroom, and we say so plainly. What the record shows is the company he keeps and the people he elevates. As a 2028 presidential run looms, that ledger — the convictions, the proximity, and the things still merely alleged — is the story, sourced line by line.

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Last updated June 26, 2026