ABC7 obtained a letter sent directly to California Attorney General Rob Bonta warning him that Andy Duong — now federally indicted in a major bribery and corruption case — had secretly recorded him in a compromising situation and planned to use the footage for BLACKMAIL!
The May 2024 letter from businessman Mario Juarez laid it out clearly. It told Bonta that Duong “has a recording of you in a compromising situation” and that he routinely recorded elected officials without their knowledge for later use in blackmail.
This is the same Duong crime family that was deeply embedded with Bonta. They called him brother. They partied with him. They sat courtside together at Warriors games. Then the FBI raided them, and the indictments followed.
Five months after receiving that letter, Bonta’s reelection campaign began spending campaign funds on private lawyers from one of the most expensive firms in the state. The total reached four hundred and sixty nine thousand dollars.
Four hundred and sixty nine thousand dollars. Paid by the Attorney General of California while dealing with a blackmail threat tied to a federally indicted donor network.
No one spends that kind of money on elite legal protection unless the situation is extremely serious. The top law enforcement officer in the largest state in America was lawyering up because one of his own donors allegedly had compromising footage of him.
The letter is real. The warning about the video is real. The four hundred and sixty nine thousand dollars in campaign spending is real. All of it is now public.
Two months into her job as District Attorney, Pamela Price decided the best way to improve the criminal justice system was to disarm her own prosecutors.
Through Special Directive 23-01, she made probation or the lowest possible prison sentence the default offer for nearly every crime in Alameda County. She banned her deputies from pursuing sentencing enhancements for guns, gangs, and bail violations without her personal approval. She also ordered them to drop prior strikes at the charging stage, effectively killing California’s Three Strikes law for repeat violent offenders. The policy even applied retroactively.
The logic was simple and disastrous. Without the threat of real consequences, defense attorneys had zero reason to cut deals. Why plead guilty when the worst-case scenario was already capped at the lightest possible sentence? What was once a fast-moving system built on plea negotiations turned into a clogged backlog of cases heading toward trial.
Her solution to this self-created chaos was to add more bureaucracy. Any deviation from the ultra-lenient default required approval from multiple supervisors, including Price herself. California law gives prosecutors 48 hours to file charges on someone in custody. Her office couldn’t meet that deadline because her own policy had turned routine decisions into multi-layered approval nightmares.
The result was not reform. It was failure on a massive scale. Over 1,000 misdemeanor cases, including domestic violence cases, were dismissed because the statute of limitations expired while her office was too paralyzed to act. Victims who came forward expecting justice were ultimately told, through pure negligence, that their cases no longer mattered.
Under the previous administration, prosecutors used enhancements and prior strikes as leverage to secure guilty pleas and protect the public. Under Price, those tools were stripped away, repeat violent offenders received sentences nearly identical to first-time offenders, and the system broke under the weight of her own policy.
This wasn’t an unfortunate side effect. It was the direct and predictable consequence of a directive she chose to implement.
Nikki Fortunato Bas was Council President while Sheng Thao was selling the mayor’s office to the Duong crime family.
As the leader of the progressive bloc on the Oakland City Council, Bas engineered the 2021 budget redirection that stripped $18,400,000 from the police department during a historic homicide spike. She canceled upcoming police academies, froze critical tactical positions, and funneled millions into the failed MACRO program that left dangerous calls unanswered. While Thao was collecting bribes and promising Duong family contracts, Bas was busy dismantling the department that was supposed to protect the city from the very chaos her policies helped create.
The results were immediate and devastating. Homicides nearly doubled in the first half of 2021. Oakland’s 911 system collapsed into the worst performance in California, with nearly half of emergency calls going unanswered within the state mandated timeframe. And in Bas’s own District 2, children at Crocker Highlands Elementary drank water contaminated with lead levels as high as four hundred forty parts per billion for four months before anyone was notified.
Bas now serves as Alameda County Supervisor after briefly becoming Interim Mayor following Thao’s recall. She presents herself as the steady hand who cleaned up the mess. The record shows she was an architect of the mess. Her council presided over the structural deficit, the credit downgrades, the bond market lockout, and the bureaucratic paralysis that left five million dollars in lead paint settlement funds sitting unused while kids in East and West Oakland continued living in poisoned housing.
The same progressive machine that elevated Thao protected the ecosystem around her. Bas was one of the few councilmembers to issue a public statement after the FBI raids on the Duong family, expressing shock while quickly pivoting to business as usual. She accepted heavy labor PAC money to win her current seat while the city she helped lead burned through reserves and basic services.
Sheng Thao’s corruption did not happen in a vacuum. It happened under a City Council led by Nikki Fortunato Bas that prioritized ideological experiments over public safety and administrative competence.
@RecallFife $336,951 for “improving the relationship between the police and community members”
Please investigate @FBI@FBIDirectorKash @nickshirleyy
Oakland Councilmember Carroll Fife is a criminal.
Oakland Councilmember Carroll Fife turned her nonprofit into a family cash machine the second she won office.
Affect Real Change, the 501(c)(3) she led as President, went from roughly $100,000 in annual revenue before her 2020 election to $3.11 MILLION in 2021. A 30x explosion in one year, right as she took her seat on the Oakland City Council.
Her husband’s group, Community Ready Corps, operated under that same nonprofit. In 2022 alone, he pulled $147,000 in compensation. Her mother took another $84,791. A close associate took $105,361. Over a quarter million dollars extracted from the nonprofit in a single year.
While Fife was aggressively pushing to defund the Oakland Police Department and redirect public safety money to “community-based” groups, her nonprofit was receiving hundreds of thousands from those exact same networks, including a $400,000 grant from the Anti Police-Terror Project. The money circled right back into the organization her husband now controlled.
Even the accounting was sloppy on purpose. Nearly $2 million was buried under vague descriptions with almost no documentation. One line item alone, $336,951 for “improving the relationship between the police and community members”, sits there like a middle finger to the public while she was actively starving police funding.
This wasn’t grassroots growth. This was a calculated family grift. She used her new political power to create the conditions for the money to flow, and her household collected.
She didn’t step away from the nonprofit when she got elected. She weaponized it. Carroll Fife must resign or be recalled!
Mia Bonta is trying to make it illegal to film fraud.
She didn’t just write AB 2624. She pushed it through the Assembly and is now driving it through the Senate. The bill, already being called the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” would let taxpayer-funded nonprofits and government contractors demand the removal of videos and photos showing what they are actually doing. And it would hit anyone who refuses with serious financial penalties.
This is the same Mia Bonta whose own nonprofit operated without proper legal status while she collected six-figure salaries. Now she is using her power to criminalize the exact kind of journalism that exposes waste and theft in programs just like the one she ran.
Nick Shirley’s work helped uncover one of the biggest fraud schemes in recent history. Billions in taxpayer money stolen through fake daycare centers. Federal prosecutors confirmed the scale of the theft. Mia Bonta’s bill would make that kind of accountability much more dangerous in California.
She is not protecting people from harassment. She is building legal protection for the opaque, taxpayer-funded operations that feed the political machine.
While her husband was announcing crackdowns on hundreds of millions in fraud, she was advancing a law to silence the watchdogs who catch it.
This is not leadership. This is a direct attack on anyone willing to show the public what is really happening with their money.
While Oakland’s streets are filled with dangerous encampments, fire hazards, and open drug use, Mayor Barbara Lee signed a Supreme Court brief arguing that cities should not be allowed to clear homeless encampments from public property.
She claimed that enforcing basic camping rules “serves no legitimate penological purpose” and would only trap people in cycles of poverty.
Even Governor Gavin Newsom supported the Supreme Court’s decision giving cities the power to clear unsafe encampments. Mayor Barbara Lee took the opposite side.
This is who protects encampments instead of residents.
Jackie Fielder spent 104 days in hiding after facilitating a crypto PUMP-and-DUMP scheme and committing municipal ESPIONAGE.
She has been out of office longer than any Supervisor in the history of San Francisco, collecting over $50,000 in taxpayer dollars while doing NOTHING.
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