It may seem impossible—or simply too nauseating—to keep track of the financial dealings of California Governor Gavin Newsom and ‘First Partner’ Jennifer Siebel Newsom. But thanks to a few investigative reporters with much stronger constitutions than my own, I will try to summarize everything you need to know in one easy-to-understand story.
You may recall this week that The Gav took to social media to drop a 5-minute video during which he proclaimed that ‘President Trump’s Justice Department’ was going after him and his wife.
“Today, my wife & I joined Donald Trump’s hit list,” Newsom practically bragged on Monday. “He has directed his Department of Justice to investigate us. They have not found a crime — they are simply trying to find one.”
It’s quite the ‘show’:
Today, my wife & I joined Donald Trump’s hit list. He has directed his Department of Justice to investigate us. They have not found a crime – they are simply trying to find one.
He isn't coming after me because of mean tweets, but because I am considering running for President.… pic.twitter.com/tVYk3WUvO8
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 15, 2026
But wait – is it targeting? Are the Newsoms just ‘the latest political victims of a vindictive Trump?’ Well, let’s see what Fox Business Network’s Liz MacDonald has to say about that.
She said Tuesday that the DOJ probe “is about California Democrats’ modern-day machine politics,” which she says is a “feedback loop of Sacramento-corporate lobbyists-governor/wife nonprofit-behested nonprofit donations-lucrative state contracts-Sacramento.”
“The modern Sacramento machine trades corporate compliance and nonprofit funding/donations for policy access and state business,” MacDonald noted further before explaining how this (alleged) grift worked out well for the Newsoms:
According to IRS Form 990 disclosures, her nonprofit frequently buys from Siebel Newsom’s for-profit film company—Girls Club Entertainment LLC—writer, producer and director services and the licensing and production rights for her documentaries. Then it sells the docs to the state and public schools.
IRS records show that her nonprofit has paid her Girls Club Entertainment LLC roughly $1.64 million for these production and licensing rights since 2012, which includes a steady annual contracting fee of $150,000 since 2018.
The nonprofit has brought in an estimated $1.48 million by selling and licensing these exact films and accompanying gender-justice curricula to over 5,000 public schools and state agencies.
Over the past decade, Siebel Newsom has collected over $3.7 million in combined personal salary and LLC payouts funded by the nonprofit.
There’s more: “A major investigation by the Sacramento Bee revealed that multiple corporate giants with extensive lobbying business before the Newsom administration—such as Kaiser Permanente and PG&E—made hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to her nonprofit. These same corporations simultaneously reportedly held state contracts worth upwards of $35 million,” she wrote.
But…but…aren’t there limits regarding campaign contributions? There sure are, which is why the Domestic Terrorists who run California created a…different category of ‘contributions’ called “behested payments.”
Read on:
Behested payments are a unique mechanism in California politics where an elected official asks a corporation, labor union, or wealthy individual to donate money to a specific charity, nonprofit, or government program.
Under California law, these are perfectly legal. While direct campaign contributions face strict legal caps, behested payments have absolutely no dollar limits. As long as the donor gives more than $5,000, the politician must report the transaction to the state.
MacDonald finished with this: “Historically, entities that donate heavily at an official’s behest are simultaneously lobbying that exact official for political favors. Governor Gavin Newsom famously requested a record-breaking $226 million in behested payments in a single year. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to the California Partners Project—a nonprofit founded by his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Many of the biggest donors were corporate giants (like health insurers and utility companies) actively bidding for lucrative state contracts or fighting state regulations.” My emphasis in bold, above.
Then there are the financial shenanigans surrounding a $9.1 million home the Newsoms paid cash for, though they didn’t have that much cash on hand, via their financial records. Hmmmm.
On Tuesday, columninst extraordinare and historian Victor Davis Hanson pondered this: California may be “reaching critical mass,” thanks to one-party rule creating a “neo-feudal society” that is “hardly democratic.”
Here’s one of the most outrageous examples that Hanson noted. He discussed the fate of Proposition 1, passed in 2014. It was a water bond “designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit.”
Prop 1 is an actual state constitutional amendment, mind you, and it includes “$2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs.” But thanks to an alliance of Dem-run bureaucracies, Democrat elected officials, and left-wing greeen activists, they have blocked all new reservoir construction.
“Adding insult to injury,” Hanson continued, “Governor Gavin Newsom instead used $250 million from the Proposition 1 fund to blow up four dams on the Klamath River.”
California residents voted to build more water infrastructure. But it was all blocked by Newsom’s own party, while the governor himself had four dams destroyed that “once provided storage, electrical generation, recreation, and flood control.”
How’s that for “muh Democracy”?
Newsom can complain all he wants about ‘Trump’s DOJ,’ but let’s be clear: The probe began under Joe Biden.
