Gavin Newsom has spent weeks screaming about Donald Trump targeting him for political destruction.
But the story he’s been selling just got blown apart by a single sentence from a defense attorney in Sacramento.
And the person who may have done the most damage to Newsom’s presidential dreams turns out to be someone he personally put on the state payroll.
The New York Post broke the news that Alexis Podesta, a 45-year-old Democrat power broker and Newsom appointee, secretly wore an FBI wire and recorded conversations inside the governor’s political orbit. The recordings started as far back as June 2024, according to McGregor Scott, the attorney representing Dana Williamson, Newsom’s former chief of staff.
“Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not,” Scott told the Post.
That one sentence matters more than Newsom would like to admit. June 2024 is not the Trump era. Joe Biden was in the White House. Merrick Garland ran the Justice Department. The FBI director was Christopher Wray. Every single person Newsom has blamed for coming after him was, at that moment, a Democrat running a Democrat administration.
Williamson herself pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and making false statements to the FBI. Federal prosecutors alleged she and others orchestrated a scheme to siphon roughly $225,000 from a dormant campaign account belonging to former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, allegedly disguising the money as consulting fees that ultimately benefited Becerra’s former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie for personal use.
Becerra, for the record, is now the Democrat frontrunner to succeed Newsom as governor of California.
Podesta stepped into this story when Williamson left private consulting to become Newsom’s chief of staff in late 2022. According to her attorney, Podesta allegedly inherited responsibility for overseeing Becerra’s dormant campaign account. Campaign finance records show Becerra’s committee paid the Podesta Company mostly $10,000 monthly installments through 2023 and 2024. Podesta’s attorney, Bill Portanova, says she did not know the payments were improper. She has not been charged with a crime.
But Portanova confirmed she cooperated with federal investigators and identified her as the uncharged co-conspirator described in the Williamson indictment, listed in court filings as “Co-Conspirator 2.”
And there is the detail that makes Newsom’s retaliation narrative genuinely hard to sustain. The FBI had someone inside his circle, someone he personally appointed in January 2020, recording conversations well before Trump ever returned to office.
Newsom appointed Podesta to the board of the California State Compensation Insurance Fund, a position that pays her nearly $61,000 a year from taxpayers. She remains in that seat today, collecting that paycheck, even as the investigation she helped fuel has expanded to include the governor himself and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
When the Post asked the governor’s office about Podesta’s continued presence on the state board, the response was that it is a “personnel matter.” That’s the kind of answer that raises more questions than it settles.
Newsom has publicly framed the expanding investigation as politically motivated retaliation by the Trump administration, saying, “They’re demanding records; they’re abusing the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random documents. Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets, he’s coming after me because I’m considering running for president.”
He said that. But the wire Podesta was wearing started recording in June 2024. The probe into Williamson has roots stretching back to 2022. The guilty pleas from McCluskie and Campbell came in November and December of 2025. These are not the footprints of a Trump-ordered hit job assembled after January 2025. They are the footprints of a federal corruption case that was already well underway when Trump won the election.
The revelation also explains something that had been puzzling Sacramento insiders for months. Last fall, after Williamson’s indictment, the FBI sent letters to dozens of Sacramento lobbyists, political operatives, and lawmakers notifying them their phone calls had been intercepted during the investigation. A lot of recipients had no obvious connection to Williamson at all.
California Assemblymember Josh Hoover (R-Folsom) was one of them. He told the Post he received one of those letters despite having never spoken with either Williamson or Podesta.
“A lot of people received letters essentially informing us that there were certain periods of time where the FBI was given access to follow phone calls,” Hoover said. “I don’t know how these investigations work, but it sounds like they cast a pretty broad net across the Capitol community to see what they could find.”
Now there’s an answer for why the net was that wide. Podesta was the one wearing the wire. The FBI was intercepting calls connected to her, which pulled in people who had no direct link to Williamson’s scheme at all.
“All of this stuff just raises so many questions,” Hoover told the Post. “What is going on in this administration? What types of conversations are being had? I think the entire case should be really concerning for the general public. It’s really raising a lot of mistrust.”
Podesta is no minor figure who wandered into this story from the outside. She served as secretary of the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency under former Governor Jerry Brown, held senior positions in Brown’s administration, and also worked for PG&E, Disney, and the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). She founded the Podesta Company in 2020, the same year Newsom put her on the state insurance board.
Court filings show that Williamson, while serving as Newsom’s chief of staff, shared confidential state government information with Podesta regarding a corporate client that reporting has identified as Activision Blizzard. The two exchanged text messages on the matter. Williamson’s plea agreement references a June 2024 wiretap in which she was captured strategizing with Podesta about how to respond to a Public Records Act request involving the state’s litigation against that company. The state eventually settled the Activision case for $54 million in December 2023.
Worth noting: Williamson’s attorney told the Post that his client declined to cooperate with federal investigators because she said she had no information on Newsom. Podesta made the opposite choice.
Newsom has not been charged with any crime. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California has said the investigation is ongoing but has not publicly named him as a target. His wife’s nonprofit finances are reportedly under scrutiny in a separate probe. Newsom denies any wrongdoing.
But the political problem here is not just legal exposure. Newsom has built his national brand around positioning himself as the clean-hands alternative to Trump, the competent technocrat who can run a big state and take the fight to the Right. What the Podesta wire revelation does is put a crack in that image that no amount of fundraising emails can paper over.
Because this is the picture that is now in focus: The governor’s former chief of staff pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges. The man who ran Becerra’s campaign account also pleaded guilty. The person Newsom personally appointed to a state board was allegedly recording conversations for the FBI inside his own political orbit. And the investigation that produced all of this was not launched by Trump. It was launched while Biden’s people were running the Justice Department.
Newsom announced plans to deliver a speech pushing back on Trump’s efforts on election integrity, framing himself as a defender of democracy. He’s playing offense. But the federal courthouse in Sacramento keeps producing new facts, and those facts keep complicating the story he wants to tell.
Sacramento insiders who received those FBI letters last fall now know who was on the other end of the wire. Whether that knowledge travels any further up the chain is the question that neither Newsom’s press office nor his fundraising apparatus can answer.
Sources: New York Post, California Post, Daily Wire, Breitbart, American Almanac, California Globe, RedState