Jed McFatter
Appearances
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
One of the main things we look at from when he was mayor, we have a whole chapter devoted to it, is while he was mayor, he created a nonprofit. He called it a nonprofit. It's not clear exactly what it is. It's an organization that he set up that was run out of the mayor's Office of Economic Development. And it was co-founded with a Chinese billionaire who has ties to, like,
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party, and his businesses are tied in with Chinese criminal gangs. His name is Vince Lo. So that's who he founded this nonprofit with. And the goal was to recruit in Chinese business and investment, right?
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
But in effect, it kind of created a streamlined path for a lot of Chinese criminals and CCP officials to infiltrate California and buy up real estate, bribe government officials, pilfer intellectual property, things like this. And what's really shocking about it is that it was operating out of the mayor's office.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
It was housed at the Chamber of Commerce, but it had four satellite offices in China that operated as a part of this nonprofit. And they claimed to have brought in From 2008 to 2018, they claimed to have brought in 5.5 billion of economic impact to San Francisco. And they claimed to have also brought in thousands of companies.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
But what happened is many of the groups he brought in turned out to be run by criminals. And so, for instance, one of these companies, I mean, there's multiple ones we talk about in the book, but one of them was a company called Oceanwide Holdings. It is a real estate company, but basically the owner of this company is a high-level CCP consultant or operative.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
And he actually owned Oceanwide Holdings and bought this property. They recruited through China SF, bought all this property. Nothing's really happened on the property. There's been bankruptcies. But that was just one example of how an actual CCP official owned a company in California that was recruited through his nonprofit.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
They wanted to bring in Chinese companies in certain industries like green energy, solar companies. A lot of solar companies were brought in. Real estate companies were supposedly supposed to boost the economy and that type of thing. But it turned out that after it got started, for years, the primary funder of this nonprofit was Huawei.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
which is kind of known for working as a part of the United Front with the Communist Party in China.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
So there was a company named Z&L Properties. It was a real estate company that was owned by a former Chinese government official. So basically it was the same thing. It was recruited through China SF.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
and they've had the same kind of problems with a lot of these companies they get started on a development it never gets finished nobody knows where the money went but this particular guy his company was actually criminally sentenced to pay a million dollar fine for bribing close associates of gavin newsom right i mean he recruited him in he ends up being criminally charged for bribing him and also there's a picture in november i think 2017 where
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
He takes a photo with China SF at Z&L Properties with his arms around some of the other employees there. And on that exact same day, he received over $20,000 in donation from this same company. Hmm.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
Well, there wasn't much backlash. A lot of people don't really realize how much he's been connected to or helped to create this nonprofit. But also nobody's ever reported that he received this money from ZNL because it was given as an anonymous donation just from ZNL. So it's never been reported that he got this money from this organization. So you guys are breaking that element of this story.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
Correct. Yes, we're breaking that element of the story.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
Have we seen these continuing questionable relationships with Chinese entities? Yes. In fact, China SF, what he did was when he became lieutenant governor, one of the last things he did as mayor is he wrote a statement where he said that he was going to embed the China SF model into state level trade office. And it did. Now it's embedded.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
within the state, it's called GO-Biz, I think is the name of it, but it's basically their kind of trade office. So it's still there. You know, he's brought it along the whole way. And here's the thing that really got me about this case with ChinaSF is that they gave him various incentives to come, right? All kinds of things to draw him.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
And one of the things he actually says when he's talking about this program is you will never have to deal with the bureaucracy. He's talking to the Chinese companies and he says, we will carry your permits through the entire bureaucracy. And to me, that's just very shocking when you consider like California is notoriously difficult to get construction jobs done, these big real estate projects.
Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
You've got to pay permit consultants to expedite it and everything. And a lot of these permit consultants get busted in these big schemes, fraud schemes that have taken place. And so in effect, Gavin Newsom and China itself kind of acted as like permit expediters for Chinese companies. Yet U.S., you know, California developers, they didn't get this same deal.