Morning Wire
Fools Gold: Newsom’s Bailouts, Beijing, and Broken California Dream | 3.16.25
Sun, 16 Mar 2025
In "Fools Gold," investigative journalists Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter peel back the curtain on Governor Gavin Newsom’s controversial ties to PG&E, Communist China, and policies they argue have shattered the California Dream. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.
Chapter 1: What are Governor Gavin Newsom's controversial political dealings?
Governor Gavin Newsom has made his way into the headlines in recent weeks, not just for the devastating California fires, but also his attempts to tack right on several of his left-wing stances. Now, a new investigative book peels back the curtain on Newsom's problematic political dealings, as well as other figures who the authors say killed the California dream.
In this episode, we sit down with the authors of the expose to discuss Newsom and the state of progressive California. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, March 16th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now are the authors of a new investigative book, Fool's Gold, Susan Crabtree and Jed McFatter.
The book breaks several new details about some key political figures in California. Susan and Jed, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, it's my pleasure.
Thanks for having me, John. There's a lot of pretty remarkable findings that you've detailed here that are causing a stir, but we wanted to zoom in here on perhaps the most significant figure right now in terms of the news cycle. That's Gavin Newsom. Let's start with the most immediate issue. Susan, you've highlighted what you've called the wildfire cash windfall.
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Chapter 2: How is Newsom connected to the California wildfires and PG&E?
This involves Newsom and the energy company Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E. What have you uncovered on this?
Well, it's interesting because everything that Gavin Newsom does is performative, not performance-based. He's been given everything on a silver platter, whether it's his admissions to college, his wine dynasty that was fueled by Getty money, or his rise in politics. It's all been given through his family connections with the Gettys and other political connections like Willie Brown and others.
But when it comes to these wildfires... It's really startling because PG&E, it's not like other states. In California, they cozy up to the Democrats. They spread money throughout the state. And in fact, they've given Gavin Newsom and his wife $700,000 in contributions, both to his gubernatorial campaign and her gender justice films. That's her big project as the first partner of California.
And I can tell you more about that. It is pretty eye-opening, the gender justice films funded by the wildfire. What I need to stress here is that PG&E is responsible for the deadliest wildfire in California history up in Paradise. They're responsible for 84 counts of manslaughter, 84 deaths. Oh, my gosh. In Paradise.
They didn't give it as much publicity because it wasn't a wealthy area as the Palisades, but it was much deadlier. The court determined that. They were actually told to go and maintain it years ago, and they never did. just like they don't clean up the vegetation that can catch fire underneath their transmissions lines either. And it just sparked this huge deadly fire.
And we're seeing the same kind of thing with the Eaton fire. So Cal Edison is now being investigated for causing that one. It sparked a transmission line as well. And they just become these big, huge infernos. And Gavin Newsom has no problem taking money from the utilities that really are the main culprits on these fires. The Wall Street Journal found that PG&E was responsible for 1,500 fires.
That's one every two days in just six years. And they like to talk about climate change. They care so much about climate change, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi and others. But guess what? These wildfires, they have rolled back all of the progress that these EV mandates and clean air policies have had over the course of two decades because they just spew pollution into the air.
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Chapter 3: What role did Gavin Newsom play in bailing out PG&E?
And so we have this pattern of Newsom letting these energy companies off the hook.
Yes. In fact, after that big wildfire in Paradise, PG&E was going to go bankrupt because they owed so much to the victims, billions and billions of dollars. And so guess what? It was Gavin Newsom to the rescue. He did a big bailout for PG&E and he orchestrated through the governor's office using taxpayer dollars to pay for the lawyers. O'Melveny and Myers were the lawyers.
They had been on the PG&E payroll for decades. So it's basically he used... PG&E's lawyers to craft a bailout for them that would prevent them from going bankrupt and to stay alive. And actually, it inculcates them from any more problems with wildfires. They have this new wildfire trust fund that gets paid out, but it's only based on the value of PG&E stock.
So if PG&E's stock goes down, the victims get less money. It's a real racket.
Incredible. Is this true for the energy company SoCal Edison as well?
Yes, Edison's the parent company. SoCal Edison is being investigated for the Eaton Fire, and that had 17 victims, 17 deaths in that fire, and just devastation everywhere. It wasn't as affluent as the Palisades. It was more middle class, upper middle class area. And yeah, SoCal Edison is involved...
Newsom appoints the regulators to what is known as the Public Utility Commission, and they just let these utilities skate. And it's a revolving door, too. So the public utility commissioners, they often go from the utility commission to PG&E and SoCal Edison, and they go right back to It's a big revolving door.
And actually, SoCal Edison recently hired Biden's energy secretary, Granholm, to sit on their boards in the middle of this big scandal that they're facing for causing the Eaton fire. And guess what? She had just given them $600 million from taxpayer money just six months ago for grid innovation. So... Yeah, it's there. I'm telling you, the Democrats are in cahoots with the utilities in California.
It's not like other states. And it shouldn't be inevitable that every year we have these wildfires.
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Chapter 4: How did Gavin Newsom's ties to China begin during his tenure as San Francisco's mayor?
Now, on this topic of problematic political quid pro quos, Jed, you particularly dug into Newsom's connections to communist China that runs back to his time as mayor of San Francisco. That was back in 2004 to 2011. What did you find out about him during his time as mayor?
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,
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: How was China SF used to facilitate Chinese influence in California?
So this China SF supposed nonprofit that Newsom created is effectively a foreign national run organization that's buying property in America through the governor's office. What was the rationale from Newsom's perspective for even starting this joint venture with CCP connected individuals? What would be his argument for this?
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.
which is kind of known for working as a part of the United Front with the Communist Party in China.
So Newsom is saying, look, I'm bringing in investment, I'm bringing in money for San Francisco that benefits ultimately California as a whole. What did you find in terms of any entanglements personally for him personally? with any of these entities that he's working with?
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.
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
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.
So this guy is charged for bribing associates of Newsom. Was there any backlash against Newsom for this?
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.
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