Alexis Podesta, a 45-year-old Sacramento consultant and longtime Newsom appointee, started recording conversations for the FBI in June 2024. She was inside the governor's operation — a former Dianne Feinstein staffer, former secretary of California's Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, and a sitting member of the State Compensation Insurance Fund Board, pulling $60,797 a year from taxpayers.
The FBI wasn't watching from the outside. It was sitting at the table.
MacGregor Scott, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California and attorney for Newsom's former chief of staff Dana Williamson, confirmed the arrangement publicly. "Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not," Scott told reporters. That one sentence rewrites the timeline of Newsom's entire 2024-2025 political operation.
Williamson, 53, served as Newsom's chief of staff until late 2024. She pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and lying to federal agents. The charges centered on $225,000 allegedly siphoned from a dormant campaign account. Podesta was identified in court filings as an uncharged co-conspirator.
Newsom's response has been to claim the Trump administration is punishing him for considering a 2028 presidential run. There's a problem with that theory. Podesta began recording in June 2024 — while Joe Biden was still president and before anyone in the Trump administration had authority over a federal lunch order, let alone an FBI corruption probe. The investigation started under Biden's DOJ. Newsom's own appointee was cooperating with Biden's FBI.
The probe's reach extends beyond the governor's office — and into the race to replace him. Xavier Becerra, the former HHS Secretary now running as the Democratic nominee to succeed Newsom as governor, had his own financial connection to Podesta. His campaign committee made monthly $10,000 payments to the Podesta Company throughout 2023 and 2024. That's twelve months of $10,000 checks going to someone the FBI was using as a cooperating witness — from the man now asking California to trust him with the governor's office.
Republican Assemblymember Josh Hoover of Folsom, who received an FBI notification letter about intercepted communications, observed that "it sounds like they cast a pretty broad net across the Capitol community." A wiretap captured Williamson and Podesta strategizing about a Public Records Act request, with multiple corporate clients referenced in the communications.
The governor who built a national brand on lecturing the rest of America about competent governance had a chief of staff pleading guilty to fraud and an appointee wearing a wire for the feds. This wasn't a peripheral staffer or a distant associate. Williamson ran the office. Podesta sat on a state board Newsom personally appointed her to in January 2020.
So when Becerra stands at a podium asking Californians to trust him as the next governor, he'll need to explain why his campaign was writing $10,000 monthly checks to someone the FBI was using as a cooperating witness. That question doesn't go away with a press conference.