On the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast, the president of OpenTheBooks.com told co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers that the Newsoms may have reached a new low in feeding at the public trough.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was paid $1.5 million over the decade to run a non-profit film and school curriculum organization, Adam Andrzejewski told the Drill Down. The group licenses its films to 5,000 schools across the country, which pay licensing fees to the non-profit. The non-profit doesn’t create the films. That’s done by a for-profit film production company she also owns, which made $1.6 million over the last decade.
“So right there, you’ve got $3 million flowing back into the Newsoms’ pocket,” Andrzejewski says.
“The fourth dip here is the governor himself. He stars in many of her films. They encourage people to vote for politicians – like Gavin Newsom – and support the policies that he espouses. They ask students to get involved, and when they do, the Newsoms actually have a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization called ‘California Partners Project,’ where the students can get active. That was created expressly to drive her public policy agenda as the ‘first partner’ of the state of California,” Adam explains.
Right after he became governor, Newsom established the office of “first partner,” which now has nine staffers and a million-dollar budget.
Adam goes on: “But of course, it wasn’t enough. They established this 501(c)(4) for more funding, more lobbying power, and a way to get the students active.”
Open The Books filed 55,000 Freedom of Information Act requests last year, exposing $8 trillion worth of federal, state, and local spending to public scrutiny, Andrzejewski says.
A few weeks ago, it was Adam’s group that exposed the ties between California governor Gavin Newsom and Silicon Valley Bank.
To listen to the Drill Down Podcast – click here.