OAKLAND — Mayor Sheng Thao struck a defiant tone Monday in her first public remarks since the FBI raided her house last week — questioning the motives of the authorities who conducted the searches and vowing that “I will not be threatened out of this office.”
“I want to be crystal clear: I have done nothing wrong,” Thao said, speaking through tears and anger at times as she read a statement. The mayor spoke for about 10 minutes, then left without taking questions.
Thao’s comments came four days after the FBI’s surprise raids across the city that centered on a politically influential family in charge of the city’s contracted recycling company.
Federal agents hauled numerous boxes and duffel bags stuffed with items from Thao’s Oakland Hills house, though she was not arrested or charged with a crime. Thao lives at the home with her partner, Andre Jones, who like Thao is a former chief of staff for an Oakland councilmember.
In a moment of crisis, the 38-year-old mayor tried to connect directly with Oaklanders by leaning into the core identity that has made her rapid political rise unique.
Thao, a daughter of Hmong refugees who once lived in a car with her son before graduating from UC Berkeley, said the situation “wouldn’t have gone down the way it did if I was rich, if I had gone to elite private schools, or if I had come from money.”
While Thao maintained the FBI’s investigation is “not about me,” she also insinuated that the feds’ interest in her could be linked to broader political forces seeking to remove her from office.
One day before the raids, a campaign to recall Thao announced that it had successfully petitioned to force her into another election this November.
“I have not been charged with a crime, and I am confident I will not be charged with a crime, because I am innocent,” Thao said, noting that she plans to be “100% transparent” and “cooperate fully” with investigators.
Wiping a tear, she took aim at her detractors, vowing that “I’m not going down like that — we’re not going down like that.”
She wondered aloud why the raids happened so soon after the recall question qualified for the November ballot. The timing, she said, was “troubling.”
“The people who voted for me deserve to have their voices heard,” Thao said. “I will not be bullied, and I will not be disparaged, and I will not be threatened out of this office.”
The mayor’s address took at least one person by surprise: her now-former attorney, Tony Brass, who said that he and Thao mutually agreed to part ways after he found her statements to be “inconsistent” with his view of how the case would be handled by authorities.
“I only became aware of it when I saw it on the news,” Brass said of Thao’s address. He declined to elaborate further on which parts of her statements he disagreed with.
At a rally outside City Hall, recall leader Brenda Harbin-Forte demanded Thao’s resignation, saying she was disgusted by the mayor’s suggestion of the recall being fueled by “radical right-wing forces.” A similar rally against Thao was held Sunday evening.
A retired judge, Habin-Forte also scoffed at Thao’s suggestion that the timing of the raids suggested a larger plot against her.
“We (recall organizers) have no power over the FBI, the IRS, the U.S. Postal Service,” Habin-Forte said. “We have a lot of support from them, but we don’t have the ability to control federal law enforcement.”
Also targeted in the raids were two other houses in the Oakland Hills and a business office along the city’s waterfront Thursday morning. All three are tied to Andy Duong and his father, David, who owns the Oakland-based company California Waste Solutions, the city’s curbside recycling provider. CWS also has a contract with the city of San Jose.
The exact documents and belongings targeted in the raids remain unclear, and the FBI has not identified the targets of the investigation. An FBI spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Prior to Monday’s remarks, the mayor had largely disappeared from public view besides a trip to City Hall on the morning of the raids with Jones, who Thao’s representatives confirmed isn’t an employee of her office.
The tumultuous week for the mayor comes as the city is barreling toward an end-of-the-month deadline to overcome revenue deficits likened by city officials to the Great Recession of the late 2000s. In all, the budget shortfall is expected to reach $177 million by the end of the current fiscal year on June 30.
On Monday, Thao said city operations have continued “without interruption” since the raids, adding that she would “remain focused on supporting the City Council” as they work to pass the budget. She also stressed the city would still complete the sale of its stake in the Coliseum as a means to help fix the budget crisis.
The mayor began her remarks by acknowledging the mass shooting that wounded 15 people on Wednesday night, noting that the unannounced raids Thursday morning had pre-empted the kind of announcement that might have been expected by the city’s mayor after such a shocking event.
Nowhere in Thao’s statement on Monday did she mention the Duongs, who have been the subject of multiple local and state investigations into alleged “straw donor” schemes.
Authorities claimed the Duongs spent years illegally funneling thousands of dollars using third-party entities to disguise political contributions and flout campaign-donation limits to several City Council candidates, including Thao.
In one instance, the Fair Political Practices Commission cited an internal email for Thao’s campaign in 2018 that laid out exactly how important the Duongs’ donations could be for political newcomers, such as herself. In it, a staff member asked, “Have you spoke with Andy Duong about $20,000 by June 30th? let me know when I should follow up with him, please,” a complaint alleges.
Within a week, Thao’s campaign received 14 contributions — seven of which were believed to have come from Duong himself through his network of “straw donors,” the complaint alleges.
Thao depicted herself as a “threat” to unnamed political forces that “built the rules to protect and preserve their power and maintain dominance over the rest of us.” As the mayor positioned herself for battle, she also marked her return to Oakland’s center stage with vulnerability — calling the address “one of the hardest moments of my life.”
“I am a mother, a fighter, a survivor,” Thao said. “When my parents came to this country, fleeing genocide, they never could have imagined that their daughter would one day be mayor of Oakland. I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”