Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s home was raided by the FBI over pay-to-play allegations against her boyfriend, a former aide claims – with the worker also revealing a huge upset in the pair’s relationship.
The Democrat lawmaker’s home on Maiden Lane was searched around 5:30 am PT Thursday.
Renia Webb, who served as Thao’s chief of staff for 18 months, says she’s been interview by federal agents and believes they may be looking into her boyfriend Andre Jones.
Webb – who says she ran her office and her campaign – accuses Jones of classic pay-to-play corruption, including trying to lobby for jobs for Thao’s donors and allies.
She says that Jones’ behavior bordered on ridiculous, with a stunt where he tried to involve his ex-wife in Thao’s swearing in ceremony as mayor being the last straw for Webb before she quit. That incident is said to have left Thao in tears.
‘And then finally, I was like, ‘Andre, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you got to get the hell out of here.’ I was like, this is too much. I don’t know what’s going on. Sheng was crying. She was like, why would you do this to me on my day like this is crazy.’
Meanwhile, Webb said she had spoken to the FBI earlier this year as part of an investigation into what was going on in the office.
‘The line of questioning I could tell that they had already been looking into, you know, some of their kind of pay-to-play type of activities,’ she told ABC7.
Webb also says that she was asked about a family close to the mayor who were also raided this week.
Agents carried out searches about three miles to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions.
The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.
One of the properties is owned by Andy Duong and the other is connected to David and Linda Duong, according to records cited by the Chronicle.
Andy Duong was one of the people Webb was questioned about by federal agents.
‘Just about board appointments, about contracts, about Andy, you know about the Duong family,’ she said.
Sources tell DailyMail.com that the mayor’s first official trip last year, to Vietnam, was co-sponsored by the Vietnamese American Business Association, which was formed by a member of the Duong family, leading to speculation that the FBI may be investigating allegations of influence peddling.
Webb has communicated to her former boss via text message during the raid to offer her best wishes.
‘She has a good heart. And she came in this wanting to do it. But sometimes that power and that machine just takes people to another level in the wrong direction… and we’re all paying the consequence for it.’
It comes as Thao’s lawyer, Tony Brass, said Friday the investigation is not centered around his client.
‘We have no information that she is or will be the target of this or any investigation,’ he said Friday.
Brass told NBC Bay Area he’s not happy with how this investigation has made Thao look.
‘Mayor Thao is ready, willing and able to cooperate fully with federal investigators. She has nothing to hide,’ he said.
‘It’s unfortunate that she has had to endure the bad optics of having this search warrant executed on her home. She would have cooperated with this investigation without the need for this search. She will continue to do the work Oakland expects from their mayor and provide the federal government with whatever information they are seeking.’
Brass says there are no plans for the mayor, who faces a recall, to resign at this time.
‘The mayor of Oakland has not been arrested,’ Brass said. ‘There’s a search warrant that was executed on an address. What that was for and why that was done does not take away from her ability or her capacity to be the mayor of Oakland.’
The raid took place around 5:30 a.m., sources said. It started when two Jeeps pulled up to the mayor’s house and several FBI agents in bullet proof vests jumped out.
They ran to the mayor’s door, announced they were FBI. Standing behind a shield, they then kicked the door in. They remained at the house for the next couple hours.
The mayor was a no show at a prescheduled press conference at 10 a.m. in San Francisco, where regional officials were on hand to support an affordable housing bond on the November ballot, sources said.
At another community event this morning in Oakland, Thao’s aide Brandon Harami was asked about the raid and said he knew nothing about it, sources said.
Earlier this week, it was revealed Thao is facing a recall election as voters complain about soaring crime in the Bay Area city.
They say her progressive, soft-on-crime policies have emboldened criminals and driven away businesses.
Thao will face a historic recall election in November amid anger over her failure to get a grip on the situation in Oakland.
The progressive Democrat lawmaker is the first mayor in the city’s history to be up for recall, after a campaign to oust her gained more than 40,000 signatures.
‘In just a year, Thao’s incompetence and dishonesty accelerated Oakland’s decline, causing longstanding businesses to close and generational families to leave,’ the Oakland United to Recall Sheng Thao (OUST) campaign website stated.
Critics are also angry that she missed an opportunity to apply for a $15 million retail theft grant, fired Oakland Police chief LaRonne Armstrong, ‘for no cause’ without appointing a successor and lost the Oakland A’s baseball team.
They also accused her of lying about calling a State of Emergency to deal with the crime wave crippling the city.
Oakland has been rocked by violent crime in recent months, including murders, which have soared from 78 in 2019 to 126 last year.
Crime overall increased by 18 percent in 2023 with property crime up 17 percent and violent crime up 21 percent.
And in the first four months of 2024, residential robberies soared by 118 percent on the same period last year.
Staggeringly, one car per every 30 residents was also stolen in 2023.
The situation has prompted several large corporations to pull out of the city, citing fears for staff safety and the crippling impact of retail theft.
On Tuesday a Florida family dropping their son off in the city for college enrollment had their rental car ransacked. The traumatized parents and their family have since fled the city and withdrawn their son from studying there.
In August one particularly disturbing video showed an innocent woman being dragged along the ground by two male muggers after trying to fight them off.
Oakland’s only In-N-Out Burger restaurant in the area closed after 18 years, despite still turning a healthy profit, as customers and staff were ‘unsafe’ due to soaring crime rates, the business said.
The local Denny’s also shut its doors, while Taco Bell refuses to allow indoor dining amid a spate of incidents.
Earlier this year, Kaiser, PG&E, Clorox and Blue Shield announced they were plowing $10million of their own cash into added security measures for their employees amid inaction from the city.
Thao’s opponents blame her progressive policies for the skyrocketing crime.