GAVIN NEWSOM’S TRUMP PROSECUTION ENVY. Gavin Newsom is outraged. “In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees,” the California governor said in a recently released video accusing President Donald Trump of directing the Justice Department to investigate him. “They’re demanding records. They’re abusing the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random documents.”
“Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets,” Newsom continued. “He’s coming after me because I’m considering running for president, because he hates that I’ve consistently called him out over and over again for his lies and deceit.”
All of this raises the question: Is Trump weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue a popular Democratic politician and possible 2028 presidential candidate? Or are there legitimate reasons that people around Newsom might attract the attention of prosecutors?
Bet on the latter. From a number of press accounts, we know that the investigations of people in the Newsom circle — there appear to be two such probes — were started by law enforcement in California, not by Trump-appointed officials in the Justice Department in Washington. “One of the investigations is examining Newsom’s wife for potential tax crimes related to a nonprofit she is linked to,” the Washington Post reported recently. “Another investigation is related to a case involving Newsom’s former chief of staff, who pleaded guilty in May to public corruption charges that include conspiracy to commit bank fraud.”
No one has said that Newsom himself is the target of any investigation. But it is not surprising that his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, might have attracted some attention. Ms. Siebel Newsom is a documentary filmmaker. The New York Times reported that she created a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization called the Representation Project that “advocates for gender equity, in part by developing educational materials based on Ms. Siebel Newsom’s documentaries.”
Siebel Newsom also has a film production company, Girls Club Entertainment, that has a close relationship with her nonprofit. “Tax records show that the Representation Project makes annual payments to Girls Club Entertainment,” the Times reported. “In 2024, the nonprofit paid Girls Club Entertainment $161,250 for film production work.”
This is not to say that Siebel Newsom has done anything wrong. But a tax-exempt nonprofit organization run by one person paying the same person’s for-profit business — maybe that’s not a problem at all, but it is also the kind of arrangement that might attract scrutiny.
Siebel Newsom has another nonprofit organization, the California Partners Project, which seeks to boost women in the corporate world. “Some of the donors that support the California Partners Project are groups with business before the state government,” the New York Times reported. Again, maybe there’s nothing wrong, but this is the kind of thing that can pique the interest of law enforcement.
“For years, critics have raised the possibility of self-dealing, but no public evidence of wrongdoing by any of the entities tied to Siebel Newsom has surfaced, and it remains unclear what precise issues and actions investigators have been asking questions about,” the New York Times reported.
The other matter surrounding Gov. Newsom is the case of Dana Williamson, Newsom’s former chief of staff who pleaded guilty last month to three felonies in a case in which she was accused of planning to steal campaign funds from an earlier employer, Xavier Becerra, now the Democratic candidate for governor of California.
“Newsom was not implicated in any wrongdoing in Williamson’s case,” the Washington Post reported. “But at the time of her arrest last year, Williamson’s attorney, McGregor Scott, said she had been approached by the FBI in 2024 — during the Biden administration — about assisting with an investigation involving Newsom. Scott said Williamson declined because she had not witnessed any misconduct by the governor.”
So again — this is not to say that Newsom has done anything wrong. But these circumstances are the sort of thing that attract legitimate law enforcement scrutiny. If there are investigations going on, and if they have involved agents seeking information from people around the Newsoms — if that is happening, it would not be a big surprise.
“Based on what we know right now, I think there’s serious reason to doubt the narrative that’s being offered by Gavin Newsom, which is that he is being specifically targeted by Donald Trump for political retribution,” said CNN legal analyst Elie Honig. “The reporting is that this investigation did not initiate from Donald Trump, or even from prosecutors in DC — so not from Pam Bondi, when she was AG, and not from Todd Blanche.”
So why is Newsom loudly complaining that he is being targeted by Trump’s weaponized Justice Department? It could be that he is suffering from a sort of Trump Prosecution Envy. Perhaps he looks at anti-Trump figures like James Comey and Letitia James, who once pursued Trump but later found themselves targeted by Trump’s second administration. Under fire from Trump, Comey and James enjoyed wide support among Democrats and Resistance media.
More directly, perhaps Newsom is looking at Trump himself, or more specifically Trump’s experience between his two terms. At one point, Trump faced more than 90 felony counts from a prosecutor appointed by the Biden Justice Department and elected Democratic prosecutors in New York and Georgia. Decisions by prosecutors and judges seemed directed toward trying, convicting, and imprisoning Trump before he could run for president in 2024.
All the while, Trump’s stature among his party’s base rose higher and higher. The more a Democratic prosecutor targeted Trump, the more passionately devoted Trump’s supporters became. At one point, a GOP rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), complained that Trump’s indictments sucked all the oxygen out of the room for the former president’s challengers. With each new indictment, the Democratic pursuit of Trump made him unbeatable among Republicans.
Gavin Newsom certainly knows that story well. So why wouldn’t he claim — no matter what the facts say — that Trump prosecutors are trying to take him down?