Former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s romantic partner Andre Jones is accused of taking a $95,000 no-show job from Thao’s big-bucks donors. But newly released documents say he showed up plenty on high-price junkets to Vietnam and the SXSW festival.

The legal proceedings against indicted former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao are starting to inch along very slowly. And Thao is maintaining her innocence, but as she does, the Bay Area News Group reports that her federal prosecutors are releasing Oakland City Hall documents they’ve seized supporting their claim that she’s not innocent.

The batch of documents just released include various emails and memos from the 17 months she was mayor before being recalled last fall. And a central focus of these documents is Thao’s live-in romantic partner Andre Jones, whom the feds say took a $95,000-per-year no-show job from high-rolling Thao donors (he was offered $300,000, Thao asked the donors to up it to $3 million, but for reasons yet unknown he only ended up getting $95,000). Still, he got some of that money, and was apparently paying his and Thao’s rent on the home they shared while she was mayor.

Those high-rolling Thao donors we mentioned are the father-and-son businessman team of David and Andy Duong, who run Oakland’s recycling pick-up contractor Cal Waste Solutions, and whose homes and offices were also raided on the day of the Sheng Thao FBI raids. Federal prosecutors argue that the Duongs were paying Jones for the no-show job in exchange for making sure he steered a number of lucrative city contracts their way.

But for having a no-show job, the newly released documents show Jones was quite hands-on in Thao’s administration. He got briefings on the “chief situation” after Thao fired Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong and the city took a year to replace him, and was involved with crafting Thao’s statements to media organizations. And he accompanied her on several trips, including a trip to attend an Audible party at the 2024 SXSW festival, which would seem to have absolutely no connection running the City of Oakland.

A more highly scrutinized trip was a 2023 trip to Vietnam that many high-level Oakland officials went on, sponsored by the Vietnamese American Business Association, which is essentially run by the Duong family. (Some paid that association back for their trip, others did not.)

The new documents show that trip also included then-deputy director of the city’s Housing and Community Development Larry Gallegos. Gallegos is an interesting figure, because Thao’s federal indictment notes that Oakland’s City Administrator "did not believe the experience of City Employee 1 qualified that person for a director-level position" when Gallegos was hired. The inference is that Gallegos was appointed to please the Duongs.

Gallegos resigned the day the indictments were released after the press identified him as “City Employee 1.”  

Gallegos also apparently had many communications with one of this scandal’s more colorful side characters, Mario Juarez. The two were trying to set up city contracts for one of the Duongs’ businesses called Evolutionary Homes, which had planned to put 300 modular “tiny homes” for the homeless on a city-owned piece of land.

The city had leased land at a decommissioned Army base to Cal Waste Solutions which would have served as the site of the 300 modular units. Though ultimately, Cal Waste Solutions had hoped to build a new waste processing facility there. The new documents show the Duongs getting numerous extensions on that project, though it has still never broken ground.

There is nothing explicitly illegal and really no big new revelations in these documents, maybe other than the SXSW festival trip — which just doesn’t seem like something a mayor of Oakland should be doing. But there will certainly be more revelations to come, and at some point, you figure someone’s going to start asking questions about why Cal Waste Solutions is still doing Oakland’s recycling collection, despite its much-indicted ownership.

Related: Feds’ Sheng Thao Indictment Says She Actually Tried to Solicit $3 Million Bribe [SFist]

Image: @Sheng_Thao51 via Twitter