She wore a wire. For months. Inside the innermost circle of California’s most powerful Democrat.
Alexis Podesta was a fixture in Sacramento politics — a Newsom appointee, a Jerry Brown alum, the kind of insider who knows where the bodies are buried because she helped bury a few herself.
Starting in June 2024, she was also working with the FBI.
Her target was Dana Williamson, Gavin Newsom’s own chief of staff. Williamson has since pleaded guilty to federal fraud and tax charges. But the wire caught more than Williamson. It caught a whole ecosystem of phone calls, connections, and conversations — some belonging to people who’d never met either woman.
That’s the part Sacramento is still absorbing. Assemblymember Josh Hoover got a letter from the FBI this fall informing him his calls had been intercepted. He’d never spoken to Williamson. He’d never spoken to Podesta. He got the letter anyway.
“It sounds like they cast a pretty broad net,” Hoover told The New York Post — which is one way of putting it. Another way: a governor’s political operation got swept up in a wire it didn’t know was running, and the fallout is still landing on people who did nothing but pick up the phone.
McGregor Scott, Williamson’s attorney, confirmed the arrangement: “Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not.”
Williamson, he said, refused to cooperate against Newsom because she had nothing to give investigators. That claim will get tested. The investigation hasn’t stopped at Williamson — it now reaches Newsom himself and his wife’s nonprofit finances.
Newsom’s answer has been to call the whole thing political revenge, a Trump-directed hit ahead of 2028. There’s a case to be made there, and Newsom’s team is making it loudly — loud enough to raise money off it within hours of the news breaking. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, said Trump has “no boundaries.”
Maybe. But the wire predates any of that. It was running in June 2024, long before Trump’s Justice Department opened this chapter.
Whistleblowers, not the White House, appear to have tipped off investigators in the first place. Sorting out politics from prosecution is Sacramento’s job now, not ours — but the timeline is the timeline.
Podesta, notably, hasn’t lost her seat on the State Compensation Insurance Fund board. She still collects nearly $61,000 a year from an appointment Newsom made in 2020. She wore the wire. She kept the job.
Somewhere in that arrangement is the real story of how power works in California — who gets protected, who gets recorded, and who never finds out until a letter shows up in the mail.
