OAKLAND — The sprawling federal investigation that became public last month with an FBI-led raid on the house of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao now appears to be reaching the Oakland Police Department, in line with latest federal grand jury subpoenas served on the town's district attorney's office.
According to the subpoenas, the U.S. Attorney's Office asked the town government to show over all internal phone number directories of the Oakland Police Department since early March. The agency also requested all Oakland Police reports since April 1 involving the politically well-connected Duong family, which runs the town's contracted recycling company and an unknown housing company that builds homes out of shipping containers.
The latest documents sought within the subpoenas – issued on July 10 and 12 and first reported by Oaklandside – represent the primary known mention of the Oakland Police Department in an investigation that has rocked Oakland's political scene.
The investigation got here to light in a startling way last month when FBI agents concurrently searched Thao's home and addresses related to David Duong, his son Andy Duong and their recycling company, California Waste Solutions, on June 20.
An initial subpoena issued days after the raids ended the investigation. Federal prosecutors are also searching for records on Andre Jones, Thao's partner of 10 years and a well-connected political veteran who once served as chief of staff to City Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan.
Investigators also looked for documents related to the event of the Oakland Army Base, plans for local homeless declarations and appointments to quite a few boards and departments across the town, including the Port of Oakland.
For greater than a decade, Duong-led California Waste Solutions had been touting plans to construct a large latest recycling facility on a 12-acre site on the North Gateway site of the previous Oakland Army Base. The multimillion-dollar project aimed to maneuver the corporate's primary recycling facility from Wood Street to the Port of Oakland, reducing congestion, vehicle exhaust and the roaring noise of trucks trundling through West Oakland streets within the early morning hours.
But that project appears to have been held up by delays. Although California Waste Solutions plans to start construction on the power in December 2022 or January 2023, construction has not yet begun, in line with Sean Maher, a city spokesman. He said the corporate has “received its permit from the state and submitted all building applications to the city,” but didn’t provide further details on the status of the project.
With the primary subpoena, the grand jury also requested details about Evolutionary Homes, an organization that shares an office constructing with California Waste Solutions and focuses on housing the homeless in converted shipping containers.
The company was founded by the Duongs and Mario Juarez, a political activist and two-time Oakland City Council candidate who was allegedly at the middle of controversial emails aimed toward Thao's rivals in the times leading as much as the 2022 mayoral election, which Thao ultimately won. Juarez was later charged with a felony earlier this 12 months after prosecutors said he wrote fake checks to pay for the emails. More recently, he was attacked and shot at in the times and weeks leading as much as the FBI raids. The attacks are still being investigated by Oakland police, his attorney and authorities said.
The housing company has been increasingly vocal over the past 12 months about its desire for a portion of city funds to handle homelessness. In December, Evolutionary Homes was certainly one of “half a dozen other companies” that approached City Councilman Carroll Fife with ideas to handle the issue, the councilman said.
Touring the showroom — on the bottom floor of the constructing that houses California Waste Solutions — Fife toured the homes the corporate has built. The man leading the presentation was Juarez — someone whose ideas for addressing homelessness “sound like anyone else's,” Fife said. “He was just a little more aggressive.”
Juarez was later certainly one of not less than six people related to the corporate named in the primary grand jury subpoena.
Last week's recent subpoenas appeared to interrupt latest ground by way of the town's funds and funding sources.
A July 10 subpoena requested “all sources of federal funds received by the city” for the reason that starting of 2021, in addition to “the names, email addresses and cell phone numbers of all attorneys who have worked in the Oakland City Attorney's Office since January 1, 2022.”
Two days later, a subpoena omitted any mention of the request for the list of the City Attorney's Office's lawyers and their attorneys' contact information.
No charges have been filed within the FBI's investigation, which is notorious for moving slowly and casting a large net, local lawyers and experts say.
Thao has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and vowed she’s going to not be “driven out of this office.” She has repeatedly stressed that she just isn’t the main focus of the investigation and suggested last month that federal agents had suspiciously timed their investigation to coordinate with a recall try to oust her from the office that was up for the Nov. 5 vote.
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