Valuetainment - May 23, 2026


＂Xavier Becerra Could Be Indicted＂ - Steve Hilton WARNS California's Dems Are In TROUBLE


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

172.24

Word count

1,805

Sentence count

157

Harmful content

Misogyny

10

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I speak with California Governor Gavin Newsom's former chief of staff, Javier Becerra. We talk about why he decided to run for president, why he s running for governor, and why he should win.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.040 Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.
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00:00:30.000 When's the last time you had a conversation with Newsom?
00:00:33.300 We had a very brief conversation.
00:00:36.080 I remember it, actually.
00:00:37.040 It was the second presidential debate in 2024.
00:00:43.900 It was held at the Reagan Library.
00:00:46.120 And the Biden people sent him in as a surrogate.
00:00:49.240 I was there.
00:00:50.180 And he was going to talk to everybody.
00:00:51.700 Exactly.
00:00:52.340 That's all right.
00:00:52.740 Well, he was literally going just off to the side.
00:00:56.660 We were both with Hannity that night.
00:00:59.160 And so we had a quick conversation then.
00:01:01.120 Did you whisper to him that you may run?
00:01:03.060 Did anybody know?
00:01:03.800 We didn't.
00:01:04.140 We didn't.
00:01:04.660 I actually, I think we actually ended up, I was still then working on the housing policy
00:01:10.640 that we spoke about earlier.
00:01:13.520 And if I'm right, I think we had a brief conversation about that.
00:01:17.700 And then he connected me to one of his team members to maybe follow up on that and so on.
00:01:21.860 How dismal you think his track record's been since he's been governor?
00:01:26.040 Well, you just have to look at the facts.
00:01:27.360 I mean, we are the worst-performing state on every measure that matters, like truly.
00:01:32.640 Under him.
00:01:33.480 Yeah.
00:01:33.860 I mean, you look at the – how else can you describe it?
00:01:37.340 I mean, poverty, unemployment, cost of living, and then, you know, more qualitative measures.
00:01:41.800 So U.S. News and World Report ranks California 50th out of 50 states for opportunity.
00:01:48.240 Think about that, opportunity.
00:01:49.460 I mean, that's supposed to be the definition.
00:01:51.660 Last place for opportunity.
00:01:52.760 Last place.
00:01:53.940 Wallet Hub, 50th out of 50 for affordability.
00:01:57.360 Chief Executive Magazine, they do an annual survey.
00:02:00.400 California, 50th out of 50.
00:02:01.720 I think it's now 10 or 11 years in a row.
00:02:04.160 It's just insane.
00:02:05.340 Roads, I mentioned, 50th.
00:02:06.660 It's not just that we're doing badly.
00:02:08.020 We're the worst performer of all 50 states
00:02:11.040 on almost everything that matters
00:02:12.820 at the same time as they've doubled the budget.
00:02:15.900 It's insane how badly that it's covered up
00:02:19.000 because, of course, we're still an amazing state.
00:02:22.700 I love California.
00:02:23.580 We've got the most incredible advantages.
00:02:26.120 Natural beauty, amazing people, diversity.
00:02:28.440 It's great.
00:02:29.600 It's a wonderful place to be.
00:02:31.720 But it's a very tough place to be if you're a regular working class Californian,
00:02:36.100 if you're running a small business.
00:02:37.640 That's why so much of what I'm talking about is very practical stuff to help.
00:02:41.580 The first hundred grand tax-free.
00:02:44.100 It just seems like a small thing.
00:02:46.400 But it's a big deal to small business owners.
00:02:48.320 Remember, I started a couple of restaurants in London.
00:02:51.560 Restaurant owners particularly hate some of this stuff.
00:02:54.120 $800 a year they charge you just for existing.
00:02:57.320 Every business in California has to pay a registration fee of $800 a year.
00:03:02.680 Now, that may not sound like a lot.
00:03:04.860 And it isn't a lot if you're Anthropic or Google or whatever.
00:03:08.240 But if you're a small business and you're not making any money,
00:03:11.460 you're just getting going, it's actually really tough.
00:03:14.780 It's simple things like that that we just need to do
00:03:17.740 to make life less of a struggle for everybody.
00:03:21.200 Now, what happened recently?
00:03:22.740 This is like a few days ago with Javier Becerra's strategic, Dana Williamson, who used to be the previous chief of staff, I believe, for Newsom, just got three felonies.
00:03:34.000 This is just a few days ago.
00:03:35.420 Yeah.
00:03:35.600 What happened?
00:03:35.880 This is a really big scandal.
00:03:39.340 It is a big scandal.
00:03:40.560 I mean, it's little.
00:03:41.660 Here's what happened.
00:03:44.160 Becerra was appointed.
00:03:45.180 He was the California attorney general.
00:03:47.540 He was appointed by Biden to be health secretary, HHS,
00:03:51.500 at the beginning of the Biden term.
00:03:54.320 Becerra wanted to take his chief of staff,
00:03:56.880 a guy called Sean McCluskey, with him to D.C.
00:04:00.500 He was going to be too...
00:04:01.800 The salary wasn't high enough,
00:04:04.920 and this guy wanted to come back and forth to his family.
00:04:08.680 And so they wanted more money for this guy
00:04:11.640 to be able to go with Becerra.
00:04:12.900 the the salary was the salary whatever the federal salary is so they cook up this scheme
00:04:20.820 to take 10 grand a month from becerra's california campaign account transfer it
00:04:29.520 to a consulting firm run by this person dana williamson and then that money that 10 grand 1.00
00:04:36.060 and goes straight out the door to the guy's wife,
00:04:39.240 to Sean McCluskey's wife.
00:04:41.880 So it's like a backhanded way of topping up his pay.
00:04:45.520 That's against California campaign finance law
00:04:49.060 because you can't use campaign money
00:04:53.540 for anything other than campaign expenses.
00:04:57.560 And it's against federal law
00:04:58.980 because you can't get income from another source.
00:05:02.100 Now, the argument from Becerra is
00:05:03.900 he didn't know about any of this. 0.60
00:05:06.060 Can we see what she looks like? Can you go a little bit lower? 0.98
00:05:08.700 Now, do you think he knew about this?
00:05:10.820 What are the chances he knew about this?
00:05:12.600 I can't believe that he didn't know.
00:05:13.960 I mean, look, his argument is I'm not in the indictment.
00:05:17.300 I'm not in the federal indictment.
00:05:18.620 And the federal indictment says he didn't know.
00:05:22.260 Katie Porter, who's been very aggressive on this, 0.65
00:05:24.140 and some of the other Democrat candidates, is saying it's ridiculous.
00:05:26.980 And just because you haven't been indicted yet doesn't mean you won't be.
00:05:30.320 and just on a human level feels to me impossible to believe that he didn't know the whole point of
00:05:38.760 the scheme was to enable him to take his chief of staff with him to washington that's the whole
00:05:45.260 reason for doing it so he knew well i'm i've who knows i mean he's saying he didn't is is that it
00:05:54.100 rob that clip right there between the two of them yes that's the one i wouldn't mind seeing it but
00:05:58.120 I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of ads that's going to come on first.
00:06:00.420 Within three, two, one, there's an ad.
00:06:04.320 Yeah.
00:06:04.880 So if something like this is tied to him, how big of a scandal would this be for him?
00:06:11.960 Well, this is what a lot of the Democrat rivals have been saying.
00:06:16.800 You're going to nominate this guy who then could be indicted in the middle of his campaign for governor.
00:06:25.260 Can you go to the part where Katie Porter's calling him out? 1.00
00:06:28.940 Fast forward a little bit to where Katie Porter...
00:06:30.800 My line is more of a political. 1.00
00:06:33.860 I said, look, you shouldn't be in this race.
00:06:36.000 You should be preparing your criminal defense. 1.00
00:06:37.940 Is this it? Go for it. Press play.
00:06:39.860 Respectfully, Mr. Becerra, your quote at the end drifted off a little bit from the words.
00:06:46.100 What the quote was was that you had not been mentioned in the charging documents.
00:06:51.160 that is in the indictment of Dana Williamson,
00:06:55.060 your long-term chief of staff, Sean McCluskey, or Greg Campbell.
00:06:58.740 But as you know, that does not preclude,
00:07:01.220 because you are also a trained attorney,
00:07:03.540 you know that does not preclude an indictment
00:07:06.240 from being issued against you.
00:07:07.980 We do not know what Dana Williamson said
00:07:11.940 about your involvement,
00:07:14.280 and the government will have the ability
00:07:17.500 to reveal that later.
00:07:19.240 Ryan, the same way I did it when I was attorney general, we established a bureau that dealt with Medi-Cal fraud, working with the federal government.
00:07:27.100 Unfortunately, Trump is a problem because Trump took a trillion dollars out of the health care system, out of the Medicare or the Medicaid and the Medi-Cal system.
00:07:37.560 Trump is now trying to deprive California of another billion dollars in health care for Medi-Cal.
00:07:42.840 He doesn't have the right to do that.
00:07:44.280 He's not answering the question. He just went to a different place.
00:07:45.720 Yeah, yeah. So that's their argument. And it's not just Katie. It's also Antonio Vieira Gosa, the former mayor of L.A., making that argument very strongly. Like, this guy could be indicted. It's a massive risk to have him as your candidate. That's their argument.
00:08:00.540 Yeah, it was overnight when he all of a sudden spiked up.
00:08:03.860 Yeah, when Swalwell dropped out, everyone was surprised.
00:08:06.840 No one expected it. 0.99
00:08:07.940 Yeah, so the worry today Democrats have in California is, holy shit. 0.99
00:08:12.100 Yes. 0.99
00:08:12.400 If something happens here, is it Katie?
00:08:14.600 Because they're worried about Katie.
00:08:15.760 She's a wild card.
00:08:16.500 Well, she seems to be fading.
00:08:17.400 Is it going to be Steyer?
00:08:18.420 It looks like Steyer is the – I mean, look at the data.
00:08:21.660 I mean, it's me and Becerra – or most of the polls, me and Becerra at the top.
00:08:27.920 then there's a gap, then it's Tom Steyer
00:08:30.300 then there's another gap, it's everyone else
00:08:31.720 there was one poll last week
00:08:34.340 which I take very seriously
00:08:36.660 it's the second one there, Emerson College
00:08:38.840 which had
00:08:40.580 basically
00:08:42.860 a three way tie at the top
00:08:44.780 myself, Becerra and Steyer
00:08:46.720 all roughly the same
00:08:47.780 and so yeah you see it there
00:08:50.260 2019-18
00:08:51.480 so
00:08:52.420 most of the polls are not that
00:08:55.880 Most of them show this gap between myself and Becerra and Steyer, but Steyer is definitely number two and Katie Porter is well below.
00:09:03.080 So I don't know. I mean, look, things have changed very quickly.
00:09:05.740 It feels like we're less than two weeks to the election. Voting's already started.
00:09:09.580 It feels very unlikely to me that Katie Porter is going to pop back up. 0.83
00:09:16.080 It would be catastrophic for Democrats if she does. It would be phenomenal for you if she pops up.
00:09:20.800 You would love a Katie Porter opposition. It would be great for TV because to me, she's gifted. 0.67
00:09:25.600 She's a natural villain to the core. 0.98
00:09:28.160 She's so phenomenal. 1.00
00:09:29.260 I mean, she will get a job the day she doesn't make it to the view, 0.95
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