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In a scene right out of a movie, cars with stolen license plates parked outside a home in the Fruitvale neighborhood in Oakland, made famous by BLM rioters when a career criminal was shot during a fight in a train station, and the men inside opened fire on the homeowner.
The homeowner grabbed his gun and returned fire.
While such sights are not unknown as criminals have taken over the streets in major California cities, this was not a gang drive by, or if it was, the gang in question appeared to have ties to a large network of the area and the entire state’s Democratic Party political establishment including the city’s DA and even the state’s attorney general and possible next governor.
The man under fire, Mario Juarez, a city council candidate, activist and businessman, had become an informant in a case that would turn Oakland and then California upside down.
“Why was I targeted? Because I know too much,” Juarez said.
And in a sign that the attempted assassination had ties at higher levels than just street thugs, the assassins were immediately released and the office of DA Pamela Price did not file charges.
Juarez (pictured above) was acting as an informant against DA Price, accusing her of demanding $25,000 in exchange for dropping charges against him stemming from his work for Mayor Sheng Thao’s campaign . Price, a Soros DA, whose sympathy for criminals, especially gang members, had become so extreme that she was denounced by the local NAACP, and protested by the Asian community, was successfully recalled from office.
The Soros network has spent six figures electing Price only to lose her, and while her office put the assassins of an informant against her back on the street, the FBI was already on the case, collecting evidence from the scene of the crime, indicating that they were after bigger game.
In the summer of last year, the FBI raided the home of progressive Mayor Sheng Tao, in a sprawling corruption case that allegedly ties in everything from municipal waste, overpriced ‘tiny homes’ for the homeless and a karaoke bar that dispensed everything from cocaine to hookers.
Thao gave a press conference in which she blamed “radical right-wing forces” at “odds with our Oakland values” and claimed that she was victimized because she “was born poor in America”.
Oakland voters booted her and DA Price anyway.
Alongside the Thao raid, the FBI had also raided California Waste Solutions, a government contractor owned by the powerful and wealthy Duong family, which had allegedly provided six figures from its companies to Juarez for campaign fliers attacking Mayor Thao’s opponents.
The involvement of the Duong family turned what might have been a local crime case into one with much larger statewide and even nationwide implications as Gov. Newsom plans for a presidential campaign, his attorney general seeks to replace him as the next governor and Kamala remains a question mark in both the gubernatorial and presidential elections..
Earlier this year, the FBI raided the home of Councilman Bryan Azevedo in nearby San Leandro who had taken thousands from the Duongs in his mayoral campaign, but one of the biggest recipients of Duong cash is not to be found in either Oakland or San Leandro, but Sacramento.
When Gov. Newsom announced a special legislative session to collect millions of dollars to fight Trump, its covert purpose was to elevate Newsom’s presidential ambitions and put Attorney General Rob Bonta on track to replace him as governor. Not even the LA wildfires slowed down Newsom and Bonta’s obsession with boosting their political profiles by taking on Trump.
But Bonta has a Duong problem.
Attorney General Bonta, the state’s top prosecutor, has spent his time filing frivolous lawsuits against the Trump administration while doing next to nothing, and in some cases covering up, the corruption of his party and political allies.
Bonta had not only taken $172,000 from the Duong family, but asked it to sponsor his biggest “fundraising” effort, and the Duong clan bragged that he will be “one of the best ally to ever support and will deliver whatever we ask for when help needs in the future.”
A member of the Duong clan had described the future AG as “Uncle Assemblyman Rob Bonta.”
After the FBI raids, AG Bonta announced that he was donating $155,000 from the Duongs “out of an abundance of caution” to charities. The ‘charities’ in question however were politically influential left-wing groups, including Planned Parenthood, which had endorsed his campaign. Rather than getting rid of the dirty money, Bonta used it to buy yet more political influence.
Worse was yet to come.
In an unprecedented move, the Alameda County DA’s office asked that Bonta be kept out of the investigation because “in local Democratic political circles, the defendants and the Bontas’ extensive intertwined political and business dealings are widely known.” Bonta and Juarez, the former city council candidate turned informant, had enjoyed “close financial and political ties”, had “publicly endorsed each other and have used the same office for their business dealings”.
The epicenter of the whole thing was, as it so often is in California Democrat circles, progressive gimmicks like ‘green energy’ funded by taxpayer money and a company making homes for the homeless, as well as the Willie Brown political machine that had made both Newsom and Kamala Harris into power players on a national stage.
Viridis had launched “America’s most visible biodiesel plant” to provide ‘clean energy’, but before long Juarez, its co-founder, would find himself sued for fraud, investigated over accusations of millions in stolen money, beaten in the streets and shot at by assassins.
AG Rob Bonta, who had helped provide $700,000 in taxpayer money for the ‘green energy’ operation despite the fraud lawsuit against Juarez, would be sidelined in the investigation, and the Duong family, who had provided money to both Juarez and Bonta and which was supposed to receive space through Juarez, are under siege in a statewide scandal upending California.
As the FBI investigation of the tangled mess proceeds, the question remains who tried to kill Juarez outside his home. “Why was I targeted? Because I know too much,” he said.
What does he know? And who wanted to kill him over it?
Did the toxic mix of green energy, turning shipping containers into housing for the homeless, police defunding and corrupt political connections in the upper echelons of progressive politics turn into a murder plot? The answer to the question may determine California’s next governor.
