Newsom fined by campaign finance watchdog just prior to DOJ probe announcement
A California commission that regulates campaign financing in the state fined Gov. Gavin Newsom $31,500 for failing to report millions in charitable donations made on his behalf on time.
It happened just a week before Newsom announced that the Trump administration’s Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the governor and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
The donations, totaling more than $5.6 million across 35 donors, are “behested payments.” That means that Newsom solicited funding for those specific groups from outside companies, including major corporations like BlackRock, Lockheed Martin and Apple.
All but two of the donations went to the California Fire Foundation, which supports firefighters and their communities, and were made during the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires. Newsom was “heavily involved in the response efforts,” said the Fair Political Practices Commission, in a proposed order levying the fine.
The proposed fine was released June 8, ahead of the commission meeting on Thursday. Newsom has already agreed to the penalty, although the agreement has not yet been finalized by the commission’s members.
That amount is just a portion of the $17,693,122 in behested payments Newsom reported in 2025, excluding two unreported donations from 2024. The majority of those payments were not included in the Fair Political Practices Commission’s recent investigation.
The California commission requires politicians to report donations made on their behalf within 30 days. But in 2025, Newsom was late 34 times. It regularly took the governor’s office more the six months to submit some reports, and one donation from 2024 went unreported for more than seven months.
The commission’s fine came just a few days before the Newsoms announced their finances were under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a video statement posted to social media, Newsom said the White House is “abusing the grand jury process” to target him and his wife after months of antagonizing President Donald Trump and ahead of his planned run for president in 2028.
The exact details of the probe are still murky. One federal source told The Sacramento Bee Monday that there were “several” ongoing investigations into the Newsoms for roughly a year and had originated out of whistleblower complaints submitted to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento.
One investigation is connected to the prosecution of Dana Williamson, Newsom’s former chief of staff who pleaded guilty to fraud and lying to the FBI last month. Another investigation is related to Siebel Newsom’s taxes, as well as her involvement in certain nonprofits.
Siebel Newsom is the unpaid co-founder of the California Partners Project, which advocates for “gender equity across the state.”
The governor has solicited more than $4.8 million worth of behested payments since 2020 for the nonprofit. More than a third of that — $1.8 million — came from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which operates the Graton Resort & Casino in Sonoma County and regularly lobbies lawmakers on legislation.
Those payments are not necessarily problematic, according to Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school who studies campaign finance.
“That’s why we have disclosure provisions, so that people can see that connection and evaluate for themselves if it’s a problem,” Levison told the Bee Monday.
“It’s really a policy decision that we’ve made in California. We know people are going to want to make donations to and around candidates,” she said. “And we want one of those avenues to be to bona fide charities and nonprofits.”
A 2021 Bee investigation found more than $800,000 in direct donations to The Representation Project, a nonprofit founded by Siebel Newsom to promote feminism, from companies including PG&E, AT&T and Kaiser Permanente. The govenor said the contributions did not pose a conflict of interest and they were not formally solicited by Newsom through the behested payment process. They raised eyebrows, however, because they were provided by companies with business in front of the governor.
Siebel Newsom also earns roughly $300,000 annually from The Representation Project, a nonprofit she founded to promote feminism. The nonprofit paid her more than $161,250 last year for her 40-hour-a-week work as founder and COO, according to tax filings.
The nonprofit separately paid Siebel Newsom’s for-profit film production company, Girls Club Entertainment, an identical amount for contracting work. In all, Siebel Newsom earned roughly $3 million in pre-tax salary and contractor payments since 2015.
The governor has never been fined for hiding behested payments made to nonprofits affiliated with Siebel Newsom, including the California Partners Project. But he has been fined at least once before by the Fair Political Practices Commission for failing to disclose $14 million of donations, made by 18 payers, between 2019 and 2024.
The governor’s FPPC fines and Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit ties are just a few controversies amongst a host of other issues the Trump administration may have seized on in its investigation, according to political analyst Dan Schnur, who chaired the Fair Political Practices Commission in 2010.
“Trump’s allies will be able to point to a lot of smoke. The first partner’s role in the governor’s office, the amount of money the foundation has raised, the charges faced by Newsom’s former chief of staff, all add up to a lot of smoke,” said Schnur, who is a professor of politics and communication at several California universities.
“The question is whether they have probable cause to believe that there’s fire underneath all that smoke,” Schnur said. “And Newsom and his supporters would argue very strongly that there’s not. And again, getting back to what I said earlier: We just don’t know.”
This story was originally published June 16, 2026 at 11:06 AM.
