Steve Hilton told the California Post that Xavier Becerra needs to be pressed again by the federal authorities about his knowledge of payments to his former chief of staff.
Page F2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
FBI asked twice to explain the same $225,000 campaign-cash gap, still no answer.
As it ran on the front
The filing says $225,000. The filing has said $225,000 since Steve Hilton first asked the FBI to look at it, and it says $225,000 again now that he's asked a second time. Two requests, one number, zero movement in between. That's the whole reconciliation, hon — the ledger hasn't changed, only the number of times somebody's had to ask about it out loud.
Xavier Becerra is running for governor of California. Somewhere in his campaign's filings sits $225,000 in campaign cash that a retired policy adviser turned television host wants the Bureau to explain a second time, on the record, because the first time apparently didn't produce an explanation anybody could reconcile against the table. That's not an accusation. That's a gap. The gap has a dollar figure, and dollar figures are the one part of this business that don't get to have an opinion.…
…(cont) Here's what we can check: the request exists, it's dated, it names the amount, and it's been made more than once about the same amount. Here's what we can't check, because nobody's shown the receipt yet: where the $225,000 came from, where it landed, and why a second FBI request was necessary if the first one closed the book.
Voters, per the record, deserve to know whether Becerra knew about the underlying corruption scandal his campaign cash is now tied to. That's a fair question to put on a ledger. It's also, notably, the kind of question that tends to stay open the longer nobody answers it — not because the numbers are complicated, they're not, it's one number, $225,000 — but because an open question costs the person being asked nothing and costs the person asking everything in follow-up columns.
Somewhere there's a bank statement that reconciles this in about four minutes. Nobody's published it yet. Until then the entry stays open, the way entries do when the number's round enough to remember and small enough that nobody upstairs treats it as a rounding error — it's a line item, and line items get audited. Eventually.
“A quarter-million bucks, same number, two FBI requests, still no receipt — that's not a scandal fading, that's a scandal on ice. Somebody's betting the story gets old before the answer does.”
The receipts
Voters need to know the truth before he coasts to victory. The Department of Justice should reinterview Becerra. We need to find out whether he is ignorant or incompetent.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.