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.
Page F2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
Voters still don't know if Becerra knew about a corruption scandal; opponent wants second FBI grilling over $225,000.
As it ran on the front
Let's run the numbers as filed. The figure in question is $225,000 in campaign contributions connected to Xavier Becerra's political operation. A rival campaign, run by Steve Hilton, has asked the FBI to interview Becerra about that figure a second time. A separate item asks a more basic question: whether Becerra knew about the underlying corruption scandal at all. Those are two different questions sitting on the same desk, and neither one has been closed out with a number the public can check.
Here's what doesn't reconcile. When a campaign account shows $225,000, there's a donor list behind it, a filing date, and a bank record. Somebody signed something. The public record, so far, shows the amount and the request for a second interview. It doesn't show the donor list resolved, and it doesn't show the 'did he know' question answered either way. That's not an accusation. That's just what's missing from the ledger, hon.…
…(cont) It's worth noting where gaps like this tend to show up. Not in the smallest campaign accounts — those get flagged early, because there's nowhere to hide a discrepancy in a five-figure filing. The larger the account, the more places a figure like $225,000 can sit for a while before anyone reconciles it against anything. That's not a comment on Becerra specifically. That's a comment on how campaign finance filings generally behave once the number gets big enough to need explaining twice.
The second FBI request isn't unusual on its own — investigators reopen interviews when the first one leaves a gap. What's unusual is doing the math out loud, twice, in public, before the first interview's findings have ever been published anywhere a voter could read them. Ordinarily the sequence runs: interview, findings, then, if warranted, a second interview. Here the sequence is: interview, silence, public request for a second interview. The order is what doesn't add up.
Two hundred twenty-five thousand dollars is not a rounding error in any campaign filing this reporter has seen. It's a number that gets its own line. When a number gets its own line and still doesn't get an answer, that's not corruption, necessarily. It's just a gap, and gaps have addresses.
“Two hundred and twenty-five grand doesn't just show up in a campaign account and nobody notices — somebody wrote that check, somebody cashed it, and somebody's name belongs on the paperwork. Now the story isn't the money, it's whether he knew, which is the version of accountability where the guy at the top never has to actually know anything. That's the whole racket in one sentence.”
“He's already answered the FBI's questions once — this is a rival campaign trying to relitigate a settled matter for a headline. There's nothing new here — well, apart from the fact that they're asking for a second interview, which I suppose does suggest the first one didn't settle it. That's not a concession, that's just how investigations work sometimes.”
The receipts
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.