Before San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder stopped attending meetings and said from a hospital last week that she was considering resigning, her office had become the focus of a city investigation into the leak of a confidential memo, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Fielder stepped back from her duties March 17 and was seeking treatment in a hospital as of 10 days later. Since then, she and her aides have declined to share details about what they identified as a “mental health condition” and requested privacy, saying the supervisor needed time to recover before deciding whether to resign.
But on Friday, Fielder’s chief of staff directly denied that the office leaked the memo, which concerned a new strategy for deterring open-air drug use called the “RESET Center,” to the news outlet Mission Local. Sasha Gaona released a written statement after learning the Chronicle planned to report that the city attorney’s leak investigation had closed in on Fielder’s office…