Former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s romantic partner Andre Jones is accused of taking a $95,000 no-show job from Thao’s big-bucks donors. But newly released documents say he showed up plenty on high-price junkets to Vietnam and the SXSW festival.
The legal proceedings against indicted former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao are starting to inch along very slowly. And Thao is maintaining her innocence, but as she does, the Bay Area News Group reports that her federal prosecutors are releasing Oakland City Hall documents they’ve seized supporting their claim that she’s not innocent.
The batch of documents just released include various emails and memos from the 17 months she was mayor before being recalled last fall. And a central focus of these documents is Thao’s live-in romantic partner Andre Jones, whom the feds say took a $95,000-per-year no-show job from high-rolling Thao donors (he was offered $300,000, Thao asked the donors to up it to $3 million, but for reasons yet unknown he only ended up getting $95,000). Still, he got some of that money, and was apparently paying his and Thao’s rent on the home they shared while she was mayor…