OAKLAND — A federal judge signaled Thursday she is unlikely to grant a key defense request from former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and her co-defendants to challenge the FBI search warrants that led agents to raid their homes and businesses in June 2024.
“I would not stop preparing for trial if I were you,” U.S. District Court of Northern California Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told a defense attorney Thursday.
The hearing marked an early legal skirmish in a sprawling corruption case that has spread across the East Bay.
Prosecutors have accused Thao and her romantic partner Andre Jones of accepting political bribes from father-and-son businessmen David and Andy Duong, who hold Oakland’s recycling contract and had sought to win taxpayer dollars for a local housing venture.
Together, the four co-defendants have pushed for months to be granted what is known as a Franks hearing, in which a judge determines whether FBI Special Agent Duncan Haunold made false statements or reckless omissions in the affidavit used to obtain the search warrants.
Agents seized computers, cell phones and other documents during the raids, which preceded Thao’s removal as Oakland’s mayor in a recall election and led to her subsequent indictment.
Much of the evidence taken will likely be fair game in the eventual trial, which is expected to take place sometime this fall. The defendants face 20 years in federal prison on the most serious individual counts of mail and wire fraud.
California Waste Solutions co-owner Andy Duong exits the Federal Building after appearing at the Federal Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., for his indictment on bribery and conspiracy charges by federal prosecutors on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. Also, his father, David Duong, former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, and her boyfriend, Andre Jones, were indicted. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
While prosecutors say they have gathered a wide range of documents exposing the alleged bribery plot, they also relied extensively on an affidavit given by a key FBI confidential informant, identified in case documents simply as Co-Conspirator 1.
On Thursday, the judge appeared ready to unseal redacted court filings associated with the case, including possibly the identity of the alleged co-conspirator, who is widely believed to be Mario Juarez, a local political operative and a former business partner of the Duongs.
That co-conspirator’s credibility — the prime target of the defense in its pursuit of a Franks hearing — may become a central theme of an eventual trial.
Juarez, a longtime Oakland businessman, has faced repeated accusations over the years of fraud, blackmail and threats against former business partners.
Days ahead of the June 2024 raids, the co-conspirator gave inconsistent and partially inaccurate statements to law enforcement about a shooting at his home that he described as an assassination attempt by the Duongs. There is no public evidence the Duongs were involved.
“It is relevant that the informant would lie about such a serious matter,” said Shawn Halbert, an attorney for Jones, the ex-mayor’s romantic partner who was affiliated with a short-lived housing company launched by Juarez and the Duongs.
Abraham Fine, a prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s office, said the conspirator’s statements ultimately did not add up but noted that Haunold, the federal agent, could not be faulted for what was known at the time about the shooting.
Plus, Fine said, “the vast majority of the affidavit is related to the public corruption scheme, so this whole discussion about the shooting, I think, is a red herring.”
Mario Juarez is pictured in a video produced by the Vietnamese American Business Association, which highlights the work of Evolutionary Homes. Juarez is identified as a founder of the homebuilding company. (YouTube) (YouTube)
Jones’ attorney also noted that the June 2024 search warrant omitted an explicitly racist and vulgar comment that the co-conspirator allegedly made about Jones, who is Black, that had appeared in an earlier warrant targeting the informant himself.
Thao’s defense, meanwhile, contended that she should be treated as “singularly” different from the other defendants because the FBI did not appear to gather any recording, email or text message sent by her that ties her to the alleged bribery scheme.
“Ms. Thao, by virtue of how the government connected her to this, has essentially been lost in the wash,” the ex-mayor’s attorney Jeffrey Tsai said at the hearing.
Gonzalez Rogers did not budge, however, accusing Tsai of trying to deliver a “closing argument” in the case, instead of meeting a separate legal standard by proving that the FBI agent had acted in a “dishonest” or “reckless” manner.
Overall, the judge showed little patience for the defense’s arguments, at one point appearing to mock a claim by Andy Duong’s attorney Winston Chan that federal agents did not reasonably justify seizing the defendants’ electronic devices as evidence.
“Really, that’s your argument? That your clients weren’t using computers?” Gonzalez Rogers said, musing later, “It strains credulity that people don’t communicate with computers and cell phones… Perhaps Elon Musk. I’ve read that he doesn’t use a computer.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.