The SF Public Press put in a records request for call logs of Mayor Lurie’s famed call with President Trump where Trump called off the cavalry of an impending federal troop invasion. Lurie’s office refuses to disclose details.
A week ago today, San Francisco and the greater Bay Area were bracing for an area-wide invasion of National Guard and/or ICE troops, and an East Bay deployment was already off to a contentious start. So it seemed a pretty major coup when SF Mayor Daniel Lurie announced the next day that he had a phone call with President Trump in which Trump called off the deployment, and that standing-down extended to the entire Bay Area.
You can see Lurie (very mildly) spiking the football in the video above. “Late last night, I received a phone call from the President of the United States,” Lurie said in the address. “The President told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal surge in San Francisco.”
For his part, Trump said on Truth Social that “I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around.”
Those two versions of the conversation do not square up entirely. So the SF Public Press put in a Sunshine Ordinance request for records of that phone call, a fairly standard journalistic practice that would have produced information like who else might have been on the call. But as the Public Press reports, Lurie’s office is refusing to release any informational details about the call.
Well, they did release some information, though it did not really contain anything that was not already known. As the Public Press reports, “the mayor’s office provided a one-page summary of Lurie’s activities for Wednesday, which included the entry: ‘7:30 pm – 7:55 pm Phone Call with Donald Trump, President of the United States re: calling off potential federal deployment in San Francisco. Attendee: Donald Trump, President of the United States.’”
Lurie’s office said they were withholding any further information “on the basis of attorney-client privilege.” The Public Press adds that “The [mayor’s] office said the request was now considered closed.”
Attorney-client privilege is an unusual explanation, considering that neither Trump nor Daniel Lurie is an attorney.
Trump’s Truth Social post also name-checked “Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others” in talking him out of deploying troops here. (Jensen Huang is the Nvidia CEO who owns a mansion on SF’s “Billionaire Row”). Further reporting from the New York Times says that Lurie “power mapped” other connections he has in Trump’s orbit, and had OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and big-time tech investor Ron Conway lobby Trump, or people close enough to him.
There has been some degree of fair criticism that this all took place behind closed doors and orchestrated among billionaire oligarchs. But folks, we elected a mayor whose inheritance and eventualy billionaire status (his mother is worth an estimated $1 billion, he is not yet) is his primary political resume, so don’t be surprised that an oligarchy is running the city.
And Lurie’s office is probably playing it close to the vest on this one because he doesn’t want to piss off Trump. For the last week, we have enjoyed a tenuous peace when we could have had masked ICE troops running amok across the Bay Area. Lurie’s office probably does not want to threaten that peace that Lurie apparently had a significant hand in negotiating.
Related: Trump Tells Mayor Daniel Lurie That Federal Deployment In SF Is Called Off [SFist]
Image: SFGovTV