What Is Gavin Newsom Hiding?

The governor presides over a statewide culture of secrecy.

For much of his political career, California Governor Gavin Newsom has presented himself as a champion of open government. As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom declared the city’s commitment to transparency and signed major open-data legislation into law. As lieutenant governor, Newsom condemned the state government for enabling secrecy. “We are one of the least transparent states in this country,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do as it relates to transparency.”

But when he ascended to the governorship, Newsom took a different tack. Despite his rhetoric, Newsom has not sought to dismantle California’s secrecy regime. Instead, he has reinforced it, and seemingly the entire state has followed suit.

This City Journal investigation—based on access-to-information requests and a review of public-records legislation and litigation—reveals that the Newsom administration and other government agencies in California have systematically attempted to conceal records and deny the public access to information.

For months, we have requested documents on crime, the prison system, private communications, and more from a variety of public agencies in California. In response, those agencies—some controlled by the governor, others by localities—have often denied, delayed, or redacted information.

In public, Newsom proclaims that transparency is a “legal and moral requirement,” but when we have asked for records, his administration has repeatedly closed the vaults, mobilizing an army of public employees to delay or deny. Which, in turn, raises an important question: What is Gavin Newsom hiding?

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As part of our reporting about California corruption, we have filed dozens of public records requests with various government agencies. Many of those requests have been denied, or, in one case, the records released to us were so heavily redacted as to be all but worthless.

Local agencies have repeatedly stonewalled us. In June, our team reported on the Honduran migrants who have taken over the San Francisco drug trade. As part of our investigation, we requested records from the San Francisco Police Department that would allow us to count the number of Honduran nationals arrested for drug dealing in the city. The SFPD sent us a trove of documents, but many had been almost entirely blacked out.

Last month, our team published a report on violent crime in the L.A. Metro system. As part of that investigation, we filed a public records request seeking all recordings of the murder of Mirna Soza Arauz, who was stabbed to death on the train by a previously convicted violent offender in 2024. After a delay, Metro told us that it wouldn’t release the footage, citing privacy concerns. We then contacted Soza’s family, who provided a consent letter arguing that the footage should be released. Eventually, Metro caved, and sent us a single, low-resolution video taken from a far corner of the train car. But Soza’s family, which sued Metro last year, told us that multiple, higher-resolution videos of the incident were shown in court—meaning Metro may have withheld responsive documents from us.

When we requested documents from bodies that Newsom controls, including his office, we encountered similar tactics.

In May, our team published a story on the Newsom administration’s efforts to provide state prisoners with new digital tablets. Our investigation, based on interviews with death-row inmates and a review of criminal cases, concluded that state prisoners had used facility-issued tablets to watch pornography, have explicit sexual conversations, and—in at least one case—allegedly exploit a minor on the outside.

We also filed a public records request with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation seeking reports related to real and suspected violations on condemned inmates’ tablets, including the use of pornography, sexual communications, communications with minors, and harassment, among other infractions. CDCR confirmed that it found records that were responsive to our request, but after multiple delays, the department cited statutory and regulatory exemptions to block their release.

Earlier this year, as part of a separate investigation, our team filed three requests seeking records of communications related to Governor Newsom and his former deputy chief of staff, Lindsey Cobia. In 2023, Capitol Weekly reported that Cobia had been “described as Gov. Newsom’s ‘Swiss army knife,’ involved in basically all manner of political decisions the governor makes,” and ranked her among California’s most influential political figures. She left the administration that year and now serves as treasurer of Newsom’s Campaign for Democracy PAC.

In response to our requests, Newsom’s office confirmed that it had found communications involving outside parties, Newsom, and Cobia, but refused to release them. “While we have identified responsive records,” Newsom’s office wrote, “those records are exempt as records of correspondence of or to the Governor or his staff . . . or records that reveal the deliberative process of the Governor or his staff.”

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How is this possible? The California Public Records Act (CPRA), enacted in 1968 by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, declares access to information about “the conduct of the people’s business a fundamental and necessary right.” But California’s system gives the governor a remarkable escape hatch.

The CPRA states that, with limited exceptions, the law “does not require the disclosure of correspondence of and to the Governor or employees of the Governor’s office.” It also provides that, when a governor leaves office, he may impose restrictions on access to those records that can last as long as 50 years, or to the death of the governor—whichever is later.

In addition, Newsom’s office has an aggressive email-deletion policy, which further limits the scope of records that ever see the light of day. “Under our approved records retention schedule,” Newsom’s legal affairs secretary wrote to us, “emails are automatically deleted after 90 days unless they are manually preserved by the individual account holder or subject to a litigation hold.”

Compare California’s approach with that of some other states. Texas requires the governor to retain certain high-level communications for four years. Connecticut requires the “permanent” retention of constituent correspondence with the governor’s office.

And at the federal level, presidential records become subject to FOIA beginning five years after a president leaves office, and a former president may invoke specified restrictions for at most 12 years.

Five years ago, Newsom had the chance to reverse the controversial exemption that shields his office’s records from public scrutiny. Instead, he signed A.B. 473, the CPRA Recodification Act, which substantially preserved the law’s terms. California lawmakers and Newsom could have done the right thing and scrapped the secrecy exemptions; they instead chose to preserve them.

The governor’s secrecy has prompted California courts to push back. In one case, KXTV reporter Brandon Rittiman sued after Newsom’s office withheld calendar entries showing then–cabinet secretary Analea Patterson’s meetings with PG&E representatives. In March 2024, a Sacramento Superior Court judge ordered the records disclosed, rejecting the administration’s “generalized” claims that disclosure would impair deliberations. In a separate case decided the following month, a California appellate court rejected the administration’s attempt to withhold selected calendar entries for former senior energy adviser Alice Reynolds, ruling that public interest in disclosure outweighed the governor’s interest in secrecy.

These are just two examples that showcase the conflict between Newsom’s rhetoric and record on transparency. Time and time again, Newsom has proclaimed one message to the public while enforcing another in private with the journalists looking to scrutinize his actions.

In September 2025, CalMatters reported that Newsom’s office had failed to release the governor’s official calendars for that year in response to its public records requests. David Loy, a transparency advocate, told the outlet that releasing such records should be a simple task that can be processed quickly. In addition, CalMatters reported that Newsom’s office had previously released what appeared to be copies of his calendars, as opposed to the original electronic documents that Loy noted are mandated by law. This matters because the original documents would potentially include metadata, such as indications of altered or deleted entries, while the copies would not.

In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bipartisan bill that had been unanimously passed (with two non-votes), which would have created a California Public Records Act ombudsperson. This new office would have been responsible for adjudicating disputes between those requesting records and the agencies responding to the requests, in an effort to ensure the state was complying with transparency laws. As a result of Newsom’s veto, Californians have no administrative process for appealing the denial of a public records request. This gives state agencies broad discretion over which records are released and leaves requesters with little recourse aside from hiring a lawyer and filing a lawsuit—an escalation both time-consuming and costly.

We reached out to the San Francisco Police Department, L.A. Metro, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and members of the governor’s staff for comment on this story. SFPD told us that it “intends to be as transparent as the law allows” and is “mandated to disclose releasable records.” CDCR, Metro, and the governor’s staff did not respond by deadline.

A transparency regime that routinely forces members of the public into the legal system undermines the very purpose of the CPRA. If the government remains the principal arbiter of what records the public may inspect, then the public’s right to scrutinize its government becomes largely illusory.

That is not how government is supposed to work. The entire purpose of transparency laws is that the public does not need to take a politician’s rhetoric at face value, and that everyone—journalists, citizens, organizations—has a right to inspect most documents related to the operations of their government. Until the governor chooses to do the right thing, live up to his commitments to transparency, and release records to the public, it is entirely legitimate to ask: What is Gavin Newsom hiding?

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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. Ryan Thorpe is a senior investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.