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tv   CBS News Bay Area with Elizabeth Cook  CBS  January 17, 2025 4:30pm-5:01pm PST

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manipulate and corruptly influence the levers of local government. >> months after the fbi raided her home sheng thao appeared in a courtroom defiant even after a slate of charges. >> there isn't evidence to support these charges and we will look forward to doing that in the courtroom. >> this is cbs news bay area with elizabeth cook. >> thanks for joining us. i'm devin fehely. the feds are calling it a case of political corruption and the recalled oakland mayor sheng thao is at the center of it all. today the feds released details of the indictment against thao saying she promised to flex her political muscle to put money in the pockets of a wealthy family if they helped her win the election. our cbs news bay area crews were the on only outside of the federal
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courthouse this morning. the indictment alleges that the owners, david duong and his son andy duong, funded a $75,000 negative campaign targeting thao's opponents during her run for mayor. the feds say the father/son duo put andre jones on the payroll for a job where you never show up or do any work to mask the bribery payment. this afternoon all four of them faced charges, including bribery, conspiracy, and mail fraud. we saw jones as he was leaving the federal building this morning. here's a look at andy duong at the federal courthouse today. he's also accused of making false statements to government agents. >> examples of promises allegedly made by thao include her agreement to purchase housing units from a company owned by the duong family, her
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agreement to insure the extension of a contract for recycling services that the city of oakland had with one of david and andy duong's companies, and her agreement to use influence to help appoint a high level city official to benefit the duongs' business interests. >> just before noon thao and her attorney walked out of the oakland courthouse and addressed reporters. >> the united states department of justice requires the government to look carefully at its prosecutions to insure that the actions that they take are not actions that are taken to affect the outcomes of elections and the timing of the investigative steps by the government in this case, including the unsealing of the indictment today, has called all of that into question. the mayor looks forward to defending herself against these charges, showing that there is, in fact, no evidence to support
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these charges and we will look forward to doing that in the courtroom. >> all of this stems from a multiyear investigation by the fbi last june. fbi agents raided the oakland home of then mayor thao and andre jones, her boyfriend. they could be seen carrying out boxes of evidence to their cars. this came two days after alameda county registrar of voters announced there were enough signatures on a petition to recall thao from office and to move forward with that process. the fbi also raided properties connected to the duong family and their recycling company, california waste solutions. the duongs hold a lucrative recycling contract with the city of oakland and have a pretty interesting backstory. the family escaped from vietnam, eventually opened the first recycling warehouse in west oakland. california waste solutions is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and employs hundreds of people. over the years andy duong has become a regular face in local and state and national politics. he helped organize a trip to vietnam in 2023 that
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included local delegates, including then mayor sheng thao. he is now charged with making false statements to government agents. his lawyers released a statement saying in part, "our client and friend andy duong is innocent of these charges. we have kept quiet despite the media frenzy in the past months in the hopes that the government would correctly come to see through objective investigation that the allegations are baseless and fanned by nothing more than gossip and supposition." david duong's attorneys also maintain their client's innocence saying, "he looks forward to prevailing in this case and continuing his decades of service, philanthropy, and devotion to our community and the bay area." here's a look at the timeline. thao was elected mayor of oakland in november 2022, facing criticism for her firing of police chief leronne armstrong and the city struggles with public safety, homelessness, and the budget.
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in june last year the fbi raided her home that she shares with boyfriend andre jones. this past november thao was recalled by oakland voters and today the fbi handed down its indictment on federal corruption charges. joining me now is cbs news legal contributor jessica levinson. i am interested at the timing of this. do you think that she would have still been indicted on this same timeline had that recall ultimately failed? >> so i have a sense that the indictment was really based on a separate timing in the sense of the indictment was based on the investigation, on when they gathered evidence, on when they thought they had enough evidence to go to a grand jury and say here are the charges we want to indict on and it should be -- i know this sounds strange -- but it should be a different calculation in the sense that whether or not to bring charges and when to bring charges should be unrelated to the election cycle. i know
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that's strange to say. >> as you read some of the allegations that the federal agents and the u.s. attorney's office is making, it's saying a lot of the direct payments went to sheng thao's live-in boyfriend, but they made pains to say well, she used to pay half the rent and then he paid all the rent. are they trying to basically sort of form a nexus to bolster their argument that she benefited from these payments in addition to him? >> really smart question and exactly right because i think we've already heard out of court a little bit which is her defense of not me, not it. i didn't know. don't try and connect me to any alleged wrongdoing. what you see in the indictment is the prosecutors here trying to do the opposite. you knew exactly what you were doing. this was a concerted scheme. there was fraud. there was mail fraud. there was
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honest services fraud and you benefited and that's why i think you're exactly right to point out that fact she used to pay -- alleged fact she used to pay half of the rent, then started paying none of it. the idea is you don't need to get a payment directly into your bank account to directly benefit from an alleged bribe. >> if i understand sort of what the alleged conspiracy and the end game allegedly was for the duongs, they were looking at recycling contracts, housing contracts with the city. to my understanding that did not come to fruition. did it need to? did they actually need to get the things that perhaps they were angling for for the feds to prove their case? >> another great question and the answer is no. you don't need to in the sense that what you need to show is an abuse of office. so it can be attempting to make those things happen. what you need to show is you used the position in order to
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try and make good on the alleged bribe, but there are all sorts of reasons we know why government officials can't necessarily make things happen. for instance, it's still bribery if you pay your member of congress to try and take a senior action. ultimately they tried. they weren't successful. if they made the attempt, if they took the money and then made the official act, that's enough. >> what i can imagine her defense is going to be and you kind of. signaled this before is okay, these things may have happened in my orbit, but i wasn't aware. how closely do the feds have to tie her to this? >> it depends on the charges. so for those charges where there's a direct charge of bribery or fraud, for instance, you need to tie the person really closely. when you're talking about conspiracy, then you need to prove that there
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was an agreement to commit illegal activity and there was an overt act taken in order to effectuate that agreement, but in terms of how closely they need to tie her to these actions, i mean the answer is pretty closely here. they'll need to come forward with the evidence in the indictment in order to get a conviction in this case. now we should also note that it's also the case that sometimes you see certain charges are added or subtracted as a case moves forward. so i'm not saying this is going to happen, but you can see a situation where one co-defendant is later charged with conspiracy. >> i have one last question. what do we think is a reasonable timeline for this to be adjudicated in the courts? >> oh, my gosh, not a simple answer for a lawyer. lawyers can complicate everything. that's our job. so a
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reasonable timeline, i will say what you know, what i know is the time from complaint to a potential trial can be years and what we're going to see is everything from they're going to try and have the case tossed out, which i do not think will happen to, they will try and have evidence tossed out. all of this will take months, not weeks, and let's remember most cases don't go to trial. >> jessica, thank you so much for your insight and analysis. after today's announcement several local officials and organizers spoke out condemning the former mayor after losing to sheng thao in 2022. candidate for mayor and city councilman loren taylor talked about the alleged conspiracy that may have cost him an election. >> it's about oakland voters, their choice, their ability to have real representation was stolen and we have to restore the system. we have to restore faith and trust in the system and we have to start working
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for oaklanders. >> organizers with sheng thao's recall effort also spoke out but took a victory lap by saying thank you to their supporters. >> because now we know that we have saved oakland a great deal of time, energy, and heartache. imagine this happened today and she was still our mayor. >> this all comes as oakland prepares to elect a brand-new mayor. there are currently 16 candidates, including loren taylor and former east bay congresswoman barbara lee. we'll continue to follow this case and the latest developments on air, online, and streaming on the free cbs news app. still ahead, emergency evacuations are underway at fires burn at the world's largest lithium battery plant in monterey county, why fire crews say it's still too dangerous to try and put that fire out. coming up in the forecast, noticeable change today. did you see the marine layer came in for most of the morning? it was almost like may. this was a
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live depiction. it's still hanging out over the city, onshore flow. it was like 9 degrees cooler today for some of us. how much longer are we doing this? we'll look at that coming up in the first alert forecast next.
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welcome back. this potentially hazardous smoke can be seen for miles in monterey county. it's coming from a fire at one of the world's largest lithium battery plants. evacuations in moss landing are still underway this hour. about 1,500 people are affected. from our chopper today you can see the fire is still burning around 24 hours after it first broke out. firefighters say they plan to let the fire burn itself out.
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it's not really clear how long that's going to take. the facility is operated about i vistra energy. there have been no reports of injuries. that is the good news, or any deaths related to the fire or smoke. a county supervisor says he hopes the company will use this as an opportunity to improve safety across the industry. >> there must be accountability for this and there will be accountability. this is really a lot more than just a fire. it's really a wake-up call for this industry and if we're going to be moving ahead with sustainable energy, we need to have a safe battery system in place. >> a cause for that fire has not been determined yet. the last time a fire happened at the moss landing plant was about three years ago in 2022. let's go ahead and get a check of our first alert forecast with meteorologist darren peck. it was chilly today as i came in. that's what i noticed. >> everybody, too. marine layer came back in. it was kind of like it was a may gray day. we're going to use the virtual set to track this because it's
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coming back tonight. first, want to talk about that fire that devin was just referencing. if you look at the time lapse today, see the plume of smoke coming off that fire? we'll play this twice. let's let that play through to the end. that's the marine layer that came in. you're looking at the last hour. there's still almost as much smoke coming off that fire as there was yesterday at this time, but we lose it within the last 30 minutes because the marine layer comes in and obscures our view. that's not necessarily ideal because one way to at least monitor the situation there from a distance for anybody to know if there was still smoke put into the sky, you could see it and now the manner layer will cloud that view. keep doing what your doing. keep those windows closed. stay away from the area. you don't want to be breathing some of that stuff in.
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continue to be calf careful if you're down there. if we look at the time lapse today from the salesforce tower and match that up with the virtual monitor, we got a little taste of may gray today. the marine layer came in overnight with a vengeance of everybody woke up to gray skies. it took a while for this to melt back. if you look down at the map, let's get a high view where we are here, we still have the marine layer hanging out. this is the most recent updating high resolution depiction of where the marine layer is. as we play the winds on here, this is a good old-fashioned onshore influence. onshore flow cooled us down by about 10 degrees. pick out four or five representative spots on here. santa rosa, you were 9 degrees cooler today than you were yesterday. so the numbers on here are showing you the drop in daytime highs from yesterday to today. devin pointed this
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out right off the top. if you look at the daytime highs, we struggled to make it that much farther out of the mid-and upper 50s for daytime highs for just about everybody. the one expectation was san jose which only dropped 2 degrees. you can see you didn't really have as much of the marine layer down here. you had plenty of sunshine. that managed to buffett you from getting a big drop in temperatures. let's change the story now in terms of what's coming next. we'll say good-bye to the temperatures. we'll turn that wind off and now we'll watch the clouds come back in and this is where we end up again tomorrow morning. this is going to be saturday. this will be sunday and it will probably be like this into monday, but i think by monday with offshore winds coming back this stuff's going to get eroded. so for the next two days over the weekend, saturday and sunday morning, this is what it will look like. we'll wake up to the marine layer once again, but how does this change by the time we get to monday? we'll go back to that wind again and instead of
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looking at the onshore breeze from today, now we'll look at monday morning. look what the wind's doing. this is all offshore again. monday morning we'll wake up and there are going to be 50-mile-an-hour winds going over the peaks of the mountains. you'll have a 50-mile-an-hour gust on mount st. helena, a 25-mile-an-hour gust going across mount diablo and the offshore wind will be back for us. doesn't have a significant effect here. we aren't too concerned about fire weather here at home obviously, but the offshore winds here will turn into another santa ana wind event in southern california and that obviously will be something to watch very closely. those are the headlines. in the seven-day forecast i wish i could talk about rain, but i can't. we've got offshore winds on monday and a little warm-up through the remainder of the week with no rain. devin, back to you. >> thank you very much, darren. let's check in on the fires down in southern california. some residents have been allowed to return to their
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homes the first time since those wildfires broke out last week. fire crews continue to make slow progress on contain ment. they have been helped by calmer winds. the death toll stands at 27 and all the water used to fight the fires is raising concerns about potential mudslides on those steep hillsides and that is not to mention the burn scars that could be very dangerous after heavy rains long after these fires are out. the palisades fire destroyed around 10,000 homes and other buildings. here's a 3d map showing the scope of the destruction. every red dot is a home or building that's been destroyed. firefighters have not been able to get to the gray areas yet. so those numbers are expected to increase. here's a look at the structural damage caused by the eaton fire. you can see those red areas. the fire destroyed around 7,000 homes and buildings in that area. the man convicted of
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kidnapping denise huskins in vallejo pled guilty to two more home invasions and sexual assaults in mountain view and palo alto in 2009. matthew muller is also the subject of the netflix series "american nightmare," that details the vallejo case and how police initially thought it was a hoax. he's serving a 40 year sentences and is scheduled for sentencing next month for these other cases. about 90 minutes ago israel's cabinet voted to approve the ceasefire and hostage release deal with hamas. this comes hours after the country's security cabinet gave it the green light. the deal is scheduled to take effect this weekend. in the meantime attacks from the israeli military continue. about 100 people have died since the word of the ceasefire deal went public earlier this week. the first phase of that deal is expected to begin sunday with the exchange of several hostages currently held in gaza for a number of palestinian prisoners in israeli jails. the agreement is
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still a bit fragile but would be a step towards ending the 15 months of war. >> translator: we ask god for the truth to be implemented because the people are really tired of a life of death, a life of killing, and a life of destruction. life has become an unbearable hell. the children and social situation and economic situations on multiple dimensions, we are honestly suffering physically, completely suffering. >> the hamas attack on israel in october 2023 killed about 1,200 people. more than 46,000 palestinians in gaza have been killed in israeli strikes in the ensuing war. monday's inauguration of president-elect donald trump is moving indoors because of the bitterly cold weather heading for washington. the ceremony will instead take place in the capitol rotunda. the presidential parade has also been moved inside to capital one arena. you can watch trump's inauguration right here on cbs news bay area. live coverage is going to start at
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6:00 a.m. on monday. we will be right back. dave's been very excited about saving big with the comcast business 5-year price lock guarantee. five years? -five years. and he's not alone. -high five. it's five years of reliable gig speed internet. five years of advanced securit. five years of a great rate that won't change. it's back. but only for a limited time. high five. five years? -nope.
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comcast business 5-year price lock guarantee. powering five years of savings. powering possibilities. comcast business. i don't ever see anyone coming out to maintenance anything, so it's very scary for me because i have everything i love in this home. so, we've now implemented drone technology. how is that safe for me? it enhances the inspection, so it allows us to see things faster. your safety is the most important, and if you're feeling unsafe,
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that's not okay. it doesn't feel like that in our hearts. i mean, it's worrisome. [dog barks] [dog barks] for the first time since june of last year, stargazers will be able to spot multiple planets in the night sky without a telescope. six of our solar system's planet will line up in a phenomenon known
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as a planetary parade. the last time this happened was june and only two planets could be seen with the naked eye, but this time you can spot four of them just by looking up. >> venus and saturn are in the western part of the sky and you should be able to spot jupiter and mars further over to the east. veep venus and jupiter typically are the brightest one. >> for the first few weeks of february it's best spotted on a clear and cloudless night. coming up at 5:00, the presidential inauguration is going to be held indoors for the first time since ronald reagan. we'll hear from bay area republicans who are heading to the nation's capitol. a lack of snowfall doesn't keep people off the slopes in tahoe, but resorts have some advice before you go. plus a.i. is coming to a grocery store near you. we'll show you how this new technology will help you check out faster. the evening edition is next.
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(light gentle music) - unraveling life's mysteries. at stanford medicine, it's part of our dna. our world class school of medicine and adult and children's health systems work together expanding what we know and sharing what we discover to accelerate breakthroughs and inspire the next generation of code breakers. stanford medicine, advancing knowledge, improving lives. (light gentle music)
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stanford medicine, advancing knowledge, improving lives. right now on cbs news bay area, oakland's former mayor one of four people facing charges in an alleged bribery scheme. >> we hope bringing these charges serves to strengthen bay area residents' confidences in the processes by which our elected city government leaders are held accountable. >> the indictment itself is chock full of allegations, but
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it is not chock full of evidence. the kidnapper at the center of a high profile case in vallejo in a south bay courtroom today, the plea from matthew muller on the latest sexual assault charges. federal agencies now responding to a fire at a monterey county battery plant that's been burning more than 24 hours. we're live at the scene with the impact on the surrounding community. >> it seems like it's more dangerous this time around because the air is more toxic. disturbing new details on the evacuation process in the minutes after the palisades fire erupted. from cbs news bay area, this is the evening edition. we begin with a federal indictment of former oakland mayor sheng thao, her romantic partner, and two oakland business owners. >> good evening. i'm ryan yamamoto. we there were this morning when thao surrendered to authorities at the federal courthouse in oakland with her attorney at her side. this is

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