recall petition to put it on the ballot. And tonight, supporters of the recall are calling for the mayor's resignation. So let's go ahead and bring in NBC Bay Area's Pete Serratos, who's at the mayor's house, and investigative reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken Pete, I want to go ahead and start with you this evening. What is happening where you are right now, and what have you learned about the investigation in. Yeah, well, we know that people are inside of the mayor's home here in Oakland in the Oakland foothills. But as far as we know, the mayor is not one of them. But as you laid out there, Audrey, this raid by the FBI taking place this morning and sources, of course, telling us that this was one of four search warrants at different locations around Oakland this morning. And this operation included a number of agencies. You're talking about the FBI, the IRS and the U.S. Postal inspector. And in some of that video that our morning crews got, you can see investigators taking out boxes and plastic bins as a part of this investigation, but still no details from the FBI. As far as why these raids took place. But you did mention that recall, we actually had recall organizers here in the past hour. Now they're calling for Mayor Tao to resign in light of today's news. And remember, it was on Tuesday that they were able to get 40,000 signatures to get that recall vote on the November ballot, and we've been keeping a close eye on that for sure. Pete Jackson, I want to turn to you now, we mentioned four home search. What do we know about the people living at the other homes that the FBI searched today? Well, two of the homes are tied to the that, ferm waste solutions. They, are the father and the son and both the father and the son. The Duong family have separate houses and they're the subject of a long standing investigation by the Ethics Commission in Oakland. And the focus is on them, allegedly, five people who would contribute to campaigns and candidates in Oakland and elsewhere who wouldn't perhaps otherwise do so. They're known as straw men and women. Actually, there's, a number of them, and they're kind of a rogues gallery. We've got some major figures in town, as well as people who act like maintenance and do other apparently somewhat menial chores. And the question is, how much time and who was involved and how they got the money. That's what Ethics Commission people are asking in their investigation, where did some of these people get the money to make thousands of dollars of contribution on a single day? Jackson, there's a lot going on here. Obviously, you've been looking at the court documents. I want to if you could actually just give us more more about the ethics violations. What are those all about? Really? What did you learn? Well we know that about 2018, 2017, there were a number of candidates running for the city council in Oakland. And in other offices. And the allegations are that the son of the owner of the family, Andy, allegedly was soliciting people to act as donors, and he would allegedly reimburse them. And what happened? According to people involved, complained to the Ethics Commission and they started an investigation back in 2019. 2020 time frame. However, a number of the players in this have flatly refused and have filed legal challenges to the authority to seize documents and even give, statements to the Ethics Commission. So basically, the investigation had slowed to a crawl. And some recent developments, a number of the actions seeking cooperation have been withdrawn by the city. One wonders whether the Ethics Commission has gotten some cooperation in there. There were a number of figures who had been fighting this for years, who have now since the cases have been dropped against them. So we don't know what's going on now. We just know that the case is still ongoing, that the Ethics Commission investigation has not been resolved, investigations still happening right now. Jackson. Thank you. Pete, I want to turn back to you now because, you know, all of this is happening in as we just learned that, you know, a lot of people want to recall Mayor Sheng Thao, do we have any response from the mayor tonight? Yeah, I did reach out to the mayor's office tonight. They are not commenting on this. In fact, they're forwarding all inquiries to the FBI at this time. All right, Pete and Jackson, thank you so
