The fallout from Tuesday's court filing on behalf of Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow continues as reporters have swarmed City Hall, Mayor Lee has issued multiple denials and outright dismissals of the allegations, and most of us sit back snickering assuming that some or all of the claims made are probably true. But will anyone actually go down for this? Will this notably impact Lee's essentially unopposed election bid in November? The answers to those questions are maybe, and probably not.
We learned yesterday that former supervisor now Assemblymember David Chiu had cooperated in the FBI's years-long investigation into Chinatown crime and corruption, wearing a wire to an event where Chow apparently said something unpleasant and possibly threatening to him.
Today we have District Attorney George Gascon neither confirming nor denying that his office is looking into potential prosecutable offenses amongst the wiretap evidence in the federal probe, as the Chron reports. But whom will they be going after assuming the stuff about pay-to-play donations to Lee's campaign seems too much like hearsay?
Could it be former Human Rights Commission member Zula Jones who's the one quoted in a wiretap saying things about one such donation and saying "Ed knows"?
Could it be Sululagi Palega, who's currently a manager of Muni’s crime and graffiti abatement program, who offered to get weapons for an undercover agent posing a marijuana grower, and handed him a handgun over lunch in a See's Candy box saying "Enjoy the candy"??
The oddest thing is that the federal prosecutors in Chow's case are scrambling to try to get all that wiretap evidence sealed now, even though it's all out there, saying that Chow's attorneys violated a protective order governing this organized-crime case when they made their filing publicly. As CBS 5 reports, the feds asked a judge to now seal the filing and supporting documents, also citing a federal law that "requires a judge’s permission for release of information from wiretap applications." The judge asked for more explanation of how the filing violated either that law or the protective order.
Mustache met mustache at City Hall Wednesday when political reported Phil Matier got Mayor Lee on the record about all the allegations. And the party line, in case you haven't heard it yet, is, "I have to take it with a big grain of salt. This is this an attempt by the defense counsel to smear everybody else just so they can get off."
Right, but a wiretap transcript is a wiretap transcript. It's just there's no smoking gun or See's Candy box in the case of Lee, Supervisor London Breed, or any other higher ups. At least not yet.
