Former Sheng Thao chief of staff Leigh Hanson was kept on after the recall, but was fired Sunday over a 2024 meeting note that referred to Black people as “tokens,” though she says it was a reference to certain Black people being paid by the recall campaign.
The bribery and corruption trial of recalled Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao is moving along very slowly, but popped back up in the news again last week when a trove of documents seized by the FBI were released by the City of Oakland last week in response to public records requests from numerous media organizations. Some of these documents referenced Leigh Hanson, who was Thao’s chief of staff, and was retained in that position by current interim Oakland Mayor Kevin Jenkins, as Hanson has not been accused of any legal wrongdoing.
Well, Hanson had been retained as Mayor Jenkins’s chief of staff, but no more. The Chronicle reports that Hanson was fired Sunday, in the aftermath of a Saturday Chronicle report that the trove of released documents produced one set of meeting notes where Hanson had referred to Black people as “tokens.”
“Effective Sunday, Leigh Hanson is no longer an employee of the City of Oakland,” Jenkins said in a Sunday statement. “I thank Ms. Hanson for her service. Deputy Mayor Burt Jones will be serving as the Mayor’s Office chief of staff until further notice, and I thank him for stepping up to the role.”
The “damning” notes in question are seen above, and the phrase that caused the uproar is in the top right hand corner. There are no complete sentences in these strategy notes from 2024 that describe how Team Thao planned to fight the recall. But we do see the phrase “CM Fife can outreach to NAACP - use BP as tokens.”
“CM Fife” refers to Oakland City Councilmember Carol Fife. Hanson herself acknowledged to the Chronicle that “BP” did in fact mean “Black people.”
But Hanson also gave a statement to KTVU that argues the statement was taken out of context, and her explanation does sound pretty credible.
She said the statement was “a specific reference to Seneca Scott, a paid African American political operative, who was hired by the wealthy white funders of the recall campaign to obscure the public’s understanding of the recall’s political origin.” Her statement adds, "It was Mayor Thao and her political team’s belief that this operative’s paid involvement constituted tokenization by the recall’s financier, and Oakland voters had a right to understand this connection.”
This “wealthy white funder” she refers to is Piedmont hedge fund manager Philip Dreyfuss, who was by far the recall’s biggest donor, giving at least $630,000 to the recall campaign. She also mentions Seneca Scott, a Black man who was the recall’s paid spokesperson and primary shit-stirrer.
Scott has, shall we say, a rather checkered background. He ran for Oakland mayor against Thao in 2022, coming in a distant seventh place. He also has previous gun charges, and had a restraining order placed against him this past December by Thao’s (and now Jenkins’s) aide Brandon Harami, a restraining order whose settlement curiously said, per the Bay Area Reporter, that Scott “will not accuse Harami of being or supporting pedophiles” and “will stop accusing Harami's fathers of abusing him.”
So clearly Scott had some sort of very out-of-the-ordinary beef with Brandon Harami.
BREAKING: Brandon Harami, a staffer in the Oakland mayor’s office, has been placed on administrative leave. Harami told @KQEDNews he was informed in a meeting this morning that his role will be terminated on Friday.
— Alex Hall (@chalexhall) April 7, 2025
But as of Monday morning, it looks like Scott got Harami’s scalp as desired. Just in recent hours, interim Mayor Jenkins fired a slew of Thao holdovers, Harami included. (They are technically on administrative leave until April 11, which will be their last day). No explanation was given.
The NAACP has a press conference scheduled today, and had reportedly intended to call for Harami’s firing. Maybe there is some yet-unreported wrongdoing that we may not currently be aware of.
But this all feels like some attempt to affect the upcoming Oakland mayoral election, and create a “last minute surprise.” That Oakland mayoral election to replace Sheng Thao, by the way, happens to be just one week from tomorrow.
Image: City of Oakland
