San Diego county supervisor sex scandal blowing up big time

AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi

Back in January, I painted a little picture for you of what a socialist, woke hellhole the formerly idyllic San Diego had become. Between banning natural gas, proposed mileage taxes, and rigging the scales so the votes of Democratic supervisors and their reps from populated sections of the county were weighted more than the rest, it certainly has meant good times for the ruling progressive junta.

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There seems to have been seismic shaking going on over the past week and a half, with so many major Democratic players involved who have their fingers in so many plums in this pie, it’ll take a minute to explain it all. But what it might wind up doing is giving citizens of SanDiego a chance to get some of their own back. We’ll see. Lemme try to sort it out.

Nathan Fletcher is the name of the county supervisor for District 4. The former state assemblyman and Qualcomm exec is one half of a Southern California power couple, married in 2017 to a former Democratic assemblywoman now union boss named Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher. He was, at one time, a Republican but got whipped twice running for San Diego mayor and realized what side his bread was buttered on. His wife, already a major player, had lots of butter in 2018 with which to advance her new hubby’s career.

…But perhaps the most dramatic and clear-cut example of political parties’ power to launder cash and pass it along to intended recipients involved a locally well-known power couple during the spring primary campaign in San Diego County.

The couple: Democratic state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher and her husband Nathan Fletcher, a former Republican whip in the Assembly and a two-time loser in runs for mayor of San Diego.

Fletcher, who converted from Republican to Democrat in 2012 and 2013, with an intermediate stop as an independent, was one of five primary election candidates this spring for a seat on his county’s Board of Supervisors, getting large-scale financial support from the local Democratic Party and some from the county’s labor unions.

But nothing matches what he’s gotten from his wife. By the end of the primary season, Gonzalez Fletcher had transferred $355,000 of her Assembly campaign funds to the county’s Democratic Party, far outstripping other San Diego politicians like state Senate President Toni Atkins ($16,000) and Democratic Assemblyman Todd Gloria ($9,000).

The reason was obvious. While Gonzalez Fletcher was giving the party enormous sums, the organization was passing much more to her husband — a total of $680,000, of which he got $188,000 in just one week. So there’s little doubt that Gonzalez Fletcher’s campaign funds were staying in the family.

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SURPRISE! He got elected to the county supervisor’s gig.

And apparently enjoyed his new powers thoroughly, especially when that schweet, SCHWEET COVID hit and he could lord it over all the stupid rubes. (As he’s so much smarter than you, there’s a LANGUAGE CAUTION on this Instagram capture.)

Screencap KUSI

In the video below, Fletcher explains COVID Science™ to the peasants.

YOU MAY SWIM BUT NOT BE ON THE SAND ~ Nathan Fletcher’s San Diego COVID beach ettiquette

You get the drift – a thoroughly despicable and classically typical progressive fascist.

More so than anyone had any idea.

March 26th, the first tremor is felt. Fletcher tweets a shocking note on a Sunday evening – PTSD, alcoholism, rehab, WHUT? He’d be stepping down May 15.

Good grief! That might explain why he’s such a thoroughly revolti…OH. Maybe it was something else entirely, also known as “he got busted.”

…Fletcher’s wife, Lorena Gonzalez, tweeted a short message in response that read, “I love my husband and appreciate his willingness to put our family first.”

Just two days after Fletcher’s shocking announcement, a lawsuit was filed in Superior Court alleging sexual harassment, failure to prevent sexual harassment and retaliation, sexual assault and battery, and whistleblower retaliation.

The suit reads, “Defendant San Diego Metropolitan Transit System’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Nathan Fletcher, stalked plaintiff’s Instagram account and sexually assaulted plaintiff. Defendants abruptly fired plaintiff the same day Nathan Fletcher announced his candidacy for the California State Senate.”

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This guy is as scummy as they come and this girl had him dead to rights.

…And, sure enough, just 48 hours later, we learned of the second shoe to drop; a young Hispanic female staffer at the Metropolitan Transit System, which Fletcher chaired, filed a lawsuit on Monday alleging sexual harassment and retaliation after having engaged in text exchanges that depict Fletcher more like a horny teenager than a powerful community leader.

Fletcher’s admitted “consensual interactions” are not just private indiscretions; they are abusive harassment because of the power imbalance between a powerful elected official and an employee of a public entity he oversaw, even if not officially, at a minimum, in an influential political role.

In texts with the staffer, Fletcher asks her to drive near his home he shares with Gonzalez and that he would ditch his official security detail to meet up with her for a late-night walk. In another exchange, he asked her to meet him at a hotel after 10 pm when his security team was off for the night, clearly demonstrating his understanding of how inappropriate his illicit behavior truly was.

But THIS is the kicker and what a classic Prog shake-down.

…The plaintiff’s lawsuit claims Fletcher, Gonzalez, and their lawyer threatened to destroy the younger staffer if she filed a lawsuit, but neither side would release their correspondence to review the language and tone for ourselves.

And? We don’t have to “check the tone” because they’ve subsequently fired the young woman on top of it. From a city job!

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…Facing a barrage of inquiries, MTS, which has a $300 million annual budget and 3,000 employees, released a statement claiming that officials fired Figueroa for performance reasons, not because of her interactions with Fletcher.

“The termination of Grecia Figueroa was solely related to ongoing performance concerns and followed MTS’s normal practice of documenting such concerns and attempting to work with the employee towards improvement over a reasonable period of time,” the statement read.

Not a good look there, kinder, gentler…

…believe-all-women party. I’m assuming Mrs. Fletcher forgot she tweeted that in all the excitement of getting this young woman canned.

It’s Katy-Bar-the-Door time in San Diego County now. Old political scores are being revisited – the mayor of El Cajon is pissed about Fletcher dumping homeless in their hotels vice downtown San Diego’s, for starters – and the rest of the junta Democrats on the County Board are panicking as information starts flooding out about this clown and how they do business, leading people to ask “What else is going on?”

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The Board of Supervisors isn’t waiting for May – they want to dump this guy tomorrow.

Meanwhile, local news is starting to go through figures with a fine-toothed comb. For instance, it seems the Fletchers had pretty expensive security needs – almost $2M charged to the county to watch over them since late 2021.

The mayor of San Diego, a fervent Fletcher suck-up, is coming under enormous pressure as are other politicos who endorsed and supported this guy. Veterans are going after Fletcher for shamelessly using PTSD as part of his craven excuse litany. Locals had their moment ripping the Board of Supervisors, too, and I imagine it’s only going to get worse, especially if the Board continues to misstep or in any way is perceived to be acting in a fashion that’s less than transparent.

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There’s more about the Fletcher/Gonzalez partnership – “corruption” is a word being routinely used in darn near everything I read, and the tentacles reach beyond county malfeasance into CA labor unions.

The BoS has already held one closed meeting which has raised the hackles of people watching, and with all the eyeballs on them, now is not the time for the usual political subterfuge. The problem might be that these people are so used to dealing in that fashion, habits are hard to break, and that might bring more of them down.

The next couple of weeks could be really interesting. Maybe even be beneficial for San Diegans.

Peel that onion.

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Ed Morrissey 2:00 PM | October 11, 2024
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