The chief of staff of the mayor of Oakland shot the note with racist reference

OAKLAND – The former chief of staff to former mayor Sheng Thao was dismissed on a reference to the blacks whom she noted during a meeting last year during which the supporters of Thao organized a political opposition to the ablation of the mayor.

Leigh Hanson, a central actor in the Thao administration, had remained in his role after the successful recall of his boss to help guide the turnover between the administrations of the city mayor.

It was criticized last week after the note was published publicly among thousands of pages of documents from Oakland City seized by federal prosecutors before the acts of criminal indictments against the former mayor and three others.

Until his dismissal on Sunday, Hanson was the chief of staff to the member of the Council Kevin Jenkins, who fills the interim mayor before the voters of Oakland on April 15, select a permanent replacement of Thao, who was recalled by the voters last November.

“As of Sunday, Leigh Hanson is no longer an employee of the city of Oakland,” the city administrator, Jestin Johnson said on Sunday in a statement distributed by a city spokesperson. “I thank Ms. Hanson for her service. The deputy mayor Burt Jones will be the chief of staff to the mayor’s office until further notice, and I thank him for intensifying the role. ”

Hanson refused to comment on Sunday evening.

She arrived in Oakland in 2016 after working in the mayor’s office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was a voluntary pillar of the Town Hall during the mandate of Thao and for several months later, taking the lead in critical negotiations between the city and the main land buyers, such as the A Baseball franchise and the group which seeks to acquire the Oakland Coliseum.

She seems to have written the explosive note that led her to draw during a meeting in March 2024, at a time when Thao and a circle of political advisers provided for a political struggle against an expensive recall effort filed against her.

Oakland voters approved Thao’s withdrawal from office in November – a few months before the ex -mayor was charged with corruption and plot crimes.

The relevant extract of Hanson’s note, which reads “use BP as a token”, seems to refer to blacks in the context of being “token” – a tactic often attributed to people or groups accused of cynically benefiting from black voices for political purposes.

In the full context of the note, Hanson describes campaign strategies against the recall of Thao – electoral finances, political allies and public relations – on an article, listing several multicultural non -profit organizations under the direction of “black supporters”.

One side of this section seems to note the member of the Carroll Fife council – a long -standing ally of the former mayor – as one of these supporters, and warns the member of the Treva Reid council, a frequent criticism of Thao, like someone to whom the Thao camp must “be careful”.

“CM Fife can raise awareness of NAACP,” writes Hanson, referring to the historical organization of black civil rights whose chapter of Oakland took on a special aversion to Thao during his loaded mandate as mayor.

Noted by dashes below: “Use BP as a tokens”.

Hanson, whose dismissal was reported for the first time by San Francisco Chronicle, faced Swift Backlash in the days following the fact that the document became public as part of a thousand record tickets that the city last year presented to the federal authorities.

Hanson’s planned sense of note remains uncertain. Tokenism is widely considered as a common practice in politics, although the sentence is often a pejorative term attributed by political groups to their opponents, double as accusation of racism.

The documents published last week played a decisive role in helping to reconstruct the interior functioning of the Thao administration in 2023 and 2024, illustrating how the former mayor directed conversations between senior city officials and the men who are now accused of having welded it in federal accusation.

This press organization reported last week that Hanson had referred – in the text messages included in the documents – to a plan considered by Thao to hire a former campaign director to whom the former mayor owed tens of thousands of dollars.

It is a story in development. Come back for updates.

Originally published: April 6, 2025 at 7:38 p.m.