Interim mayor fires Oakland chief of staff
Interim mayor fires Oakland chief of staff
Interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins fires Oakland Chief of Staff Leigh Hanson.
OAKLAND, Calif. - Interim Oakland Mayor Kevin Jenkins has fired his chief of staff.
"Effective Sunday, Leigh Hanson is no longer an employee of the City of Oakland," Jenkins said in a 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 San Francisco Chronicle first reported that Hanson was reportedly let go over a note she wrote last year that appeared to refer to Black people as tokens while she was working under former mayor Sheng Thao.
The note read "CM Fife can reach out to NAACP. Use BP as tokens." (CM Fife is Councilmember Carroll Fife.)
Hanson confirmed to the Chronicle that BP was an abbreviation for Black people but added it was taken out of context.
She told the news organization that the note was written during an anti-recall planning meeting where Thao and others discussed their perceptions of the recall effort’s plans to recruit Black people to their cause.
In a four-sentence statement texted to KTVU on Monday, Hanson said: "These handwritten meeting notes record a group discussion that included proposed messaging points that the anti-recall campaign wanted to provide to potential surrogates.
"They are 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.
"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.
"I regret that my short-hand note-taking has been taken out of context on social media and inadvertently harmed close friends, colleagues and members of my community who have been marginalized by our political system."
The note was found in a batch of documents released by the city related to the FBI investigation into Thao.