Conor Johnston was then-Supervisor London Breed’s aide for five years until 2017. He then transitioned into being a political trickster, Mayor Breed’s confidant and her most emphatic online and real-life partisan backer. He was named “Biggest Mayoral Troll” by SF Weekly in 2018; one year later he said “I would crawl through broken glass to bite an alligator for her.”
In a videotaped interview with Mission Local last week, Johnston now says that the former mayor, “somebody I was close to, told me things that were just horribly wrong. And for 16, 18 months, I’ve wrestled with what to do with that.”
Johnston says Breed in November 2024 told him that billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has put millions into Breed’s political career, personally called her and asked for Stephen Sherrill to be appointed to the vacant District 2 supervisorial seat.
Sherrill, a native New Yorker, had previously worked for then-New York Mayor Bloomberg. Prior to his appointment as a San Francisco supervisor, Sherrill worked in Breed’s office as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Innovation, a Bloomberg-funded position.
In the five weeks between Breed’s defeat to now-Mayor Daniel Lurie and her appointment of the largely unknown Sherrill, Johnston says he and Breed had numerous discussions about the pending appointment. “During those conversations she told me things like ‘this one’s for me,’ meaning this appointment,” Johnston says.
Other things Johnston recalls Breed saying at the time include “I’m 50 years old and about to be out of a job; I need to think about my financial future,” “Mike Bloomberg called me and asked me,” “They” — meaning Bloomberg World — “are going to set me up,” “I have a lot of expenses, I need to worry about how I’m going to pay for things.”
It was, Johnston continues, “a variety of comments along these lines. At every point I pushed back.”
Johnston readily acknowledges that he was in a “conflicted role” — he, too, was hoping Breed would tap him for the District 2 seat. “Am I offering advice because that’s what I believe is the correct advice or because I’m trying to talk her out of appointing someone other than me? I suppose both were true, but more than anything I was concerned about her saying those things. I couldn’t believe she was saying those things, to be honest. It was very out of character. It wasn’t the person who I had worked with for the preceding 12 years.”
Breed’s former confidante says their relationship permanently splintered when he insisted upon an impromptu and candid City Hall meeting with her on Dec. 3, 2024. This meeting was recounted in a February article in the California edition of the New York Post.
“I was very honest,” Johnston recalls. “I said ‘what you’re considering is potentially illegal, it’s certainly wrong and you can’t do it.’ And the response I ultimately got was ‘it was very inconsiderate of you to come to my office today.’”
Mission Local reviewed text messages between Johnston and Breed from before and after that December 2024 meeting. The phone number of the recipient corresponds with Breed’s cell number. She did indeed criticize Johnston for coming to see her in person: “You should have just said hold off on a decision until we talked … I wish you would have been more considerate.”
Johnston texted back “I’m trying to look out for you. It was urgent …” He added: “It’s bad and we’re worried.”
Mission Local reviewed additional extemporaneous notes and text messages exchanged in November and December 2024 by people knowledgeable about the appointment process. Their content corroborates Johnston’s narrative.
An email to the Bloomberg communications department has not yet been returned.
Reached for comment, Sherrill, who is up for election on June 2, wrote “The appointment process entailed rigorous vetting, interviews, and community input. I am proud of my record of service both as District 2 Supervisor and in my prior roles, and for delivering results for my neighbors and constituents.”
Breed in 2025 accepted a six-month position as an adviser-in-residence at the Aspen Policy Academy at the Aspen Institute, which collaborates with and is partially funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. No high-profile longer-term job, with or without Bloomberg ties, has yet materialized; if Breed is benefitting from the District 2 appointment it is not resplendently obvious.
She sent a lengthy statement denying any wrongdoing:
I want to be very clear: Stephen Sherrill was appointed because I believed he was the best person for the role, based on his experience, qualifications, and ability to serve District 2 and the City effectively. He has proven to do so. I am proud of the work Supervisor Sherrill is doing and the leadership he continues to demonstrate on behalf of the residents of District 2 and San Francisco.
Yes, Mike Bloomberg is a friend, and he has been a thoughtful voice and mentor over the years, just as he has been for countless leaders and public servants across the country and the world. But that is the extent of it. I don’t work for Mayor Bloomberg. And I have always made my own decisions.
I currently run my own company and maintain active clients. I have worked consistently since I was 12 years old. I hold a BA from Davis and a masters from USF; I am deeply experienced, and I have built a long record of public service and leadership that speaks for itself. To once again attempt to portray me as a puppet of a man is deeply offensive.
I also stand proudly behind my record of appointments during my time as Mayor. I appointed highly qualified leaders to serve as District Attorney, Public Defender, Districts 5 and 6 Supervisors, City Attorney, Assessor-Recorder, City Administrator, and members of both the School Board and City College Board, in addition to District 2 Supervisor.
Those appointments reflected thoughtful consideration, extensive vetting, and a commitment to always doing what’s best for San Francisco, despite some individual’s hard feelings.
2nd former staffer backs up Johnston
Some Breed staffers close to the appointment process did not recall the mayor saying anything untoward. But not all of them.
“When I asked London Breed how she was making the decision, she said ‘I am making this decision based on what I need to do next and I don’t have a paycheck come January and I can’t collect my pension until I’m 53,’” said Eric Kingsbury, Breed’s campaign manager in her 2024 re-election bid.
“Later, unprovoked, she said that again but also added that she has family who depend on her financially.” Kingsbury recalls being flabbergasted at the time: “I didn’t know what to say because it seemed a pretty damning thing to say.”
Kingsbury, like Johnston, was a hopeful for the seat awarded to Sherrill — leaving him open to accusations of sour grapes.
“There’s a reason I haven’t gone public about this in a year and a half, and it was because I thought that would be the response,” he said. “I can understand why someone would think that, but at the end of the day all I have is my integrity. I think people deserve to know the truth.”
Kingsbury said he does not plan to run for the District 2 seat in November. As a member of the Democratic County Central Committee, he personally abstained from voting on the June District 2 endorsement, which Sherrill won handily.
‘It smells’ — but it’s still ‘a defense attorney’s playground’
Bill Portanova, a former state and federal prosecutor now in private practice, reviewed the on-the-record claims of Breed’s former staffers at Mission Local’s request.
“It smells,” he said. “It smells like someone planning their post-government career.”
But, he added, “there is plenty of room for a good defense attorney to argue that it’s something else entirely. There is certainly a lot of smoke and heat, there’s no question about it. … At the moment, it’s definitely highly defensible.”
If Bloomberg did indeed call Breed and lobby for Sherrill to be given a job, that, in and of itself, is not illegal. And it would also not necessarily be illegal if Breed made the appointment her longtime benefactor desired, provided there was no specific promise and exchange driving Breed’s decision as to who would be the next District 2 supe.
“Everything anybody claims to do in the public interest is also in their own interest — everything,” Portanova continues. It’s the explicit promise of quid-pro-quo that is, he says, “the essence of bribery itself: You have to get something.”
Legal red lines are crossed when politicians knowingly offer a thing in exchange for a thing knowingly taken. Without an explicit promise, the aforementioned smoke and heat do not combust into fire.
If a politician is merely hoping his or her act leads to “sunshine filling the sky tomorrow,” Portanova says, that would not be enough to break the law. “The intangible nature of the sun shining warmly on me tomorrow,” he continues, “is really a defense attorney’s playground.”
Why now?
In the year and a half since his appointment, Sherrill has picked up a reputation as a hard-working and approachable district supervisor.
As Mission Local wrote in March, the accusation that a wealthy individual used his connections to get ahead may not even be perceived as a tremendous problem in affluent District 2.
Sherrill has amassed over $1 million in his race to win a Board of Supervisors seat in his own right. That includes over $440,000 from five different independent expenditure committees that are backing him. If Sherrill crushes opponent Lori Brooke in the June special election to fill out Catherine Stefani’s term, he may clear the field for the November election to win four more years.
District 2 is, blessedly, not unduly burdened with the issues of overt misery, law-breaking and poverty that other San Francisco neighborhoods are. A pragmatic District 2 supe can, in the absence of a constituency that needs him to do much, use their time in office to take popular citywide votes and court constituencies elsewhere in the city. Supervisor Gavin Newsom did this, and he matriculated to the mayor’s office and Sacramento — and perhaps beyond. Stefani, appointed by then-mayor Mark Farrell to replace himself on the board, is now an assemblymember.
When asked why he’s choosing to go on the record at this time, Johnston replies, “I know things that voters in District 2 have a right to know and to consider.”
Breed, the woman he once said he’d bite an alligator for, “broke my heart.” Her ascent from a chaotic and impoverished upbringing in the Western Addition to the pinnacle of City Hall was, he says, the embodiment of the promise of San Francisco. “In her last act in that office she didn’t just betray that sentiment,” said Johnston, “she sold it out in the worst, most indefensible way to one of the richest men in the world.”
“Everybody I have talked to about doing this interview has told me not to do it,” he continues. “They’ve said it will only bring negativity on me. My thinking is, I would rather be disliked for telling the truth than liked for being complicit in something that I know is wrong.”