The San Francisco Ethics Commission will take up the question of whether Mayor Daniel Lurie violated city and state law by refusing to disclose records associated with his October 2025 call with President Donald Trump.
At issue is Lurie’s Oct. 22 conversation with the president, in which Trump rescinded his planned deployment of federal agents to the Bay Area.
Lurie’s office has said some of the records related to the call are privileged. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force disagreed.
The task force, the body that investigates violations of public-records law and urged Lurie to release more records in January, voted 8-1 Wednesday that Lurie violated the law, and sent the matter to the city’s Ethics Commission.
Lurie’s office says the entire matter is a misunderstanding; there are no more records, like transcripts or notes, having to do with the call. The only related records have to do with legal — and confidential — advice given to the mayor’s office related to an executive order that Lurie signed to deal with the expected Trump deployment.
“We’re at the point now where it’s simply, ‘Documents are believed to exist, so they must exist,’ but that is not the case,” said Dexter Darmali, the mayor’s legislative and ethics secretary. “The Sunshine Ordinance does not require the city to produce documents if they do not exist.”
The consequences of the Ethics Commission referral are unclear. The commission has little punitive power for these kinds of violations, and can only issue cease-and-desist letters, publicize the violation and issue warning letters, according to a 2014 city memo.
Some in San Francisco worry Lurie made a deal to ward off federal agents, promising cooperation with the White House, for example.
In November, the San Francisco Standard reported that a police official said late-night drug busts in the city were a “show of force” that was “keeping President Trump from deploying the National Guard and ICE,” citing minutes from a police union meeting.
Fears became more acute when former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said in March, minutes after she was sacked, that Lurie speaks “quite often” with her and has been “cooperative.”
The mayor’s office declined to comment on Noem’s remarks. A City Hall source said they were baseless, and that Lurie hadn’t spoken with Noem since October.
The Lurie-Trump call ethics case started when Hazel Williams, an organizer and frequent filer of public records requests, in October asked for any phone logs, transcripts, texts, or other records related to the call.
The mayor’s office first said it could disclose none, citing attorney-client privilege. It then released a calendar event for the call, and some text messages staff sent to supervisors, inviting them to a press conference during which Lurie announced he had spoken to Trump and won a reprieve.
But the Sunshine Task Force members, for their part, said on Wednesday they believe there are still records being inappropriately withheld.
One said, for example, that “unless the mayor has a special phone, there is a call log in the phone” that has not been turned over.
Others speculated Lurie may have deleted any call logs, bringing up former mayor London Breed’s practice of deleting official text messages. At one point, commissioners suggested they could send the matter to the California attorney general’s office.
Williams said there is one easy way to dispel worries about Lurie making a deal with Trump: Release the records.
“Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. There’s only one way to know, and we’re being blocked from knowing,” Williams said at Wednesday’s hearing. “The public should have access to that information. It doesn’t.”
The ethics commission will now take up the matter, though it is unclear when.
I’m glad we now have two impotent city entities wasting time and money arguing about something that might or might not have happened and deciding if a sternly worded letter should be sent.
Sorry you feel it’s a waste. I want to know and I have a legal right to know what our representatives discuss. Democracy is too important to leave to politicians.
“The commission has little punitive power for these kinds of violations, and can only issue cease and desist letters, publicize the violation and issue warning letters,”
Exactly. In other words the Ethics Commission is toothless. Lurie can, and most likely will, ignore its findings. And some might argue that whatever Lurie said and did to convince the Administration to keep ICE out of SF was worth it.
I think the key contacts with Trump were from Silicon Valley B-boys. Talking to Lurie about keeping the peace was window dressing. Just a hunch.
That’s kind of the rub right there: Without knowing what Lurie said and did to convince them, we can’t evaluate if it was worth it. In just the past couple weeks, he defended SFPD forming a protective phalanx around ICE agents as they abducted a mother in front of her child at SFO, saying that that didn’t count as assisting ICE.
The SFO incident appears to be background ICE activity that occurred regularly under presidents from both parties, not a militarized response like in Minneapolis.
The phone call(s) from Lurie and tech oligarchs were specifically directed at avoiding Trump deploying militarized ICE on the streets like in Minneapolis. That did not happen in San Francisco.
We have had months to observe the results. Do you have any evidence of policy concessions made by Lurie related to ICE not militarizing the streets?
Trump threatened to unleash ICE on SF like he did in Minneapolis. Lurie and the tech billionaires approached Trump like one would approach a counterparty in business, on the terms most likely to secure a favorable deal.
“What was the deal?” is the question here. Clearly Lurie and the tech oligarchs convinced Trump to hold off the ICE dogs. Militarized ICE has not been seen on the streets of San Francisco. So that’s a win.
But were there any policy concessions made by Lurie? It does not appear that there are. Background levels of ICE enforcement that happened before Trump, under Biden when Democrats did not whine about it, still happens.
The issue here is people who define their politics as antagonistic to those they do not like recoil that anyone would actually talk to, negotiate with, those they don’t like. They’d prefer to run the playbook that’s led progressives to near extinction here: saying what they don’t like and raging against anyone who does otherwise, in denial of objective political reality.
To have run the progressive performative TDS outrage would have elicited the opposite outcome: goading Trump into unleashing militarized ICE on SF streets because the need of the progressive to be seen being outraged is more important to them than strategic discipline that might bring a desired outcome.
My take is that weakness, fear and victimhood are such powerful, motivating forces for progressives that they feel more comfortable being abused in the political BDSM dungeon. Antagonizing Trump to crack down would offer the rich opportunity to say “See, this is what we’ve been on about.”
I am no fan of Lurie, but on this, he played it perfectly, as there is no evidence of any policy concessions in exchange for calling off ICE.
Instead of harping on matters picayune such as this, progressives and Democrats would do better to articulate a political vision of the city that they want to see that resonates with voters more than it resonates with the corrupt political class that’s lead us to defeat over and again.
Who was the dissenting vote?
Call logs? What does that mean, a screenshot of his cell phone’s recent calls screen?
The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force is a joke and a waste of time.
So Malibu dans story is that he had a phone conversation with the president of the united states of America (a lying dog of a president at that) and nobody took any kind of notes about that conversation?
That’s the story? That’s the level of competence that he wants us to assign to his administration?