California Gov. Gavin Newsom ended years of broken promises by releasing more than 700 pages of tax filings, documents that reveal a lifestyle far removed from the middle-class voters he claims to champion.
Newsom's office handed the returns to select reporters on Friday, covering tax years 2022 through 2024 and closing a gap that stretched back to 2020, the last year the governor had publicly disclosed his filings. The reporters could view the documents but not make copies, a restriction that kept the full returns out of public hands even as Newsom's team insisted the release proved he had nothing to hide.
The returns show Newsom and First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom earned between $1.7 million and $2 million a year over the three-year stretch, the New York Post reported. His roughly $200,000 gubernatorial salary accounted for only a fraction of the family's income. Most of the money flowed from winery, restaurant, and hospitality businesses Newsom placed in a blind trust after taking office, though the returns do not identify which individual businesses turned a profit and which did not.
Over the four-year period covered by the filings, the couple paid nearly $2.8 million in federal income taxes and about $500,000 in California income taxes, according to the New York Times review. They donated between $40,000 and $67,000 to charity each year, plus thousands of dollars' worth of clothing and household goods.
Among the more striking line items: in 2024 alone, the Newsoms paid nearly $200,000 in wages to household employees, plus employment taxes for domestic workers and babysitters. Childcare spending for three of their four children ranged from $14,000 to $44,000 a year across the period.
Newsom also collected $70,000 in author income in 2023 and $75,000 in 2024. The source of those payments, whether from his memoir or other publishing work, remained unclear even to the Times.
Siebel Newsom's finances drew their own scrutiny. Her production company, Girls Club Entertainment, lost about $37,000 in 2022, a year in which she reported earning just $11,700 from the business. She also collected $150,000 from The Representation Project, a nonprofit she is connected to, to promote films and other initiatives. The FBI has been examining Siebel Newsom's taxes as part of a broader federal investigation the couple disclosed last month.
One detail stood out for sheer brass. In 2022, the Newsoms donated Armani business attire they had originally purchased for about $45,000 to an Oakland restorative justice nonprofit. On the tax filing, they listed the clothing's estimated thrift-store value at $4,900, roughly eleven cents on the dollar. The write-off is legal, but it captures something about how the governor's household operates: buy luxury goods, hand them off, and take the deduction.
Newsom's spokesperson, Diana Crofts-Pelayo, dismissed the returns as routine:
"They're unremarkable and entirely consistent with what Californians already know from his annual Form 700 disclosures."
She added that Newsom was "happy to go above and beyond by releasing the remaining years as well." That framing, going "above and beyond", is worth pausing on. Newsom signed a 2019 California law requiring gubernatorial candidates to publicly disclose five years of federal income tax returns before appearing on the state's primary ballot. He released multiple years of returns during his 2018 campaign, dating back to 2011, and pledged to keep releasing them annually while in office.
He then stopped after tax year 2020 and let the silence stretch for years. When The Post pressed him on the gap earlier this month, Newsom pivoted to a joke:
"I know you love taxes. And you will have all those new tax returns, because, I have no reason why you haven't gotten them already."
The timing of the release is impossible to separate from the legal pressure bearing down on the governor. Newsom disclosed last month that he and Siebel Newsom are subjects of a federal investigation. He has characterized the probe as politically motivated, accusing the Trump administration of weaponizing the Justice Department against him as a likely 2028 presidential contender.
Federal investigators have also separately investigated Dana Williamson, Newsom's former chief of staff. Williamson pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and lying to the FBI. Her sentencing is scheduled for September 17. The governor's former chief of staff pleading guilty to federal crimes raises obvious questions about the culture of financial accountability inside Newsom's inner circle, questions the tax returns alone cannot answer.
Newsom's office had told The Post earlier this month that "the remaining returns will be shared this month." Spokesperson Izzy Gardon confirmed Thursday that the release would come Friday. The governor's team waited until the final hours of its own self-imposed deadline to follow through.
The 2025 returns were not included. The couple filed for an extension and expects to complete them in October.
Crofts-Pelayo offered a second defense of the governor's record on disclosure:
"The governor publicly released his tax returns while he was on the ballot and is happy to go above and beyond by releasing the remaining years as well."
That statement contains its own indictment. Newsom released his returns "while he was on the ballot", and stopped once voters could no longer hold him accountable at the polls. The years of silence ended only after a federal investigation surfaced and reporters kept asking uncomfortable questions. Transparency that arrives under legal duress is not transparency. It is damage control.
The returns also leave significant gaps. The blind trust structure means the public still cannot see which of Newsom's winery, restaurant, and hospitality businesses made money and which lost it. The filings show totals, not the kind of granular detail that would let voters or investigators trace how the governor's policy decisions might intersect with his private financial interests. Newsom's team has not explained why reporters were barred from copying the documents, a restriction that limits independent analysis and fact-checking.
Newsom is hardly the only prominent Democrat whose financial disclosures have raised eyebrows. Rep. Ilhan Omar's financial filings recently showed her husband's income collapsing from millions to $200 in a single year, the kind of sudden shift that invites more questions than it answers.
A governor who signed a law demanding tax transparency from candidates, who pledged annual disclosure, and who broke that pledge for years does not get credit for finally handing over the paperwork when federal investigators are already looking over his shoulder. Accountability that only arrives under subpoena pressure is not a virtue. It is a tell.