Federal prosecutors say former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao didn't just trade favors for a recycling contract — they allege that when a reporter started digging into a Duong-funded trip to Vietnam, money moved to make the story disappear.

Thao returned to a federal courtroom in Oakland this week for a pretrial motion hearing, two months before her Oct. 19 corruption trial. But the reason the case is back in the headlines isn't the underlying bribery indictment — it's a set of court filings that widen the scope from a pay-to-play recycling deal to something closer to political blackmail: an alleged five-figure payment to bury unflattering reporting, and a co-defendant's phone that prosecutors say held dozens of covert recordings of politicians.

Former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao was due back in federal court in Oakland on Friday for a pretrial motion hearing, NBC Bay Area reported, as her lawyers work to keep certain evidence away from a jury ahead of her Oct. 19 trial. The hearing itself is procedural. The allegations that put the case back in the news are not.

The sharpest new claims come from government filings reported by ABC7's Dan Noyes. Prosecutors describe co-defendant Andy Duong — who, with his father David, owns Oakland's curbside recycling contractor California Waste Solutions — as a man who routinely filmed and photographed elected officials without their knowledge, banking the footage as leverage. Investigators, the filings say, pulled dozens of such clips and images off his phone.

The thread that ties it together runs through a July 2023 trade delegation to Vietnam that the Duong family bankrolled and Thao joined, alongside roughly 50 others. Among the recordings, prosecutors say, is dashcam-style video of Duong, then-San Leandro Councilmember Bryan Azevedo and others swapping stories about a previous night's encounters at a massage parlor. When a journalist later started asking about suspected drugs and prostitution on the trip, the filings allege, Thao reacted with alarm — and the Duongs arranged a $10,000 payment to a person connected to that reporter to head the story off.

That is a materially different accusation than the one Thao was indicted on. The January 2025 indictment↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) charged Thao, her partner Andre Jones and the Duongs with eight counts — conspiracy, bribery, mail and wire fraud, and false statements — built around an alleged arrangement in which the Duongs financed Thao's 2022 campaign and paid Jones through a no-show job, in exchange for her promise to extend the recycling contract and steer the city toward buying shipping-container housing. The new material adds a second layer: not merely purchasing an official, but allegedly spending money to suppress journalism about her.

It also fills in how the alleged benefits reached Thao's household. Prosecutors now assert she landed a home lease on the strength of a phantom $150,000 salary handed to Jones through her sister's cannabis consulting firm, according to ABC7's summary of the filings.

Azevedo, who gave up his council seat and is expected to testify for the government, has publicly rejected the lurid framing. Pressed by Noyes in April 2025 about what happened in Vietnam, he acknowledged massages and the presence of women but insisted nothing improper occurred, and flatly denied that any sex acts were exchanged. He is not the only defendant to break from the group: Azevedo was the first to plead guilty↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) in the wider federal probe.

Thao has pleaded not guilty and declined to comment as she arrived Friday. Her defense has leaned heavily on shrinking the pile of evidence a jury will ever see. The case sits before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who in April declined to toss evidence↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) the defense called tainted, and who this month forced prosecutors to pare a proposed exhibit list of roughly 1,700 items down to about 500 — a fight The Dissent covered earlier this week.

Whether the reporter-payment allegation and the cache of covert recordings survive those same evidentiary battles is now one of the open questions heading into October. What started as a story about who runs Oakland's garbage has become, in the government's telling, a story about who gets to decide what the public is allowed to read.