In yet more bad news for California Governor Gavin Newsom as he tried to get his potential 2028 presidential campaign off the ground and in the public eye in a positive way, a new scandal has emerged, with one of his major donors and allies pleading guilty to a nearly $250 million fraud scandal involving the defrauding of investors.
For reference, the individual involved is Joseph Sanberg, a green energy entrepreneur who set up shop in California. He has long been a major Democrat donor, with political donation data revealing that he has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to state and federal leftist causes over the years. Sanberg was known as a Newsom ally not only because of his donations, but because he was intimately involved with the governor’s campaign to raise the state-level minimum wage to $18/hour.
In any case, Sanberg has pleaded guilty to a massive fraud scheme. The DOJ described the scheme in a press release, noting, “According to court documents, beginning in 2020 and continuing into 2025, Joseph Neal Sanberg, 46, of Orange, California, devised a scheme to use his role as a co-founder and board member of Aspiration as well as his shares of company stock to defraud various lenders and investors. Between 2020 and 2021, Sanberg and Ibrahim AlHusseini, both members of Aspiration’s board of directors, fraudulently obtained $145 million in loans from two lenders by pledging shares of Sanberg’s Aspiration stock.”
Continuing, the statement went on to describe how they lied to obtain loans on false pretenses regarding collateral, saying, “Sanberg and AlHusseini also falsified AlHusseini’s bank and brokerage statements to fraudulently inflate AlHusseini’s assets by tens of millions of dollars to secure the loans. Beginning in 2021, Sanberg also defrauded Aspiration’s investors by concealing that he was the source of certain revenue recognized by the company.”
Building on that, the DOJ noted how Sanberg hid the source of payments for contracts with Aspiration, noting, “Court documents also state that Sanberg personally recruited companies and individuals to sign letters of intent with Aspiration in which they committed to pay tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg used legal entities under his control to conceal that these payments came from Sanberg rather than from the customers. Sanberg instructed Aspiration employees not to contact the customers that he had recruited in order to conceal his scheme.”
Further, that bled into the company he was running showing fake revenues in the hope of attracting customers. The statement provided: “Aspiration booked revenue from these customers between March 2021 and November 2022, but Sanberg did not disclose that he was the source of the payments. As a result, Aspiration’s financial statements were inaccurate and reflected much higher revenue than the company in fact received. Sanberg continued to solicit investors to invest in Aspiration securities into 2025.”
Concluding, the statement noted that the fraud, when it collapsed, led to his fraud victims suffering nearly $250 million in losses: “According to the documents, Sanberg also defrauded other lenders and investors with fraudulent materials describing Aspiration’s financial condition, including a fabricated letter from Aspiration’s audit committee that falsely stated that Aspiration had $250 million in available cash and equivalents at a time that Aspiration had less than $1 million in available cash. Sanberg used these fraudulent financial materials to obtain millions of dollars in additional loans and investments in Aspiration securities. Sanberg’s victims sustained more than $248 million in losses.”
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Acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli slammed Sanberg in a statement, saying, “This so-called ‘anti-poverty’ activist has admitted to being nothing more than a self-serving fraudster, by seeking to enrich himself by defrauding lenders and investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. I commend our law enforcement partners for their efforts in this case, and I urge the investing public to use caution and beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
Watch Stephen Miller accuse Newsom of “crimes against humanity” here: