Mike Thompson

The race between the North Bay’s most seasoned congressmember and his insurgent Democratic challenger grew more heated this week after rival Eric Jones accused Rep. Mike Thompson’s campaign of basing part of a recent attack ad on material gained from what Jones said was an illegal recording of a private campaign event.

Jones’ campaign has suggested it was Thompson’s team that captured audio of the small event in Davis, and that the attack ad Thompson is running in its wake is defamatory.

“Mr. Jones is incensed by the Thompson Campaign’s decision to disseminate to the public what it knows full well are lies,” an attorney for national law firm Foster Garvey wrote in a May 8 cease and desist letter.

Legal options could include a civil lawsuit and a criminal complaint, wrote the lawyer, Brad C. Deutsch. He called on the Thompson campaign to preserve all electronic data, often a precursor to the legal discovery process following the filing of a lawsuit.

Jones’ team emphasized that they are not seeking monetary damages, but rather a public apology from Thompson and his campaign.

The incumbent’s campaign is unbowed.

“Eric Jones is trying to hide his record, and this legal intimidation is the exact same thing Donald Trump tries to do to his opponents,” Thompson campaign manager Thomas Dowling said in an email to The Press Democrat. “Mike Thompson does not back down to Donald Trump or millionaire bullies like Eric Jones.”

The dust-up was first reported by the Davis Enterprise.

It marked the latest round of tension between the two front-runner Democrats in California’s 4th District race, where Jones is mounting a primary challenge against an incumbent who has rarely faced strong opposition since he was elected to Congress in 1998. The redrawn district includes all of Napa, Yolo, Colusa, Sutter and Yuba counties, and parts of Sonoma, Lake, Sacramento and Placer.

Thompson and Jones, or their proxies, have traded accusations over everything from campaign finance to where the two men live and cast their vote, with rhetoric that has grown increasingly personal.

As of Wednesday, Thompson’s ad — the first to target Jones by name — was still available on YouTube and other platforms. It calls out the challenger for his investments, and for supposedly lying about stocks he has owned.

While a narrator makes that second point in the ad, text at the bottom of the screen cites an “Eric Jones Davis Meet & Greet” on March 8.

That meet-and-greet was a private event, say its hosts, Davis residents Dean Johansson and Nora Oldwin, and they had no reason to expect it would be recorded, nor were they informed it was taped at the time.

California operates under the rule of two-party consent. If a conversation is considered private, recording it without permission is a violation of the state’s penal code. It allows for a fine of up to $2,500 and jail time up to one year. A separate section of the code permits parties injured by invasion of privacy to sue for injunctive relief and monetary damages.

Public interactions, by contrast, are generally considered fair game, with less expectation of privacy under the law.

In the week leading up to the Davis meet-and-greet, Jones posted an invitation on his Instagram account that included the Oldwin-Johansson address. He later deleted it.

The Davis hosts, who gathered about 25 people in their home for the March 8 event, insist the meeting was meant to be private. They, too, are seeking an apology from Thompson.

“This offends me at a very personal level,” Johansson wrote in a May 11 letter to Thompson, which Oldwin shared with The Press Democrat. He added that “if I had been aware of any video or audio recording at that event I personally would have put a stop to it.”

Johansson, as he wrote in his letter, is a retired prosecutor, public defender and private attorney, and former board member of local chapters of the ACLU and NAACP.

Both Oldwin and Johansson have long been involved in local politics and community activism. They relish informal events that shed light on an issue or a candidate, Oldwin said, and have hosted many in their home.

She and Johansson first became interested in Jones’ views when he attempted to speak at a No King’s Rally in Davis, but was denied an opportunity. Thompson was the scheduled speaker that day.

The couple served food and drinks to guests March 8 in their compact kitchen-dining-sitting area. They knew almost all those on hand. A number were members of Johansson’s Quaker church. Some were friends from a nearby mobile home park.

The Jones campaign didn’t know someone had recorded the session until a California Post reporter contacted staff, inviting comment, according to Deutsche’s cautionary letter. The media outlet, a subsidiary of the New York Post, has yet to publish a story based on the recording.

The Post shared a copy of the full audio file with the Jones campaign, which in turn shared it with Johansson and Oldwin.

The hosts felt betrayed.

“Who came in my house and did this?” Oldwin wondered.

She and Johansson have made an effort to figure out which guest had the recording device. They have constructed “a whole schemata” in their living room trying to piece it together, Oldwin said. She played a few seconds of the audio for a Press Democrat reporter. You can hear a repetitive squeak that she says is someone spinning a globe displayed in the room.

Guests at the Davis home were asked to sign in and provide contact information.

“We’ve eliminated everybody except about six people,” Oldwin said.

She and Johansson have been sending apologies to every attendee for whom they have an email address. But they are not currently considering legal action.

“No. Listen, that’s not who we are,” Oldwin said. “All we want is, tell us what happened.”

The defamation claims made by the Jones’ campaign have to do with characterizations of his work in venture capital.

Thompson’s attack ad accuses the candidate of investing in gambling, big oil and a company investigated for preying on seniors. Jones’ campaign countered that the ad refers to investments made by the Dragoneer Investment Group, the candidate’s former employer, and that he had no personal connection to that money.

Courts have traditionally given wide latitude to such political speech, with the legal bar to prove defamation cases involving public figures, like candidates for public office, set far higher.

The disputed attack ad is far from the first non-policy issue to roil the 4th District race.

The Thompson and Jones camps, which are running about dead even in fundraising, have traded barbs, bad feelings and occasional missteps.

In December, The Press Democrat first reported on a Capitol Police investigation into the actions of a 19-year-old volunteer with the Jones campaign, who was found to have parked for hours at a time outside Thompson’s St. Helena home, allegedly frightening the congressman’s wife and granddaughter.

In early March, Politico reported on a video posted by Jones that showed him posing with prominent Democrats — including revered labor activist Dolores Huerta and Michael Tubbs, who is running for lieutenant governor — at the party’s nominating convention.

Huerta called the video “very sneaky,” noting that she had told Jones she was endorsing Thompson, and others were surprised by the images, too. Jones’ campaign initially removed the video from social media accounts, then reposted it several hours later, along with a disclaimer reading, “THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT.”

Around the same time, Napa County resident and activist James Hinton filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing Thompson of failing to report in-kind wine donations for a fundraising event last August. The FEC has yet to rule on the complaint.

Dowling called it “a politically motivated complaint filed by a former opponent,” adding, “The campaign takes rigorous steps to comply with the law in all its activities.”

Finally, each candidate has slammed the other for living outside the 4th District, with campaign proxies pitching stories to reporters about that particular angle for months.

After Politico picked up that story this week, Thompson’s campaign on Wednesday circulated a press release noting that Jones, who bought a house in Napa in 2021, didn’t register to vote there until January 2025, about eight months ahead of his campaign launch. Before that, his home of record, or at least voting record, was in the Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco.

Members of the House of Representatives aren’t legally bound to live in the district they represent. But Dowling, Thompson’s campaign manager, called it dishonest in Jones’ case.

“Eric Jones needs to answer one simple question: Did you lie time and time again to voters about when you moved here, or were you committing voter fraud by voting somewhere you did not live for three years?” Dowling said in his email.

Jones’ campaign manager, Brian Parvizshahi, called the accusations “Trumpian hits from a Washington-based elite.”

Eric and his wife Rachel first moved to Sonoma County when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. “Then, they chose Napa as the community to raise their children in 2021,” Parvizshahi said in a written statement. “Like many working parents, their focus was on raising young kids, settling into new homes and working long hours — life during a pandemic got in the way of them going to the DMV to update their ballots’ mailing addresses.”

Jones, meanwhile, sent out a political mailer recently that accused Thompson of declaring a Washington D.C. home as his primary residence for years, citing mortgage records.

“Anyone who knows Mike Thompson knows he was born, grew up and still lives in our district,” Dowling told The Press Democrat. “If the Eric Jones campaign really believed he lived in Washington DC, why was a member of their team stalking the Congressman’s house in St. Helena for two months?”

Back in Davis, Johansson and Oldwin feel stung by their experience. A friend of theirs who is involved in a local campaign, unrelated to the 4th District, recently called to ask the couple if they’d be willing to host an election night party.

“I said no,” Oldwin told The Press Democrat. “So, yes, there has been a chilling effect.”

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or [email protected]. On X (Twitter) @Skinny_Post.