Chula Vista Mayor John McCann’s role in helping a South Bay businesswoman convicted of fraud get an early release from prison is not new.
But it is newly relevant in a political sense as McCann wages what is widely described as an uphill battle against Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre to win an open county supervisor seat in a special election runoff on July 1.
In January 2021, President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Adriana Camberos, who then went by her married name of Shayota, after then-Deputy Mayor McCann and other community leaders wrote letters pleading for clemency for her.
Just over a week ago, Camberos was sentenced to more than a year in prison following her conviction in another massive fraud scheme. Combined, the two criminal enterprises totaled tens of millions of dollars.
Just months after her release in 2021, Camberos and her brother, Andres “Andy” Camberos, contributed thousands of dollars to independent committees that helped McCann win the Chula Vista mayor’s race the following year. They each also made $360 donations to his mayoral campaign, the maximum allowed to candidate-controlled committees.
Andy Camberos, a Chula Vista businessman, also was convicted in the latter fraud plot involving U.S. sales of discounted products meant for Mexico and sentenced to one year of home detention. McCann had said it was Andy Camberos who initially sought his help in getting an early release for his sister in 2021.
All this has been laid out in articles by inewsource, Voice of San Diego and The San Diego Union-Tribune surrounding the siblings’ recent sentencing.
They include new revelations about some of the large political donations to McCann. inewsource also reported that just two months after Adriana Camberos began serving her 26-month sentence, Andy Camberos made a $50,000 donation to a Trump re-election campaign committee.
There’s nothing good here for McCann, of course. The question is how backers of Aguirre, a Democrat, will use this and whether it hurts McCann’s campaign.
Being tied to people convicted of large-scale fraud is not a good look, especially as the Republican McCann is fashioning himself as the law-and-order candidate. That they spent a lot of money to get him elected mayor is much worse.
The money swirling around may raise suspicions, but McCann isn’t implicated in anything illegal. He has said to news organizations he was unaware during the mayoral campaign of the Camberos’ expenditures on his behalf.
Everyone misjudges character now and then. But at best, it may appear McCann got played by two big-time fraudsters who, after he assisted them, helped finance his political ascent.
Then there’s the potential for this to further tie McCann to Trump. The Camberoses aside, Aguirre signaled she’ll be making that connection. ed voters in South Bay’s supervisorial District 1 are 2-to-1 Democrats over Republicans. In November, Trump did better in the region than before, but still lost by an overwhelming margin.
Granted, the voter registration difference may not mean as much in a low-turnout special election.
The key impact of the Camberos factor may be whether it affects McCann’s fundraising. It didn’t scare off the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, which announced its endorsement of McCann immediately after the recent coverage.
This district election has outsized importance for the entire county because it will determine which political party controls the majority of the five-member Board of Supervisors, which is currently split between two Democrats and two Republicans.
Even before the latest spate of stories, some business interests were weighing the odds of a McCann win, and whether it was a worthy investment given the potential for ending up on the wrong side of a potential Democratic majority.
The District 1 seat opened up with the surprise resignation late last year by Nora Vargas, who said she would not serve the second term she had just won in a landslide.
McCann, the only major Republican in the primary, easily gained the most votes in advancing to the runoff. He was well-funded, but with the battle over which Democrat would face him, he received little scrutiny.
Despite tough, big-spending competition, Aguirre came in second, with more than twice the votes of San Diego City Councilmember Vivian Moreno, who finished in third. The runoff is shaping up with a familiar dynamic: a business-oriented conservative Republican against a labor-d progressive Democrat.
The election may turn on which candidate voters think will best handle issues that directly affect their lives — housing, homelessness, crime, Tijuana sewage spills, the local economy and protecting public services amid federal cuts, to name a handful.
There will be others.
After Adriana Camberos was released about halfway through her sentence in 2021, McCann told the Union-Tribune he vouched for her because he believed “she got caught up in something she did not fully know about,” and called her “an incredibly good person.”
In late April, McCann told the Voice of San Diego he was “saddened (Adriana) chose to engage in illegal activity after she. . . was given a remarkable opportunity to restore her life.”
McCann and his campaign certainly knew this would all come up again. He suggested the Aguirre campaign was dredging up a 5-year-old story, according to inewsource.
But dismissing troublesome developments as old news doesn’t always work in politics.
What they said
Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman), founder of Punchbowl News.
“Here’s a bizarre congressional story. In March, House Homeland Security Chair Mark Green sold his townhouse in D.C. to an entity owned by Darrell Issa. Issa paid $1.5M for the property. Now Issa leases the property to Speaker Mike Johnson. . . “
