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With less than a week to go until the upcoming November election in which Alameda County residents will make a final decision on a measure to recall first-term District Attorney Pamela Price, the pro- and anti-recall campaigns are continuing to battle one another in the push to win over voters.
More than a quarter million dollars poured into the pro-recall campaign in the most recent campaign finance reporting period from Sept. 22 to Oct. 19 in the final stretch of election season as Price, her supporters and her opponents blast one another in high-profile media appearances and announcements.
Over the past week, two prominent Tri-Valley residents – Rep. Eric Swalwell and Price’s predecessor, Nancy O’Malley – have ramped up their support for the pro-recall campaign to remove Price from office partway through the six-year term she was elected to in 2022.
Following a series of public exchanges between Swalwell and Price in the wake of the former’s press conference earlier in the month announcing his endorsement of the recall campaign, Swalwell issued a press release last week announcing that he’d retained legal counsel to pursue litigation against Price after she failed to retract what he called “untrue statements” her campaign made about him publicly in response to his endorsement.
In particular, the letter from Swalwell’s attorney Charles Stone that was sent to Price’s office on Oct. 19 points to remarks in an Oct. 2 Facebook post from her campaign following the recall alleging that Swalwell supports the death penalty – which his attorney called an “easily checked falsehood” – and that, as a former prosecutor in the office under O’Malley, Swalwell could be seeking to protect his image as Price’s office reveals new details and takes action to address issues Price said have been uncovered under her predecessor’s leadership.
Price’s campaign publicly acknowledged the letter and announcement from Swalwell in a Facebook post on Oct. 25, calling it “political grandstanding”.
Stone told the Weekly on Tuesday that while his office had not yet filed litigation against Price despite the timeline outlined in his Oct. 19 letter saying a legal complaint would be forthcoming within a week if the remarks in question weren’t retracted, the attorney was anticipating that the complaint would be filed soon.
“The congressman feels it’s important to hold the district attorney accountable for the truth,” Stone said. “The truth is not a casual thing, and when someone who is entrusted with such an important role takes the truth for granted, it is a strong indication that they are not suited for that role.”
The exchange between Swalwell and Price’s campaign came the same week that O’Malley held a virtual press conference on Oct. 23 in which she invited members of the media – excluding the Weekly – to announce her formal endorsement of the recall campaign and criticizing Price, her one-time political rival whom she had beat out in the election for her final term as DA starting in 2018.
“She is not qualified nor competent to hold that position,” O’Malley said at the press conference, according to KQED. “She ignores the rights of victims. She’s used this office improperly. She uses it to intimidate. Of course, she takes any chance to criticize me erroneously for things that I didn’t do.”
Price and her campaign held their own press conference hours later announcing details of an investigation by her office into alleged juror discrimination and prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty cases going back decades.
“I presume that Ms. O’Malley must have heard about this press conference today and that we were at a point where we felt compelled to reveal to the public the kind of complicity in this office to prosecutorial misconduct,” Price said. “What the public should know is that this must be a sign apparently that we must be getting close to uncovering the role that Ms. O’Malley played as the former leader of this office while this prosecutorial misconduct actually was taking place.”
O’Malley herself was facing a recall effort organized by the Justice 4 Oscar Grant Coalition in May 2021 after she declined to reopen the case amid a report that was made available to the public 10 years after court proceedings. The recall effort ultimately did not go to the ballot, with O’Malley announcing the same month that she would not be seeking an additional term in the seat at the end of 2022 – paving the way for a fresh face in the office, which would be Price after defeating O’Malley’s choice successor Terry Wiley.
Critiques from Swalwell, O’Malley, and other supporters of the recall campaign have centered around allegations that Price is “soft on crime” with perpetrators of violent crime being offered plea deals and sentences lighter than the maximum allowed by law since she’s taken office.
One notable exception to that characterization is Price’s record on police accountability. Earlier in the same week, she’d held a press conference at her office on Oct. 21 announcing charges against at least two Oakland police officers for allegedly driving while intoxicated while on duty. Weeks after taking office in January 2023, Price announced that she was reopening investigations into the police shootings of eight different people within the county.
Those cases included the death of Cody Chavez, who was shot by Pleasanton police officers during a 2022 domestic violence standoff in which Chavez ultimately left the apartment he’d barricaded himself in while holding a knife and moving toward police surrounding the area. A month prior, O’Malley had cleared the officers involved of any criminal wrongdoing. In addition to being revisited by Price’s office under the Public Accountability Unit that she formed upon taking office, that case is the subject of an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit in federal court.
For their part, Price’s supporters have contrasted her record with O’Malley’s, who only brought charges forward against one law enforcement officer behind a fatal shooting during her 13-year tenure, and pointed to ongoing campaign contributions from police unions and other law enforcement groups to both O’Malley and the recall campaign.
At the end of the same week in which Price squared off with both Swalwell and O’Malley, the final campaign finance reports ahead of the election were filed by the Oct. 24 deadline for the reporting period between Sept. 22 and Oct. 19, showing a total of $282,500 raised during that period for the pro-recall campaign and $41,527 raised by the anti-recall campaign.
Contributors to the pro-recall campaign include the Alameda County Prosecutors Association with a $40,000 donation, as well as a $10,000 donation from the Alameda County Police Officers Association and a $20,000 donation from the Deputy Sheriff’s Association of Alameda County. No individual donations from Tri-Valley residents or groups were reported during the most recent period.
Despite the additional flow of cash in recent months, bringing the total contributions received by the pro-recall campaign to $1,278,929, the campaign continues to be in debt as of Oct. 24, with $1,409,704.63 in payments made over the course of election season.
The anti-recall campaign is also in the red after the most recent campaign finance report, with $283,848.22 in monetary contributions as of Oct. 19 and $314,457.87 in payments made. Pleasanton residents John Bauer, Megan Burns and Wendy Wong were among the contributors to the anti-recall campaign during the most recent reporting period, donating a total of $829.32.
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