After only a few hours of deliberations, a jury delivered a crushing verdict for Santa Clara Vice Mayor Anthony Becker, finding him guilty of leaking an explosive civil grand jury report on the San Francisco 49ers’ influence on the city and then lying about it under oath.
Becker was full of emotion as the decision was read aloud in Santa Clara County Superior Court in Morgan Hill on Thursday. His husband, Abel Cardona, watched from the front row of the courtroom.
Becker, who remains free on his own recognizance, has maintained his innocence since he was first indicted in April 2023. Chris Montoya, a deputy public defender who is part of Becker’s five-person legal team, declined to comment until after sentencing on Jan. 31.
Following the verdict, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said “the criminal justice system depends on people telling the truth.”
“When an elected official lies under oath, it undermines the criminal justice system, and that’s what Mr. Becker did,” Rosen told reporters.
Perjury, a felony, carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison, but Rosen said the crime doesn’t feel like “a state prison case.”
“There does need to be some accountability whether that’s a combination of jail time and fines because this is very serious what the defendant did,” he said.
Becker’s trial began a day after the Nov. 5 election in which the vice mayor came in dead last in a three-way race for his seat, and the prosecution called more than a dozen witnesses to prove its case. Becker opted not to take the stand, and his legal team called no witnesses in his defense.
Rahul Chandhok, the San Francisco 49ers’ former chief of communications, served as the prosecution’s star witness. He testified at the beginning of the trial that Becker had leaked the bombshell Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury report, titled “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” which accused Becker and other members of the council of having an improper relationship with the 49ers and holding closed door meetings with team lobbyists that potentially violated state law.
That report was released a month shy of Election Day in 2022 when Becker unsuccessfully challenged Mayor Lisa Gillmor, a critic of the NFL team that began playing at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara in 2014, for her seat.
The NFL team spent heavily on the election that year, shelling out more than $1.4 million trying to get Becker elected and another roughly $1 million attacking Gillmor.
Chandhok testified that Becker sent him the report on Oct. 6, 2022, via Signal, an encrypted messaging app where the messages can be scheduled to disappear. The report was set to be released publicly on Oct. 10 but appeared in several media outlets on Oct. 7.
The 49ers quickly worked to get ahead of the story, describing the report as a “hatchet job” and investigating whether any of the jurors were biased.
Rosen criticized the 49ers outside of the courtroom on Thursday for attacking members of the civil grand jury.
“We have a lot of large companies in this Valley: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, the list goes on and on,” he said. “The behavior in this case of the 49ers is not something that I have seen with any of those other companies.”
Brian Brokaw, a spokesperson for the 49ers, said in a statement on the verdict that they “respected the outcome of the legal process and look forward to continuing to work with Santa Clara to maximize the benefits of Levi’s Stadium for the community.”
The civil grand jury investigated the leak in late 2022 but didn’t find the source. When testifying under oath to the civil grand jury, Becker said he didn’t leak the report.
In a social media post, Gillmor said that Becker’s “felony conviction highlights a deeply troubling and consistent pattern of misconduct and betrayal of public trust in Santa Clara.”
“As multiple Grand Jury reports have documented, it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to undue influence and lack of transparency in the way the City Council and some City staff interact with the 49er organization,” Gillmor said. “The people of Santa Clara deserve a government that operates legally and ethically.”
During closing arguments on Wednesday, Deputy District Attorney Jason Malinsky sought to persuade the jury that Chandhok had “no reason to lie” about Becker being the source of the leak.
“What are his motivations?” Malinsky asked. “He was given immunity. He was actually forced under court order to testify.”
Meanwhile, Montoya attempted to convince the jury “that the prosecution failed.”
He argued that the defense revealed that evidence had been destroyed by the prosecution during the investigation, that they uncovered new evidence, and that the forensic team who reviewed Becker and Chandhok’s devices were unqualified.
Montoya described the case against the vice mayor as circumstantial and said that many questions remained unanswered, such as why Councilmember Kevin Park had a seven-minute call with Chandhok just after 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 6 as the 49ers crafted their response.
“They failed to complete a thorough investigation,” he said on Wednesday. “They failed to prove Mr. Becker is guilty.”
While the prosecution was unable to find any message or email on Becker’s devices that pointed toward his leaking the report, Malinsky said that it wasn’t just one piece of evidence that proved his guilt. Santa Clara Councilmember Suds Jain corroborated Chandhok’s testimony, he noted. The recently re-elected councilmember testified that Becker told him in a phone call that he gave the report to Silicon Valley Voice, a local news outlet.
“When you look at the totality of the evidence, there is only one conclusion — that Becker committed both of these crimes,” Malinsky said in his closing arguments.
