After only a few hours of deliberations, a jury delivered a crushing verdict for Santa Clara Vice Mayor Anthony Becker: he is guilty of leaking an explosive civil grand jury report and then lying about it under oath.
The decision, which was delivered in Santa Clara County Superior Court in Morgan Hill on Thursday, comes as a blow to Becker who has maintained his innocence since he was first indicted in April 2023.
The trial began a day after the Nov. 5 election where Becker came in dead last in a three-way race to try and hold onto his seat. More than a dozen witnesses were called by the prosecution and none by the defense. Becker opted not to take the stand.
Rahul Chandhok, the San Francisco 49ers’ former chief of communications, served as the prosecution’s star witness, testifying at the very beginning of the trial that Becker was the one who leaked him the report.
“Unsportsmanlike Conduct” — a bombshell Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury report — was released a month shy of Election Day in 2022 as Becker unsuccessfully challenged Mayor Lisa Gillmor for her seat. The report accused Becker and several 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.
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 said Becker sent him the report on Oct. 6, 2022 via Signal, an encrypted messaging app where the messages between the two were set to disappear after a certain amount of time. The report was set to be released on Oct. 10, but appeared in several media outlets on Oct. 7.
The 49ers quickly worked to get ahead of the story, calling the report a “hatchet job” and investigating whether any of the jurors were biased.
During closing arguments on Wednesday, Deputy District Attorney Jason Malinsky tried to persuade the jury that Chandhok had “no reason to lie.”
“What are his motivations?” Malinsky asked. “He was given immunity. He was actually forced under court order to testify.”
While the prosecution was unable to find any message or email on Becker’s devices that pointed toward him leaking the report, Malinsky said that it wasn’t just one piece of evidence that proved his guilt, but all of it together.
“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.
But Chris Montoya, a deputy public defender who is part of Becker’s five-person legal team, told 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 called the case against the vice mayor “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.”