As a heads up, this article is going to have multiple links to X (Twitter). Apologies in advance, it’s unavoidable when that’s the social media site where the people discussed post.

After I published Monday’s article about Santa Monica city councilmember Lana Negrete partying with Donald Trump’s HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Jenny McCarthy, a reader notified me that Negrete spoke at a bitcoin conference headlined by Trump’s vice president J.D. Vance.

Below are the headline image from the conference and Negrete’s speaker listing at the event.

https://www.maxim.com/news/bitcoin-2025-every-speaker-at-the-worlds-largest-bitcoin-event/

https://www.maxim.com/news/bitcoin-2025-every-speaker-at-the-worlds-largest-bitcoin-event/

As you can see at the link, the conference had a stacked speakers list full of other Republican electeds and Trump White House officials.

Negrete posted a picture of herself on stage at the conference with Dom Bei,

https://x.com/lananegrete22/status/1928336152303395178

Bei is the former head of the Santa Monica firefighters’ union and the current head of the Proof of Workforce, a scam to get public pensions to “invest” in bitcoin. Bei ran for a seat on the board of the California public pension, CalPERS, on an explicit platform of getting CalPERS to light money on fire on cryptocurrency.

https://x.com/workforcebtc/status/1899816619855274269

https://x.com/Beiwatch/status/2087272048074915903

Bei’s Proof of Workforce operation was the partner for Santa Monica’s bitcoin office, which was initiated by Negrete placing it on the July 9, 2024 city council agenda, in another example of Negrete intermingling her private interests and public responsibilities. As I discussed in Monday’s article, bitcoin is also a key binding thread for Negrete not just to Republicans at home but violent autocrats abroad such as El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele following his making bitcoin legal tender in 2021. Below is a photo shared by Negrete posing with Bukele’s ambassador to the United States at a bitcoin conference in January 2025, at which Negrete was a featured speaker.

https://x.com/lananegrete22/status/1885034699820863878

Santa Monica city councilmember Lana Negrete posing for a picture with Trump HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at one of RFK’s 2024 presidential campaign events. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cus-rcJLJYq/?img_index=5

In a previous article, I explored how the Blue Wave Democratic Club that endorsed Lana Negrete, Ashley Oelsen, and Doug Trussler this year is a rightwing astroturf group controlled in part by Negrete herself. As I discuss in this article, Negrete’s involvement with this rightwing group is no accident or coincidence. Her political affinities range from endorsing El Salvador’s violent autocrat Nayib Bukele, to Republican election conspiracy theories and voter suppression efforts, and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Social media posts by Los Angeles for RFK 2024 organizer Zeke Arthur Hindle (to the left of RFK in the above picture) place Negrete at at least two of RFK’s 2024 presidential campaign events. The first event is where the above picture was taken where Negrete is posing with RFK. The two photos below are from the second event, showing Negrete posing with anti-vaccine activist Jenny McCarthy, who has been pushing the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism for over 20 years, and which was also attended by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence until June 19 of this year.

Negrete posing with Hindle and vaccine conspiracy theorist Jenny McCarthy at an RFK for President 2024 campaign event. https://www.instagram.com/p/CxZbuOgLKPV/?hl=en&img_index=3

Hindle posing with former Trump Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at an RFK for President 2024 campaign event. If you expand this image or the image of Negrete with McCarthy, you can see that Hindle has tagged Negrete, RFK, and Gabbard as all attending this event. https://www.instagram.com/p/CxZbuOgLKPV/?hl=en&img_index=6

As a I reported in 2024, Hindle quickly moved on from RFK’s presidential campaign to local Santa Monica politics. Negrete and Phil Brock went on to headline events hosted by Hindle under the banner of two groups which were nominally nonpartisan voter education efforts, but which both used Republican fundraising platforms and had ties to other Republican astroturf organizations. John Putnam, a Republican who switched his party registration just prior to running for Santa Monica city council in 2024 and who Negrete endorsed, has a picture of himself speaking at one of these events as his banner picture on his 2024 campaign Facebook account. Putnam has a history of large contributions to Republicans, only first giving to Democrats when he tried to run for city council as a Democrat, and this year, Putnam hosted a fundraiser for city council candidate Ashley Oelsen, whom Negrete has endorsed for this year’s city council race.

Negrete’s other endorsed 2026 city council candidate, Doug Trussler, claims to be a lifelong Democrat but like Putnam has no record of giving to Democrats at the state¹ or federal level until this year, when he decided to run for Santa Monica city council. His donation history includes a maximum donation to Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 presidential election and a combined $6,000 this year to the rightwing astroturf organization controlled by Negrete which endorsed his city council campaign.

When not attending RFK presidential campaign events, Negrete’s other pastimes include going on a podcast run by the far-right Epoch Times to whine about cancel culture, and going to El Salvador to speak at bitcoin conferences with the head of the Santa Monica firefighters union Dom Bei and to sing the praises of its authoritarian president Nayib Bukele for making the country safer (and for making bitcoin legal tender).

Readers may recognize Bukele’s name from new coverage of the El Salvadorian torture prison Donald Trump was illegally sending people to at the beginning of his current term. Indeed, Bukele was already long-known for creating a human rights crisis in El Salvador at the time Negrete visited in 2023. Negrete was not simply unaware of Bukele’s violent track record; she explicitly praises Bukele for making “harsh decisions”.

The Epoch Times podcast Negrete went on has been used to spread a number of conspiracy theories, including “QAnon, 2020 election fraud, and dangerous anti-vaccine fake science”, according to Santa Monica Democratic Club president Jon Katz in a 2024 interview with Santa Monica Next editor Damien Newton. Katz also noted Negrete identified herself as a regular viewer of the Epoch Times during her appearance on the podcast.

In August 2021, when the Santa Monica city council was considering mandating full COVID vaccination for all city employees, volunteers, and contractors (item 16.F at the linked city council meeting agenda), Negrete abstained, saying:

Partying with RFK, Jenny McCarthy, and Tulsi Gabbard at RFK’s campaign events and going on podcasts peddling vaccine conspiracy theories strongly suggests that unlike in 2021, when she says she only begrudgingly got the COVID vaccines because her music store business requires her to interact with the public, she would no longer make the same decision today. She would be far from the only rightwing politician to make this journey on vaccines. Trump himself has gone from demanding credit for the COVID vaccines to pushing conspiracy theories linking vaccines to autism.

Gabbard, whom Negrete attended the RFK presidential campaign event with, would later go to Georgia to oversee a federal raid of Fulton County elections warehouse during her time as Trump’s DNI in furtherance of Trump’s conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Alarmingly, Negrete is also on the record as repeating Republican talking points about voter ID being crucial for election integrity as recently as this year.

On October 9, 2025, a company called MyGovTools posted an ad on social media platforms including Instagram and LinkedIn featuring Santa Monica city councilmember and then-mayor Lana Negrete in city hall and the Santa Monica city logo. As discussed later in this article, Negrete is the CEO of MyGovTools and has a 50% ownership in it. Filming on ad in city hall for her private business is an improper use of her public office for private gain, as well as potentially illegal if MyGovTools did not have approved commercial filming permits (Santa Monica city code Chapter 6.110). The use of the city logo for private business purposes is expressly illegal under all circumstances (Santa Monica city code Chapter 2.32 section 10).

Stills from the 10/9/2025 MyGovTools ad, available at https://www.instagram.com/p/DPl_AY6kSSA/

In the ad, Negrete presents herself as an enthusiastic customer of MyGovTool’s newsletter services providing a testimonial about using their service for her councilmember newsletter. However, this spring, I received a tip that Negrete likely had an ownership stake in or similar financial relationship with the company. The tip included the fact that Negrete was cold contacting city councilmembers in other Los Angeles County cities attempting to drum up business for MyGovTools. At the time, my initial internet searches could not establish a connection between Negrete and the company beyond the ad and the fact that she uses and likes the service, so I turned to Public Record Acts requests to try to get an answer.

The first PRA request that came back was from West Hollywood. In this response, I received documents including the below email from Negrete to West Hollywood city councilmember John Erickson. I also received an identical email sent to West Hollywood city councilmember Chelsea Byers. In these emails, Negrete says she “helped build GovTools” (MyGovTools and GovTools seem to be used interchangeably in company correspondence).

Page 1 of 2 of an email from Negrete to Erickson soliciting business for MyGovTools. “WeHo 4660-0000003.pdf” at this Dropbox link in the WeHo folder.

The response also included a solicitation Negrete sent to to Byers via text message.

Text message from Negrete to Byers soliciting business for MyGovTools. “WeHo 4660-0000005.pdf” at this Dropbox link in the WeHo folder.

These PRA documents strongly suggested that it was correct that Negrete had a financial interest in MyGovTools. Additionally, the MyGovTools website indicated that the company is owned by her longtime friend Evan Meyer, whom she has done business with in the past. Meyer’s ownership is not stated explicitly on the MyGovTools website, but the link under About/Podcasts is to Meyer’s video podcast series. But neither of these conclusively ruled out that she was simply an enthusiastic customer as presented in the ad. So I submitted a PRA request to Santa Monica requesting all communications between Negrete and Meyer regarding topics such as MyGovTools.

This did not prove particularly fruitful. The city took nearly three months to provide me with a first production of documents.¹ I was told that over 8,000 pages of potentially responsive records had been found by staff, but what I ultimately received was only 50 pages, and a promised second production has still not been provided as of this publishing, nearly six months after I submitted the PRA request.

The document provided by the city is “R040665_Search1-Emails_Redacted.pdf” available at this Dropbox link. In these emails Negrete was more heavily involved in business activity, and even sends an email containing the sentence “I have copied in my partner Evan Meyer regarding My Gov Tools” to a potential customer, but I still felt I did not have sufficiently conclusive evidence proving a financial relationship between Negrete and MyGovTools beyond paying for the service.

However, once Negrete finally filed her 2025 annual FPPC Statements of Economic Interests (Form 700) nearly two months late,² everything finally clicked into place. She indicated on this submission that she has an ownership stake in a business entity called 5W.com LLC, which is described as a “Newsletter Service”.

Taken from the Schedule A-2 of Negrete’s latest Form 700, downloaded from https://form700search.fppc.ca.gov/ The full document “Negrete_Lana_2025_City of Santa Monica_CityTown Council Member_Annual.pdf” is available at this Dropbox link.

Searching for this business on the California Secretary of State’s website, I found that she’s the 50% owner and CEO of this company; Meyer owns the other 50%.

The first page of the Statement of Information Limited Liability Company for the LLC 5W.com, which lists Negrete as 50% and CEO of the company, with Evan Meyer owning the other 50%. Downloaded from https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/search/business The full document “B4013-2845.pdf” and an additional filing “B3960-9615.pdf” are available this Dropbox link

While the name of the company listed on these forms is 5W.com LLC and not MyGovTools, the nature of the MyGovTools business is also newsletters, and it seems exceedingly unlikely that Negrete co-owns two completely distinct newsletter companies with Meyer. More recent Instagram posts also explicitly identify Lana as Meyer's business partner in MyGovTools (see the Instagram post screenshotted below), and on pages 15 and 23 of the Santa Monica PRA response, there are references to “The 5 W’s web tool you mentioned” in an email from Raymond Diaz at Blue Shield CA, whom they were soliciting for business.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZy0ECsp5Q4/

Note: a repository of PRA response documents I received are available at the Dropbox link provided at several points in this article. I want to emphasize that the Malibu and Culver City PRAs only requested correspondence between the relevant city councilmember listed on MyGovTool’s homepage as using the service and Evan Meyer. No correspondence between those councilmembers and Negrete was requested from those cities, and yet she appears repeatedly in the correspondence as conducting business on behalf of MyGovTools.

Disclosure: I submitted a complaint about Negrete’s use of city hall and the city logo to film an advertisement for her business to the Santa Monica city attorney on September 22. As noted at the start of the article, city code Chapter 2.32 section 10 explicitly prohibits use of the city logo in the way Negrete used it in the MyGovTools ad. In this complaint I also requested that the city attorney review whether proper permits were filed under city code Chapter 6.110, which requires permits for commercial filming in city hall. I have not yet received a response to this complaint as of time of publishing. I also submitted a complaint regarding the late Form 700s to the FPPC on September 10, and received a response on September 21 that my complaint was the subject of an existing FPPC case, Case No. 2023-00649, and that my complaint was therefore incorporated into that case.

A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the city logo as the city seal. This has been corrected in the current version of the article. Santa Monica city code § 2.32.020(a) restricts use of both the city seal and the city logo to official city business.

In this year’s Santa Monica city council election, the Blue Wave Democratic Club has endorsed Lana Negrete, Ashley Oelsen, and Doug Trussler.

But what is the Blue Wave Democratic Club? It’s obvious enough what the name is intended to suggest. But looking at the group’s listed leadership, it quickly becomes clear that this is a rightwing astroturf operation operated by Negrete’s childhood friend and political ally Greg Morena; another political ally Los Angeles city councilmember Traci Park, whose district borders Santa Monica; and by Negrete herself.

The below screenshot shows the first capture of the group’s leadership page by the Internet Archive, from 5/19/2023.

The Blue Wave Democratic Club’s leadership as listed on their about page, as captured by the Internet Archive on 11/28/2023. This is the first appearance of this page in the Internet Archive. The homepage for this website first appears on 5/19/2023, at which time no leadership was listed on the website. https://web.archive.org/web/20231128224451/https://bluewavedemclub.org/about/

Greg Morena is a former Santa Monica city councilmember and as mentioned above, political ally of Negrete. The vice president at the time, Jacob Burman, is listed as a senior advisor to Los Angeles city councilmember Traci Park (whose district borders Los Angeles) on her official website. Rick Taylor is a longtime consultant to Park. Park was a longtime registered Republican before switching her party registration to Democratic to run for her council seat.

Justin Gordon? Big Traci Park supporter.

Apologies for the X link: https://x.com/Justin_G0rd0n/status/1897797438469296638

Julie Milligan? A westside political operative and one of the Park donors who triggered an $8,000 fine for excess contributions against Park in 2022.

In 2024, Blue Wave’s endorsements included then-incumbent Phil Brock and disgraced Los Angeles city councilmember Kevin de Leon (whose racism scandal occurred a year before they endorsed him). They also endorsed John Putnam, a Santa Monica city council candidate in 2024, who is another lifelong Republican until running for office in 2024. His donation history includes $25,000 to Mitt Romney and GOP PACs in the 2012 election cycle, a $2,500 max donation to Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 election cycle, and a donation to Republican Larry Elder in the 2021 recall against Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom.¹ In June of this year, Putnam was on Fox News talking up Republican Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt.

Today, Blue Wave’s listed leadership is five of the same seven individuals as in 2023.

https://bluewavedemclub.org/about/

Newcomer Josh Yeager, the legislative director for John Lee, a longtime Republican who became a registered independent after being involved in a massive corruption scandal for his then-boss Los Angeles City Councilmember Jose Huizar.

And from at least 2/2/2026 to 4/20/2026 (the last capture of the page by the Internet Archive as of now), the interim president of the club was, as mentioned at the start of the article, none other than Negrete herself.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260202140123/https://bluewavedemclub.org/about/

I’m sure Negrete had to work extremely hard “to have earned the endorsement of the Blue Wave Democratic Club”. She thanks for the club’s members for their endorsement in that Instagram post, but unlike the Santa Monica Democratic Club, the official arm of the Democratic party in Santa Monica, this astroturf organization provides zero transparency about their endorsement process. The SM Dem Club process involves every candidate being considered for endorsement filling out a questionnaire and conducting a video interview, both of which are posted online for SM Dem Club members to consider before voting collectively on the endorsements. This year, the SM Dem Club also held a candidate debate a week before the club’s endorsement vote. Following the vote, the club releases vote totals for each round of voting. The Blue Wave Democratic Club releases none of this, and membership in the astroturf organization also costs three times as much as membership in the real Dem Club.

In an upcoming article, I’ll explore why Negrete fits in so well with this collection of LA County rightwing politicians.

I can be reached on Signal at the username jason.917