California Governor Gavin Newsom showed up at a restaurant in a county where indoor dining is not allowed, but the governor’s office said he did not dine at the restaurant.
He was there to meet with the restaurant owners, who received a grant of aid, Newsom spokesman Daniel Lopez told Fox News.
Newsom posted a video on his TikTok account with celebrity George Lopez talking about where to look for eligibility for the coronavirus vaccine. Newsom and Lopez were in Fresno, California, and are inside the Los Amigos restaurant.
A separate video of Lopez was posted on the Facebook page of the Los Amigos restaurant. Lopez was endorsing the restaurant’s food.
Fresno is at the strictest purple level, which does not allow meals indoors.
In early November, Newsom was spotted having dinner at the elegant French Laundry in Napa for the birthday of a longtime adviser. The covered dinner was not open to the public in Napa. Newsom won a bitter reaction to the tour, which he later called “a mistake”
“I should have stood up and … driven back to my home … The spirit of what I am preaching the whole time has been contradicted,” he said. “I need to preach and practice, not just preach.”
Newsom said in his apology that he wanted to “assume” his mistake, because he feared it would undermine the security message he wanted to send to residents.
“I’m doing the best I can every day to try to model better behavior,” he said.
The French Laundry tour helped start a recall effort that is gaining momentum in California. Organizers of the Newsom recall effort say they have collected 1,825 million signatures. They need 1.5 million signatures by March 17, but they represent a fraction of the signatures to be rejected.
Newsom’s competitor if the recall race is successful, Kevin Faulconer, hit the governor for showing up at a restaurant when other people in the county were not allowed to do so.
“Gavin Newsom continues to show that he is nothing but an incompetent elitist who doesn’t give a damn about California families,” said John Burke, Kevin Faulconer’s communications director for Governor, in a statement to Fox News. “Their failures have damaged our state’s economy and affected the lives of millions of families. We are going to call him back and start a tour of California to get our state on track. ”