Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard — who got the job after his predecessor was caught lying to reporters — has always seemed to me a fairly robotic center-right spinmeister, delivering carefully scripted comments without much feeling or human warmth. Or maybe he just hates me and the Guardian, as I’ve heard from others at City Hall, which is why he’s generally fairly unresponsive to our requests and terse when he finally does answer. For example, I had to hound him for days, even after he’d missed the Sunshine Ordinance deadline for the resignation letters Newsom requested and blown off a 10 a.m. appointment with me, before I could finally see the documents and ask him a few questions about them in his office on Monday, which he answered while distractedly looking at his computer almost the entire time.
That was when I was able to finally corner him into admitting that Newsom didn’t seek legal advice before announcing his unorthodox and overreaching demand for everyone’s resignations, a scoop that the Fog City Journal followed up today with a story on whether Ballard had lied to them and other reporters. So today, I followed up with an e-mail to Ballard (CCed to FCJ, the Chron, and the Examiner, who have also sought a straight answer) asking a simple question: Precisely when did Newsom seek legal advice on his resignation request plan? His answer, delivered a couple hours later, follows: