Why this matters
A letter Chula Vista Mayor John McCann wrote to help a South County woman get her fraud sentence cut by President Donald Trump in 2021 has become an issue in the District 1 Supervisor race. The winner of the race will have a major influence over county policy for the next four years.
As the race for the District 1 seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors enters its final weeks, the role Chula Vista Mayor John McCann played in the commutation of a South County woman four years ago continues to reverberate.
Last week, McCann’s opponent, Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, called on McCann to release a letter he wrote supporting the commutation of Adriana Camberos. Her 26-month prison sentence for her role in a food counterfeiting scheme ran out of the Otay Mesa business she operated with her former husband was commuted by President Donald Trump on his last day in office in 2021.
Camberos and her brother Andres — who solicited the letter from McCann and others — were recently convicted in a second food scheme. Adriana Camberos was sentenced to a year in prison.
“John McCann successfully lobbied Donald Trump to free a criminal who’s now going back to prison for even more fraud,” Aguirre said in a news release. “Voters have a right to know what John McCann said to Donald Trump to release this criminal. If John McCann wants to lead the County, he needs to come clean on what he said to Trump, not keep covering it up.”
McCann did not reply to a request for comment on the Aguirre campaign blast. Meanwhile, the Camberos-McCann connection from four years ago still hangs over the race, and there are questions over the timeline of events that led to the letter writing campaign — and large campaign contributions the Camberos siblings made to support McCann’s race for Chula Vista mayor in 2022.
Adriana Camberos was a largely unknown businesswoman and even more anonymous federal inmate when Trump selected her for commutation, which cut her sentence nearly in half.
She had been convicted along with others for a scheme involving 5-hour Energy drinks, which the company owned by her and her former husband purchased from the manufacturer at a reduced price, with the promise that they would be sold in Mexico.
Instead the couple sold the products, after stripping off the Spanish-language labels, back to the U.S. — at the full, and higher, U.S. market price. Later the company manufactured its own brew that attempted to approximate the ingredients of the real deal, before they were caught.
After she was released, Camberos joined her brother — and according to records in the federal criminal case against them, started defrauding companies nearly right away. This new scheme was more elaborate, defrauded more companies, lasted longer and was more lucrative — until they were indicted in September 2023.
McCann has said he wrote the letter at the request of Andres Camberos after meeting him, and after McCann said he researched the case. But when the meeting occurred is not precisely clear.
He told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2021 that he had met Andres Camberos in high school. But later, after the pair had been indicted, McCann told the U-T in October 2023 that he did not know Camberos in high school.
That makes sense. The two men are about a decade apart in age.
In that 2023 U-T story and in recent news articles McCann has said he first met Camberos in late 2020. He told Voice of San Diego in April that he met Andres Camberos during a tour of his Grasshopper cannabis business.
Camberos opened the business in November 2020, according to a news release from the city. It was the first legal cannabis business in Chula Vista.
However, that late 2020 date does not line up with a New York Times report from September that detailed individuals Trump had pardoned or commuted, who — like Camberos — later committed crimes.
The story said that the Camberos family filed a formal petition seeking commutation for Adriana Camberos “before Ms. Camberos finished her second month in prison.”
Court records show Camberos began serving her sentence in December 2019. Two months later makes it February — which would be early 2020, not late 2020.
In written responses last week to questions from inewsource, McCann reiterated that he met Andres Camberos in “late 2020,” and that is when Andres Camberos asked him to write a letter for his sister — which would have been months after the commutation petition was filed.
inewsource asked McCann for the letter during an interview April 18, but he responded that he did not have a copy.
Further clouding the timeline, Andres Camberos appeared on a podcast that aired on Jan. 22, 2021. He discussed the long process behind becoming a licensed cannabis business in Chula Vista.
When asked if there was someone in city government who helped “walk him through the process,” Camberos mentioned two people. One was then-Councilmember Jill Galvez. And the second was McCann.
Camberos explained that under Chula Vista’s regulatory scheme, council members are excluded from reviewing or issuing cannabis licenses.
He also likened McCann and Galvez to “an advocate” and specifically said of McCann, “I’m like, ‘Hey, John, we need this,’ or ‘We’re inquiring about this,’ and at the very least they can point you in the right direction so you’re not making a million phone calls and getting a voicemail.”
Chula Vista began accepting applications for cannabis business licenses in 2019. When Grasshopper’s retail store opened in April 2021, Camberos said it had taken two years to open the business. That time frame means he could have contacted McCann before late 2020.
In his written response McCann said he was simply doing his job as an elected official. “Regarding the podcast, my job as a city councilmember and now mayor is to respond to inquiries and direct people to the appropriate city department,” he wrote.
After Adriana Camberos was released, both siblings each contributed $360 to McCann’s mayoral campaign, and later much more to an independent committee run by the conservative Lincoln Club of San Diego County.
Campaign finance reports show that in August 2022 the committee received a total of $30,000 from two contributions made in the name of two companies the siblings owned and used in the fraud scheme.
The records further show that Adriana Camberos individually contributed $20,000 to the committee in October 2022.
The independent committee of the Lincoln Club spent more than $100,000 opposing McCann’s opponent in the mayoral race. By law, such committees can not coordinate efforts with a political campaign.
McCann and Aguirre are squaring off for a seat on the county Board of Supervisors representing South County, which became vacant when ex-Supervisor Nora Vargas abruptly quit in December.
The winner of the July 1 election will determine the makeup of the board, which is now evenly split 2-2 between Republicans and Democrats. A majority for one side or the other will have enormous influence over how the board tackles problems like homelessness and housing, crime, development, and quality of life issues.
Type of Content
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
