Late on April 8, in the headquarters of the Republican Party of San Diego County, Carl DeMaio had three negotiators representing him. He had just failed to get the party’s Central Committee to endorse his run for State Assembly even though it had already endorsed his opponent. The whole episode had left his ally, then party chair Paula Whitsell, vulnerable to losing her position.

One of his negotiators was Corey Gustafson.

Gustafson is now the party chairman and he’s overseeing a dramatic enforcement action against DeMaio that could mobilize the party against him in a way that would have been shocking a few years ago.

Or maybe it should have been expected. Almost every one of DeMaio’s 20 years in San Diego have featured dramatic fallouts with friends and former allies. But his ability to fire up conservative voters and his platform as a former San Diego City Councilmember, talk-radio host and failed candidate for mayor and congress have kept him in an influential position in the Republican Party. This week, however, many of his few remaining supporters at the Central Committee turned against him after a long-running feud with police officers led to a series of increasingly vicious conversations.

All of them had to do with the agreement Gustafson helped negotiate for DeMaio that night — an agreement Gustafson now says DeMaio broke. Gustafson’s decision could unleash a torrent of support for DeMaio’s opponent in the race to represent the 75th Assembly District in Sacramento. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are already flowing in to support Andrew Hayes, who is running for the seat and now the local party may help much more.

How we got here: In the weeks before April 8, Whitsell tried to tell the party’s Central Committee that its endorsement of Hayes in the California 75th Assembly District was just for the primary. Now that DeMaio was in the race and had gotten more votes than Hayes in the primary, she wanted the Executive Committee of the Central Committee to move the endorsement to DeMaio.

This move would not be just symbolic. Parties are allowed to spend as much as they want communicating with voters who registered to vote and selected the party as their preferred party. Candidates can direct donors to the party and the party can send mailers or other communications to registered voters. The candidates and parties can coordinate on that spending, freeing up the candidate to focus resources on independents or members of another party. And when the Republican Party, for example, sends information to voters who registered as Republicans, it can mention its endorsed candidates as part of the family of candidates the party supports.

Whitsell wanted those benefits to flow to DeMaio instead of Hayes in their increasingly bitter fight for the Assembly seat Republican Assemblymember Marie Waldron is vacating.

Republicans across the county cried foul. U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa filed an ethics complaint, accusing Whitsell of working against a party endorsed candidate, a taboo of the highest order. Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey said it was a violation of party rules and longstanding tradition: Hayes had gotten the endorsement from two-thirds of the members of the Republican Central Committee and that endorsement had always been secure through the primary and runoff elections. Former San Diego City Councilmember Scott Sherman helped squash the move at the party’s Executive Committee meeting.

But then Whitsell removed Sherman from the Executive Committee and the battle reached a new level. Ultimately, she didn’t have the votes and worse for her, had left many members of the Central Committee wanting her out as well.

Hence the negotiations on April 8. The Committee wanted to see peace with DeMaio but keep the endorsement for Hayes intact.

They forged an agreement: Hayes would keep the endorsement but he would not get to use money from the party’s Victory Fund. He would not appear on the Republican Party’s voter guide mailer or door hangers. And the party would not mention the 75th Assembly District on its website.

In other words, he didn’t get any of the actual advantages of the party endorsement. But he also wouldn’t face any headlines that he had lost it and DeMaio would not get to tout that he got it.

In exchange, DeMaio agreed to stop trying to get the endorsement and he would not recruit or endorse candidates that the party did not endorse. Whitsell agreed to resign immediately and one of the negotiators working on DeMaio’s behalf, Gustafson, would become chair.

Gustafson signed a piece of paper with all the terms. So did five other members of the negotiations, including Whitsell and past chair Tony Krvaric, who were also representing DeMaio. They reached DeMaio on the phone who verbally consented.

The deal lasted until this week: Sept. 12 at 6 p.m., to be exact. A wide array of prominent local Republicans were waiting to see what would happen at that point as indicated by this post from Amy Reichert, who is running for vice chair of the Central Committee.

“Someone recently bullied, threatened, and tried to bribe me. If you’re just Lorena Gonzalez in a Republican grifter suit, I will release the dogs of war against you. You have until 6 pm,” she wrote.

She was referring to DeMaio. And it was not her deadline, actually. But he didn’t meet it, nonetheless.

What happened: DeMaio has long had a feud with police officers. It goes back to his time on the San Diego City Council. The city’s pension crisis was beginning its second decade of producing relentlessly bad headlines and, worse, huge bills for the struggling city government to pay. He and former Mayor Jerry Sanders pushed in different ways for a measure that would end pensions for future employees. But Sanders and Republican City Councilmember Kevin Faulconer wanted to exempt future fire fighters and police officers from the measure.

DeMaio did not. Finally they agreed to a compromise: Fire fighters would not get guaranteed pensions in the future. Police officers would.

The police officers have never forgotten, though. Over the years they perceived other slights from DeMaio (he was distracted by his phone at an officers funeral or he didn’t support death benefits). Brian Marvel, who ran the Police Officers Association then, now runs the Police Officers Research Association of California, or PORAC.

At the end of August, Marvel and PORAC filed a complaint about DeMaio and his political action committee, Reform California, with the Fair Political Practices Commission, the ethics watchdog for the state.

“Based on publicly available information, it appears that Mr. DeMaio has misused Reform California funds to benefit his Assembly campaign in direct violation of state law,” the complaint reads.

We’ve written about Reform California repeatedly. Republicans complained in 2021 it was a “promote-Carl organization.” And this year, our Tigist Layne wrote about how often DeMaio collected signatures and donations for ballot propositions that never became ballot propositions .

The police went further and argued that people were sending donations to Reform California for certain causes and he was laundering them to support his own campaign for Assembly.

“Here, it appears that Mr. DeMaio and Reform California have blurred the lines between the resources of each entity, resulting in illegal contributions from Reform California to Mr. DeMaio’s Assembly campaign,” PORAC’s complaint says.

DeMaio did not respond to a message from me seeking comment.

But I know he was not pleased with PORAC’s complaint. He took out his displeasure on Jared Wilson, the current president of the San Diego Police Officers Association. Wilson is running for a seat on the Poway City Council against Tony Blain.

The Republican Party endorsed Wilson. And, according to the agreement it had with DeMaio, he was not to endorse anyone other than the party’s preferred candidates. He could avoid a race, but he couldn’t support an opponent of the Republican Party’s endorsed candidates. Yet that’s what he was doing.

Gustafson took the unusual step of publishing an op-ed on the party’s news site . He called out DeMaio and Reform California for supporting Blain instead of Wilson.

“These actions are counterproductive to the conservative movement in San Diego County. Republicans unified behind a single candidate stand a better chance of beating one Democrat than do two Republicans splitting the vote. We must unify behind a single candidate rather than hand Democrats a victory and lose this seat,” he wrote.

DeMaio fired back with his own open letter to members of the Central Committee, blasting Gustafson, his one-time ally.

“For the past several months, the SDGOP has continued to make a series of embarrassing mistakes – failing to recruit candidates and forfeiting seats, putting incorrect information out repeatedly, sending triplicate mailings to donors causing them to question the waste, etc,” DeMaio wrote.

Gustafson gave DeMaio until Thursday night at 6 p.m. to withdraw his support of Tony Blain and either endorse Wilson in the Poway City Council race or just stay neutral.

DeMaio called Amy Reichert, who was running for vice-chair of the party on a slate with Gustafson and demanded she withdraw her support for Gustafson. She refused.

“Carl called me on the phone, pressuring me to renounce my support for Corey as Chair of the San Diego Republican Party in order to overthrow him. DeMaio went further, asking me to withdraw my name from the slate as Vice Chair, in a clear attempt to apply pressure on Corey through me. When I refused to betray Corey, Carl personally threatened me. His words were chilling: ‘If you do not renounce Corey as Chair, I will never support you in any leadership role in the San Diego Republican Party. Furthermore, when you want to run for something two years from now, I will not support or endorse you, and I will make sure you never hold political office,’” she wrote in what is now her own open letter.

Then she said, someone influential called her and said, if she would patch things up with DeMaio, they would support her for chair.

She refused.

“I want to make it clear that this is a matter of principle to me. I will never be bullied, threatened, or bribed, and I will not tolerate this kind of behavior within our party. It has become evident that Carl DeMaio is willing to weaponize his Reform California guide against good Republicans out of personal gain and spite,” she wrote.

That someone I found out was Michael Schwartz, the political director of San Diego County Gun Owners. Schwartz told me he did call Reichert and he did encourage her to run for chair. But that it had nothing to do with DeMaio.

He called it a “weird coincidence” that he called her to encourage her to run for the seat when everything was happening. But he did acknowledge he hasn’t been impressed with how the Central Committee has been run.

“If fighting with Carl and Reform is the direction the new Republican Central Committee leadership is going, I’m going to decline to cooperate every time,” Schwartz said. “Carl DeMaio has done a lot for my organization and a ton for Republicans and the Central Committee. If they disagree over a candidate, in this environment, you must work on the 99.9 percent of things you agree on.”

The other shoe: By Friday, Gustafson declared the agreement he had forged between DeMaio and the party and the Hayes campaign void. The party would now be free to support Hayes with all its resources and it would. Hayes epitomizes what a good public servant is, Gustafson wrote Friday to the Central Committee.

“In stark contrast, his opponent decided to place his own self-interest and political ambition above the good of the party. Mr. DeMaio failed to live up to his commitments. He endorsed candidates opposed to our officially endorsed Republican candidates, helping Democrats win seats that should be Republican. He has bullied, threatened and lied about current and future Republican Central Committee members. Enough is enough,” Gustafson wrote.

By Thursday, unrelated to this drama, $350,000 had flowed into a firefighter political action committee opposing DeMaio, including a random $50,000 donation from the company DoorDash.

Now, many thousands more could flow through the Republican Party.

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