Last Friday afternoon, George Gascon’s office announced he was backing off on some of the progressive policies he’d put in place after taking office. Specifically, he now wanted to set up panels to evaluate “extraordinary” cases, including cases where juveniles could be tried as adults. At the time, I suggested Gascon might be reacting to the results of the SF School Board recall which had passed overwhelmingly earlier that week. But it turns out Gascon may have had another reason for changing his policies late on a Friday afternoon.

Monday, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin released audio from jailhouse calls between Hannah Tubbs and her father. In those calls, the now 26-year-old Tubbs was heard gloating about the light sentence she had received from the DA’s office. The crime in questioned happened in Jan. 2014, about two weeks before Tubbs (then known as James Tubbs) turned 18 years old. Tubbs molested a 10 year-old girl in a Denny’s bathroom but wasn’t caught until recently. Under DA Gascon’s guidelines, Tubbs was treated as a juvenile offender and received a 2-year sentence to be served in a juvenile detention facility.

Tubbs was convicted of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a Denny’s bathroom in Palmdale in 2014 at age 17.

In one call in November 2021 while in LA County custody, Tubbs makes extremely crude, disparaging remarks about the girl and his sexual desires for her at the time.

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) February 21, 2022

Again, Melugin released that audio and the accompanying story Monday. But it turns out he asked the DA’s office for comment about the audio last Thursday. So about 24-hours after informing Gascon that this audio would be published soon, the DA announced a new policy about charging some juveniles as adults. That’s definitely not a coincidence. And on Sunday, Gascon released a statement admitting Tubbs sentence may not have been sufficient:

“While for most people several years of jail time is adequate, it may not be for Ms. Tubbs,” Gascón said in the statement. “If we knew about her disregard for the harm she caused we would have handled this case differently. The complex issues and facts of her particular case were unusual, and I should have treated them that way. This change in policy will allow us the space to do that moving forward.”

DA Gascon’s office claims they weren’t aware of the jailhouse calls until last week when Melugin asked questions about them but not everyone is convinced.

The question is when did @GeorgeGascon’s executive team know about these call?.Every indication is that they knew about them early on, but only acted on them after ⁦@BillFOXLA⁩ sought comment last week. Only then did they reverse course. https://t.co/6IoKYExYwL

— Eric Siddall (@EricSiddall) February 21, 2022

Finally, there’s one more aspect to Tubbs’ case that is attracting attention. It turns out that Tubbs didn’t announce she was trans until after the arrest for the 2014 crime.

In this case the trans part is relevant. The perpetrator molested a child in the women's restroom at a restaurant at 17.

8 years later he only began identifying as a woman after being arrested for the crime.

CA is treating him as a child in the case. https://t.co/gU8GbHoD6y

— Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 (@chadfelixg) February 21, 2022

One of the recordings Melugin produced yesterday seems to suggest Tubbs’ decision to start identifying as a woman was strategic. Here she is telling her father to be sure to address her as “her” in court.

LISTEN: In another in-custody phone call, transgender child molester Hannah Tubbs instructs family to say “her” in court because “we’re trying to avoid the whole [sex offender] registering thing”, & “we’re also trying to avoid prison again.” Tubbs avoided both under @GeorgeGascon pic.twitter.com/Sniw4rUPBs

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) February 21, 2022

One person who is not happy about all of this is the victim of the crime who moved out of state and is reportedly still in counseling over the attack.

“The things he did to me and made me do that day was beyond horrible for a ten-year-old girl to have to go through,” she said. “I want him tried as an adult for the crimes he committed against me.”

She said the light sentence was offensive and hurtful and offered her “no true justice.”

“I’ve also heard that my attacker goes by she/them pronouns now,” she added. “I see it also unfair to try him as a woman as well, seeing how he clearly didn’t act like one on January 1st of 2014.”

So the bottom line here is that Gascon’s office got advance warning this very embarrassing story was coming and decided to get ahead of the backlash by announcing a change in policy and also some regret over the light sentence before the story came out. In this local news report a prosecutor calls what Gascon is doing “damage control.”

Finally, this news report is from about 6 weeks ago when the outlines of the Tubbs case were first becoming news. As you can see, police involved in the case were already angry about it then and Gascon was already trying to distance himself from the outcome, even though it was entirely based on his own policies.

Update: Deputy DA Jon Hatami, who has been an outspoken opponent of Gascon, told Fox News he’s seen emails that prove the DA’s office was aware of these jailhouse recordings long before Fox News got hold of them.

Alex Bastian, Gascon’s special adviser, said on “America’s Newsroom” earlier in the day that “the content of these jail calls was something that we did not know about” until Fox News’ Bill Melugin asked for comment on the alarming statements Tubbs made in calls with her father between November and January.

“That statement that Alex Bastian made is completely untrue,” Hatami said. “And it is a slap in the face to the victim in this case.”…

“I’ve seen emails, emails that show that George Gascon and his chain of command knew about those jail calls well before Bill Melugin published them,” Hatami said. “We have a DA who completely lacks any transparency, who’s sending a spokesperson on the news to say things that just aren’t true.”

Gascon was asked about it this afternoon and once again denied having heard about the tapes prior to last week.