California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s long-awaited tax return reveal landed with all the transparency of a locked filing cabinet.

After months of pressure, the governor finally let a select group of media outlets inspect hundreds of pages of documents, but only under rules that looked more like damage control than disclosure.

The California Post reported that Newsom allowed favored outlets to review 718 pages of tax records in Sacramento, while forbidding copies and limiting reporters to pen and paper.

The governor, who loves lecturing everyone else about openness, was not there to answer questions.

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That private showing came after Newsom had promised to make four years of tax records public.

Instead, the public got a filtered version through outlets that were given special access while others, including The Post, were left outside the room.

The staged release sparked immediate criticism from Republicans who said Newsom was trying to claim the halo of transparency without actually doing the transparent part.

For a governor with national ambitions, that is not exactly a confidence building exercise.

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“If the governor is truly committed to transparency, it makes little sense to pick and choose who that transparency extends to,” US Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former state legislator, told The Post.

Scott Meyers, a GOP candidate for Congress in California’s 30th Congressional District, added The Post: “If you want voters to trust you as a steward of their tax dollars, you should welcome that level of scrutiny.”

The records, according to notes taken by the chosen outlets, show Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, reported hefty annual income while presenting a far more carefully crafted public image.

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The couple brought in between 1.7 million dollars and 2 million dollars annually from 2022 through 2024.

The filings also showed the couple paid household staff nearly 200,000 dollars and wrote off Armani clothing that had originally cost about 45,000 dollars.

They later valued the donated clothing at 4,900 dollars when giving it to an Oakland restorative justice nonprofit, according to the Times.

Newsom also reported author income from his recent memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry.”

He collected 70,000 dollars in 2023 and another 75,000 dollars in 2024, not bad for a politician who tries to package himself as the scrappy underdog of California politics.

In 2021, the couple reported 3.5 million dollars in taxable income, boosted by roughly 1 million dollars from the sale of their home in wealthy Marin County.

Newsom’s official governor salary was only a slice of the family’s earnings, with much of the money tied to winery, restaurant and hospitality businesses placed in a blind trust after he took office.

The returns reportedly do not identify which individual businesses produced profits or losses.

That detail matters, especially when the same politician has spent years insisting that public officials should bare their finances for voters to inspect.

The filings also showed Siebel Newsom’s feminist film production company losing money.

Girls Club Entertainment lost about 37,000 dollars in 2022, while she reported just 11,700 dollars in earnings from the business, according to the Times.

At the same time, Siebel Newsom has reportedly collected at least 150,000 dollars per year from her nonprofit, The Representation Project, which promotes her films and related initiatives.

For ordinary Californians crushed by the cost of living, that setup may look a bit different from the glossy moral branding.

Newsom has long sold himself as a champion of financial disclosure.

During his 2018 run for governor, he released years of returns going back to 2011, then signed a 2019 law requiring gubernatorial candidates to disclose five years of federal returns before appearing on California’s primary ballot.

He also promised to keep releasing his own returns each year while in office. Yet until Friday, the public had not received tax records covering the years after 2020.

When The Post asked about the missing returns earlier this month, Newsom sounded surprised.

“I know you love taxes,” the governor joked, before turning to his favorite political security blanket, President Donald Trump.

Newsom insisted he had released his taxes “for decades,” and his office later said the newer filings would be shared by the end of July.

What his office did not say was that certain outlets had already been contacted and allowed to inspect the documents first.

His office tried to wave off the controversy by saying the filings were nothing special.

“They’re unremarkable and entirely consistent with what Californians already know from his annual Form 700 disclosures,” spokesperson Diana Crofts Pelayo previously told The Post.

“The governor publicly released his tax returns while he was on the ballot and is happy to go above and beyond by releasing the remaining years as well.”

The timing only adds to the scrutiny.

Newsom recently disclosed that he and his wife are subjects of a federal investigation, which he claims is politically motivated, while a source previously told The Post that one inquiry is examining Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s taxes.

Federal investigators also separately examined former Newsom chief of staff Dana Williamson, who pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return and lying to the FBI.

For a governor testing the waters for 2028, this carefully managed tax show may raise more questions than it answers.

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