Two years ago, Jesus Cardenas, a leading San Diego County Democratic political operative, abruptly vanished from public life.
He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of fraudulently obtaining Covid relief money by massively overstating the size of his political consulting firm’s workforce.
Forced to step away from his role as a go-to political consultant to a generation of Democratic power brokers, he became a political pariah.
The same politicians who once courted him suddenly acted as if they had never known him. His exile was swift and seemingly absolute.
It also may have been short-lived.
Starting late last year, a prominent labor union that has become a central player in local Democratic politics made a series of payments to a digital marketing firm that operates out of Cardenas’ Chula Vista home and lists as its CEO Cardenas’ wife, Jessica Garcia.
The company, Morena Media, has received a total of $18,000 from three separate political action committees maintained by Local 89 of the Laborers International Union of North America, according to campaign filings.
In an interview with Voice of San Diego, Cardenas said the money isn’t going to him and he isn’t working for LIUNA 89, as the union is known.
Cardenas said Morena Media is his wife’s company alone – and that he isn’t trying to stage a political comeback.
“She does digital communications for a variety of private and political clients,” Cardenas said of Garcia. “She has a long track record in politics.”
Cardenas said Garcia preferred not to talk to the media, because she disliked how some reporters treated her and Cardenas after his conviction. Through Cardenas, Garcia declined to comment for this story.
Cardenas said his wife’s preference for privacy should not be interpreted as an attempt to evade public scrutiny.
“Morena Media is a digital marketing and public relations firm that works with a variety of clients, not all of them in politics,” Cardenas said. “[Garcia] likes digital platforms. She’s a person in the digital world.”
The payments to Morena Media are for a variety of services, including campaign consulting, developing a social media and text message strategy for a San Diego City Council candidate who lost during the primary election and other unspecified email and internet services.
With the exception of a $1,000 payment for the strategy work in support of Josh Coyne, the losing council candidate, most of the payments to Morena Media come from a LIUNA political action committee that works on broader issues and does not support individual candidates.
The payments do not specify which political issues benefited from the company’s services.
Cardenas, who is 43, pleaded guilty in 2024 to two felony counts of fraudulently obtaining more than $200,000 in federal Covid relief and state unemployment funds.
Cardenas claimed his political consulting firm Grassroots Resources had 43 employees, enabling him to get a forgivable federal loan of $176,227 during the pandemic.
In fact, 40 of those employees worked for a marijuana dispensary that was one of Cardenas’ clients, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
The DA’s office also alleged that Cardenas’ political firm was under pressure to pay off debts at the time.
A judge sentenced Cardenas to 45 days of work furlough, 135 days in home detention and two years’ probation. The probation ended in March of this year.
Cardenas’ sister, Andrea Cardenas, pleaded guilty to the same charges. Prior to her conviction, she had served as a Chula Vista City Councilmember.
She resigned from the Council shortly before her conviction.
Cardenas himself also ran into trouble with the city’s Ethics Commission while serving as chief of staff for San Diego City Councilmember Stephen Whitburn and simultaneously running his political consulting business. Cardenas had to pay a $5,000 fine because his political firm took money from a cannabis lobbying group that was also lobbying him as a working city official.
Cardenas resigned from his job as chief of staff to continue running his consulting firm.
After the DA’s Office charged him with defrauding taxpayers in 2024, he shuttered his political consulting firm and withdrew from the active role he had played in the upper echelons of San Diego County’s Democratic Party.
The terms of Cardenas’ probation did not restrict him from working with political clients.
Nevertheless, he said, he has not worked on any election campaign since his conviction.
“My conviction had nothing to do with political work and I’m extremely sorry for what I did,” he said.
Cardenas did acknowledge that he has started consulting again – just not for political clients. He said he has done a mix of land-use consulting and community outreach to earn a living and repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes he owed at the time of his conviction.
He declined to name the organizations he has worked for.
“I’ve done no consulting for any political client,” he said.
State business records show Cardenas started a new consulting firm called Impact Strategies Group in January 2025. The firm lists an address in Bankers Hill near Balboa Park.
Cardenas met his wife Garcia in 2014 when she was a high school student volunteer in a youth political engagement program he ran.
Garcia went on to work for Cardenas before getting a communications job in the office of then-San Diego County Supervisor Nora Vargas.
After a brief stint with Vargas, Garcia moved to working for a San Diego-based digital marketing company called IVC Media, where she managed digital projects for a variety of private sector and political clients.
“She’s a master at social media and she knows how to run commercials and things I don’t know how to do,” Cardenas said.
Cardenas and Garcia married in 2023.
Though both Cardenas and Garcia have kept a low profile since Cardenas’ conviction, that has not stopped a growing number of political observers from alleging that Cardenas has begun edging himself back into San Diego politics.
“Jesus Cardenas works for LIUNA,” said Lori Saldaña, a former state assemblymember and a current member of the San Diego County Democratic Party Central Committee.
Saldaña did not offer proof to support her claim about Cardenas’ alleged professional relationship with LIUNA – a claim that other party activists also have made in recent months.
Both Cardenas and a LIUNA representative strongly denied that Cardenas has done any political work, formal or informal, for the union.
The union’s director of government affairs said the union discloses all payments to all of its vendors and has paid Cardenas nothing since his conviction.
LIUNA 89 has spent millions in recent years backing leading Democratic elected officials.
This year, the union is making big moves in the city of Chula Vista. It spent more than $225,000 in a key mayoral race and two city council contests and was sponsoring a ballot initiative that, before city councilmembers put a hold on it this week, would have made major changes to city government.
Saldaña said it is irrefutable that Cardenas is becoming an increasingly visible presence in Democratic Party affairs.
“He has been in action all along,” she said.
Saldaña and other party activists said they have observed Cardenas attending online meetings of the Democratic Party’s Central Committee, which sets party policies and has the final word on influential party campaign endorsements.
Saldaña said she also saw Cardenas dining with members of the California Democratic Party Black Caucus at a state party convention last year in Long Beach.
Cardenas acknowledged attending online party Central Committee meetings, which are open to the public. He said he attended as a bystander, because he remains interested in the party’s current activities and supports the party’s political goals.
He also acknowledged attending the state party convention last year and meeting with members of the Black Caucus.
But he said he is not seeking to influence party policies and is not trying to return to his former role as a key player in the party’s internal deliberations.
“I don’t have a formal role in the Democratic party,” he said.
Saldaña said she and other party members continue to press party leaders for a long-promised audit into roughly $200,000, which she said the party paid to Cardenas for work on the 2022 Chula Vista mayoral campaign of Amar Campa-Najjar.
“None of the money paid back to Jesus was ever reviewed or approved by members,” Saldaña said. “We’ve been asking for years what happened to that money.”
In a June 22 email to Saldaña, Ryan Hurd, executive director of the San Diego County Democratic Party, said the party hired an auditor for an initial retainer of $4,000 to review previous years’ finances.
“You and other members should receive something soon,” Hurd wrote.
Cardenas said he hoped that by being forthcoming about his current activities, he could spare his wife from wrongful assumptions that her political work is simply an extension of his own.
Her business, he said, is wholly her own.
