University of California Regents have bought UC President Janet Napolitano’s story about how her office came to interfere with an audit of its performance ordered by the state Legislature, with regents saying they were disappointed by the scandal but prepared to move on after reprimanding Napolitano.

But there could be more fallout on two fronts: in the Legislature and in the governor’s race, where the frontrunner, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, is an ex-officio UC regent.

That’s because Napolitano’s story seems so implausible. According to an independent report prepared at regents’ behest by former California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno and the Hueston Henningan law firm, after state Auditor Elaine Howle sent surveys to UC campuses in October 2016 asking for their assessment of UC’s Office of the President, Seth Grossman, Napolitano’s chief of staff, and Bernie Jones, her deputy chief of staff, put out the word that they needed to review the responses. This was done even though Howle had emphasized the responses were supposed to be confidential. Subsequently, three campuses – UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC San Diego – revised their responses to make them more favorable to Napolitano’s office.

But Napolitano told the Legislature in May, and Moreno’s investigators more recently, that while she approved the plan to have her office review the responses, she did so because she wanted to ensure the responses were correct – not because she wanted to protect her image. She also said campuses had requested help.

Moreno’s report did not suggest the UC president was lying. But it found no evidence that campuses sought help with their responses. And it noted that UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal said that he was chewed out by Napolitano for his campus sending in a response to Howle without running it by her staff. UC Santa Cruz’s response was the harshest of any campus, giving Napolitano’s office one “poor” and three “fair” ratings out of the 10 categories in the survey questions. After Blumenthal’s telephone conversation with what he described as a “furious” Napolitano, UC Santa Cruz changed the “poor” and “fair” ratings to good and upgraded three “good” ratings to “exceptional.”

Napolitano said she remembers her conversation with Blumenthal as being routine, not angry. But Blumenthal’s account is consistent with other findings in the Moreno report, such as Napolitano’s declaration in a text message that Howle was on a “witch hunt.”

The two aides cited in the Moreno report resigned a week before the report’s release and declined substantive comment on the allegations against them.

Lawmakers unlikely to be satisfied with handling of scandal

The Legislature, which passed a bill last session subsequently signed by Gov. Jerry Brown making it a crime for a state agency to interfere with a state audit, could consider follow-up legislation. There’s considerable residual anger over Napolitano’s May testimony to a joint legislative hearing in which she repeatedly denied personal wrongdoing of any kind. Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, vice chair of the Higher Education Committee, cited that testimony last week in calling for Napolitano to be fired.

In the gubernatorial race, UC-related sparks seem just as likely to fly. While Newsom told the Los Angeles Times that he considered regents’ decision to reprimand Napolitano “insignificant” – suggesting he wanted stronger punishment – he joined the unanimous vote to retain her as UC president.

This is tough to square with Newsom’s reported comments about how he would deal with corruption and ethical issues in state government: “I will not be known for being timid about this or anything else. Gov. Brown says reform is overrated; I say it’s underrated.”

As for Howle’s part, she wants regents to take additional actions beyond reprimanding Napolitano, according to a letter she sent to regents and an internal report by her office that were obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Howle asked regents to “consider disciplining university employees who repeatedly interfered with a state audit, tried to hide their actions, misled investigators and withheld requested information until threatened with court action,” the Times reported.

At the regents’ Nov. 17 meeting in San Francisco, they began consideration of measures meant to “clarify and strengthen” how UC officials who report both to the regents and to Napolitano must deal with state audits.

Pressure is building on University of California President Janet Napolitano after the San Francisco Chronicle obtained two batches of official documents that appeared to show Napolitano was untruthful in her testimony at a joint legislative oversight hearing May 2 at the Capitol.

The focus of the hearing was a scathing audit prepared at the Legislature’s request and released by State Auditor Elaine Howle on April 25. It alleged Napolitano’s office had hid $175 million in reserve funds from the regents and the public while the UC president successfully orchestrated approval of a tuition hike. In her testimony, Napolitano succeeded in raising questions about the fairness of that allegation by asserting that most of the reserve dollars had been committed to worthwhile programs.

But Napolitano’s attempt to explain away Howle’s second most serious allegation – that her aides had interfered with the audit by rewriting comments from individual UC campuses to make them more favorable to Napolitano’s office – has backfired. She denied that there was any attempt to make her office look good and asserted that the remarks were revised to make them accurate and that campuses had sought guidance on how to respond.

The claim seemed shaky to some lawmakers, based on their subsequent questions. Napolitano’s office wasn’t even supposed to have seen the responses – audit officials specifically told UC campus authorities that their responses would be confidential.

But two Chronicle articles in the past week have made Napolitano’s remarks seem not just misleading but deceptive. They laid out how documents and emails from Napolitano’s aides to individual campuses didn’t reflect attempts to correct errors or give guidance. Instead, they sought for the responses to be rewritten to offer more praise for Napolitano’s office – just as Howle’s audit alleged.

7 UC Santa Cruz ratings of Napolitano office upgraded

The first article’s most telling detail was how UC Santa Cruz withdrew its official response after a conversation between Napolitano and Chancellor George Blumenthal.

The second article was based on official emails and documents that laid out Napolitano’s seeming determination to prevent individual campuses from giving Howle any ammunition with which to criticize UC and her office. Last year, Napolitano authorized the release of an unusual 31-page report denouncing a previous Howle audit that criticized UC’s system-wide decision to deny admission over the previous decade to more than 4,000 qualified in-state students in favor of admitting out-of-state and foreign students who pay far higher tuition – thus enabling UC to balance its budget without any belt-tightening.

“The surveys and previously unreleased emails show that administrators at UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego and UC Irvine removed criticism of Napolitano’s office or upgraded performance ratings in key areas at the direction of Napolitano’s staff,” wrote Chronicle reporter Nanette Asimov. “The interference – including a system-wide conference call conducted by the president’s office to coordinate responses among all campuses – prompted Howle to discard all the results as tainted.”

The second batch of documents indicated why Napolitano may have been particularly perturbed with the responses of UC Santa Cruz officials and why she personally spoke with Blumenthal, the campus’ chancellor, about them.

The Chronicle article noted that after the Office of the President’s intervention, Santa Cruz officials upgraded the ratings they had given Napolitano’s office in seven categories. One “poor” rating was changed to “good.” Three “fair” ratings were changed to “good.” And three “good” ratings were changed to “excellent.”

On Wednesday, Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva called for Napolitano to resign. While several other state lawmakers have been harshly critical of the UC president, the Los Angeles Times reported that Quirk-Silva is the first to specifically say Napolitano must go.