SAN LEANDRO — Federal prosecutors have notified a San Leandro councilman that he is a “target” of a corruption investigation for potential crimes that include bribery and lying to authorities, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office letter obtained by the Bay Area News Group Tuesday.

The letter sent to Councilmember Bryan Azevedo is the latest shoe to drop in a corruption investigation that began with a raid at his San Leandro home in January. The sheet-metal foreman is serving his second term on the city council.

It is unclear if the investigation into Azevedo is directly tied to a sprawling corruption investigation in Oakland, where ousted former Mayor Sheng Thao, her romantic partner Andre Jones and father-and-son businessmen David and Andy Duong are similarly facing bribery charges.

Azevedo, who is friends with Andy Duong and has previous ties to Thao, first learned on May 12 that he was the subject of a federal investigation, per the letter obtained by this news organization.

The letter from the federal government ordered Azevedo to contact prosecutors by May 30. Otherwise, it states, the investigation would continue with the “ordinary course of prosecution.”

Reached at his San Leandro home early Tuesday evening, Azevedo declined to offer any details on whether he responded to the letter, or if he had hired an attorney.

“No comment on that,” Azevedo said, while closing his front door.

The FBI raided Azevedo’s Dillo Street home on Jan. 15. Federal agents obtained hard drives, personal devices and other documents from his home, in addition to seizing his cell phone.

Azevedo, who has repeatedly maintained his innocence, toured a showroom of the home-building company Evolutionary Homes that was founded in part by the Duongs. Months before, he attended a trip to Vietnam led by Thao — then the mayor of Oakland — and largely paid for by the Duongs’ trade association.

When the San Leandro City Council decided last summer not to declare a state of emergency on homelessness, Azevedo dissented. That sort of a declaration was a key piece of an scheme allegedly hatched by the Duongs, prosecutors have said, to bribe Thao for access to lucrative public contracts in Oakland.

The Duong family’s flagship business, a recycling company named California Waste Solutions, holds the contract for the city of Oakland but not for San Leandro.

Azevedo’s public response to the investigation has been marred by bizarre and awkward moments. In media interviews, he has repeatedly denied every being with prostitutes while on the Vietnam trip — despite not being directly asked about anything like that.

In late April, he called Andy Duong a “great guy” and longtime friend while speaking with an ABC7 news reporter. He said he wasn’t interested in retaining an attorney because it was “too expensive,” the news station reported.

Azevedo did take one precaution, though: counting the days between the June 2024 raids on Thao’s home and her indictment to his own, which he calculated was about 210 days.

“They shouldn’t have as much stuff on me,” Azevedo told ABC7.