D.C. Lawmakers Give Themselves a Pass on Ethics

With an exquisitely poor sense of timing, District Council members voted last week to give themselves another full year in which to file their 2011 financial disclosure forms. As The Examiner's Liz Farmer reported, the council's little gift to itself came in the form of a line item tucked into the city's 2013 budget that moves the deadline from early this month to next May -- months after the November election. The city's toothless Office of Campaign Finance will be handling any financial disclosures for the rest of 2012, instead of the highly touted but still vacant ethics panel it voted to create last year.

A day after council members punted on their own responsibility to publicly disclose potential conflicts of interest, a top aide to Mayor Vincent Gray pleaded guilty in federal court to obstruction of justice for secretly diverting campaign funds in an attempt to weaken then-incumbent Adrian Fenty. Thomas Gore, the former assistant treasurer of Mayor Vincent Gray's 2010 campaign, admitted he made unlawful payments to former mayoral candidate Sulaimon Brown to attack Fenty on the campaign trail.

Gore, who also managed the finances for Gray's previous campaigns for council chairman, was caught on a wiretap admitting he shredded a spiral notebook in which he had recorded the illegal payoffs to Gray campaign consultant Howard Brooks. Brooks himself pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI when he denied delivering the money to Brown, which U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. characterized as "the underhanded dealings that tainted the integrity of the 2010 mayoral campaign."

Don’t expect anything better from the DC Council.

Remember Marion Barry is still a member.

Crack addict, Crook, Convicted Felon, Tax Dodger,Corruption is his middle name, and he is loved by the people of DC who return him to office each time he runs.

Mayor Gray, as crooked as a snake.
Eleonor Holmes Norton, Premier Racist ,Shadow Delegate.

I arrived in Arlington two years ago, and have sat observing this mess for the whole time. I would say this....all federal money paid into the DC pot, District income tax, and various fees....are simply loaded into a ‘reward’ system which various groups are making use out of.

The Georgetown crowd demands cops and nice streets....so they get protection, low numbers of murders, and a scenic place for them to walk around. The eastern half of DC....wants the money for guaranteed jobs (for their nieces or nephrews), bulked up school systems which ought to have half the schools that they presently have, and various grants to public “charity” operations which are mostly fake/bogus. The eastern side doesn’t care if 120 people get shot or murdered per year...no big deal.

After you figure this whole scheme out....how each group plays their city council member, and how the election process is manipulated....it’s like being in Bolivia. I would suggest that eleven of the city’s thirteen city council members probably are guilty of something that would earn jail-time almost every single year. They don’t worry about being fired....no one would dare toss them out unless the prosecutor (always federal....never a DC local prosecutor)gets involved. When they get caught...they always claim that the truth will come out eventually....which it does and tends to lead to some sentence. No one gets off clean (at least in two years).

My suggestion here....the minute you get indicated of a violation of some type....your pay ought to go down to fifty percent of the norm....until you clear yourself of the charges. That would probably scare them a bit.

I hope I don’t get in trouble for this, but Washington is split down the Middle.

Whites in one half and blacks in the other.

Oh!! You may see a scattered sprinkling of the two mixing , but it isn’t the general rule, and its mostly right in the middle.

For the last 60 years been called West of the park, and east of the Anacostia. Stay out of East of the Anacostia.

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