D.C. Mayor Is Burned by a Contractor's Participation in His Election

While I was on vacation last week, the biggest story in local government ethics appears to have been, once again, in the District of Columbia. According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and the charges brought by the U.S. Attorney (attached; see below), the CEO of the parent company of a major D.C. government health care contractor pleaded guilty to conspiracy to channel over $2 million in illegal contributions to and in-kind expenditures in support of two D.C. mayoral candidates and multiple D.C. council candidates between 2006 and 2011.

In his press release, the U.S. Attorney stated, “Election after election, Jeff Thompson huddled behind closed doors with corrupt candidates, political operatives, and businessmen, devising schemes to funnel millions of dollars of corporate money into local and federal elections."

To make these illegal contributions, Thompson has admitted to using over 75 conduits, including relatives, friends, employees, independent contractors, and his company's senior management, using personal and corporate money to reimburse them.

He also admits to having secretly made large in-kind contributions coordinated with candidates, which have been called "shadow campaigns." He even agreed to pay a mayoral candidate more than $200,000 to withdraw from the 2006 mayoral race. Hiding these payments and corporate reimbursements led to many acts of accounting and tax fraud.

The mayor insists that he broke no laws and that he knew nothing about the "shadow campaign" made on his behalf. But he raised an interesting issue in an interview with the Washington Post. According to a Post editorial last week, an associate of Thompson's, who has also pleaded guilty, says that she asked the mayor on Thompson's behalf to expedite a settlement. The mayor, who had sought Thompson's (legal) fundraising for his campaign, responded to this allegation, "what if she had? Is that illegal?”

The problem is that it is legal for the council president, as a mayoral candidate, to ask a major contractor to raise funds for his campaign. Once this request is made, no matter how legal the contractor's conduct may be, it will look to the public as if, once elected, anything the mayor's administration does to help the contractor is a quid pro quo.

In this case, everyone knows that no government contractor is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars clandestinely supporting candidates if the contractor believes that those candidates will not know what the contractor has done for them. The contractor's secrecy is meant to hide illegal conduct from the authorities, not from those candidates the contractor supports.

Bringing contractors and others seeking special benefits from one's government into one's campaign is playing with fire. A candidate who does this should recognize that he is taking a serious risk that he will be burned the way the District's mayor is being burned when more news of an illegal campaign-related conspiracy comes out during an election year. The best way to protect oneself from this risk is to push for a law that limits contractor participation in campaigns. If no such law can be passed, a candidate can still keep himself and his campaign separate from those seeking special benefits from his government, thereby minimizing the risk of being considered corrupt, whether or not the contractor does something illegal.

For more on this matter, see a 2012 blog post of mine.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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