When it comes to ethics, the DC Council appears to be going from bad to worse: Last year, it trashed local open meeting laws. After unanimously voting in February 2025 to expel Ward 8’s Trayon White Sr., the legislature permitted his unimpeded return to the chamber in August. Now there’s a vote coming up that would undermine long-standing disclosure requirements.

Lest anyone forget, White was indicted in 2024 on federal felony bribery charges for “corruptly” agreeing “to accept $156,000 in cash payments in exchange for using his position as a D.C. Councilmember to pressure government employees … to extend several D.C. contracts” under the city’s violence interrupters program. (There are videotapes of him shoving cash-stuffed envelopes into his jacket pocket, and there are transcripts of him asking the briber for more money.)

Serving as an abettor of unethical behavior and lax accountability, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George — currently a mayoral candidate — administered the oath of office to White in January 2025, after he won the previous November general election. Lewis George took that action even though a criminal indictment had been filed against White by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and an independent council investigation had found he had committed serious violations of the legislature’s rules. Never mind that the DC Office of Campaign Finance had issued multiple fines against White and his political committee.

Incredibly, Ward 7’s Wendell Felder later ignored his own vote in favor of White’s expulsion — deciding in August to swear him back into office after he won a low-turnout special election, using the FBI-set-me-up defense that Marion Barry deployed in 1990 when he was caught smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Barry eventually spent six months in a federal penitentiary.

Proving the presence of a multilayered crisis in ethics and morality in government — and maybe in some parts of the city — one of White’s opponents in that special election, Sheila Bunn, who had initially declared him unfit for a return to office, is now his chief of staff.

Have mercy!

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