Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) Mayor Muriel Bowser is the latest politician to join the long legacy of D.C. public officials whose campaigns got dinged for obtaining and using money suspiciously in their campaigns. D.C.’s Office of Campaign Finance is levying a $13,000 fine against Bowser’s election campaign, alleging it accepted 13 donations over legal limits, mostly from developers and contractors. The news is renewing concerns around the District’s shady campaign financing culture.
The non-profit Public Citizen flagged the suspicious donations and brought its concerns to OCF.
“There has been a problem in the culture of District government,” Public Citizen campaign co-director Aquene Freechild told WMAL. “There has been a continued vein, I hope it’s a shrinking vein, of elected officials who feel like they’re above the law.”
Freechild accused the Bowser campaign of foot-dragging and downplaying the importance of what it saw as a minuscule problem. She said she wished OCF’s fine was larger, but OCF cited the fact that the campaign had already returned the illegal money.
There is also a systemic problem, Freechild said, in that OCF didn’t find the bad donations itself.
“Anybody looking at that, sorting in Excel, can find it,” she said.
Bowser joins her protege and successor on the Council, Brandon Todd, in their respective campaigns getting fined by OCF. Todd’s campaign is appealing its $5,100 fine assessed last month. Former Mayor Vince Gray, now the Ward Seven Councilmember, had his campaign fined $10,000. Gray and Bowser could be on a collision course for a rematch in 2018.
Freechild said there is some hope coming out of the Council as they look at bills tightening pay-to-play and corruption laws.
“I think those two sets of reforms in combination could really change the conversation,” she said. “The people who write our laws, sign our laws, enforce our laws, have to follow our laws.”
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