Mendelson took care of Evans until the end
By Jeffrey Anderson | Photograph By Andy DelGiudice
The digital sign enterprise of serial fraud artist and convicted felon Donald MacCord was encountering rough seas in the fall of 2016.
MacCord and his associates in the digital sign business were “Lobbying to Save Their Sign Scheme,” according to the Office of the Attorney General, which sued the company to enforce sign permit regulations.
Part of that scheme is spelled out in an email from MacCord to his colleagues, on October 4, 2016, directing that “everyone [blank] their $500 contributions to Council Chairman Mendelson and Councilmember Evans’s constituent services funds…”
Greasing the wheel as Jack Evans runs point for a regulatory workaround is one thing, but what was D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson doing in the picture?
A month after MacCord delivered a stock certificate of indeterminate value to Evans, Evans was asking Mendelson to put “emergency” legislation on the Council’s agenda to clear regulatory hurdles for the sign initiative.
Records on file with the Office of Campaign Finance Oversight (“OCFO”) show that over the next several weeks, MacCord and about a dozen associates, relatives of associates, associated entities and lobbyists made $500 donations to Mendelson’s constituent services fund.
Most of them made identical donations to Evans within the same month, some on the same day. OCFO records from June 2016 to November 2017 show that twice as many made $500 contributions to Phil Mendelson’s constituent services fund:
Kerry Pearson, longtime campaign fundraising manager for Evans; David Wilmot, a perennial Evans middleman; Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which employed Evans at the time; Colonial Parking, owned by Rusty Lindner, a friend and former client of Evans.
Campaign donations from contributors that Evans and Mendelson have in common occur during different election cycles. Parking lot lobbyist David Julyan contributed $1000 to Mendelson in 2014, and upped it to $1500 in 2018; Anthony Lanier, a developer, patron, friend and neighbor of Evans was good for $1500 to Mendelson in 2014, and matched that amount in 2018.
Mark Tuohey, Evans’s personal lawyer, has written as many checks to Mendelson over the years as to Evans.
In 2018, as Mendelson was running for re-election, and Evans was in the early phases of fending off scandal, the developer and lobbyist crowd flocked to Mendelson.
Suddenly two of Lindners and one of Wilmot’s lobbying clients were contributing $4000 to Mendelson, on March 9, 2018. Between January and April 2018, Lindner and eight relatives contributed $1500 each to Mendelson’s campaign for a total of $13,500.
Evans’s other clients, such as Willco and Eastbanc; Western Development Corporation Chairman Herb Miller; seafood company owner and developer Greg Casten; local developer (and defendant in the OAG’s digital sign case) Douglas Jemal; and former WMATA board member Corbett Price, who lied for Evans in an ethics investigation, all opened their wallets for Mendelson in his last election.
So have Mayor Muriel Bowser insiders such as campaign treasurer and director of Eagle Bancorp Inc., Ben Soto (and his wife); former special counsel for the D.C. government and consummate insider Thorn Pozen; local developer Jair Lynch; and Chairman of the D.C. Housing Authority’s Board of Commissioners, Neil Albert.
Within five days of each other in January 2018, lawyer-lobbyist-developer Bill Jarvis, Evan’s friend, advisor, registered agent and confidante; and general counsel to the Democratic State Committee Don Dinan, who Evans hired to help him oppose a recall effort by Ward 2 voters, donated a total of $2500 to Mendelson.
Mendelson may have been “progressive before progressive was cool,” as his 2018 campaign touted, but he’s backed by Evans’s–and Bowser’s–old boys and girls club now.
He’s also quick to point out that such campaign and constituent services fundraising from people who do business with the city is perfectly legal, and that such generosity has no bearing on his actions or judgment.
The latter assertion is questionable.
As the public now knows, Evans, in the summer of 2016, was engaged in a frantic effort to sign up “consulting” clients to compensate for the outside salary he lost when his law firm gig with Manatt ended.
He began bundling constituent services funds for Mendelson while asking him to help advance legislation to benefit MacCord–who is in federal prison for defrauding investors in his digital sign scheme.
As District Dig has reported, Mendelson also was instrumental in facilitating the District’s foray into sports betting, which was conceived by Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt and championed by Evans, who introduced legislation to legalize it.
Sports betting on its face looked like an insider deal with faulty underpinnings, and it could not have happened without Mendelson wrangling votes both in favor of a no-bid contract and in opposition to an expulsion of Evans from a reconstituted finance committee.
In between Evans’s two signature initiatives, and well into 2019 as an ethics scandal unfolded, Mendelson took a cautious approach to dealing with Evans that observers have characterized as deferential if not manipulative.
Last March, Evans was already facing a recall, a federal grand jury probe and an investigation by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, when Mendelson was cajoled into holding a hearing on potential discipline. At least one colleague was already calling for Mendelson to strip Evans of his Council committee assignments.
An inconsequential reprimand was accompanied by a host of “this hurts us more than it hurts you” speeches from the dais. “What is before us is discipline, and anyone who might suggest that this is not painful should put themselves in Mr. Evans’s shoes,” Mendelson told The Washington Post.
Mendelson has consistently supplemented his apologia with some stern talk. “I have repeatedly invoked Jack Evans’s name in condemnation of his conduct . . . We do this to make clear to the public that Mr. Evans’s actions do not reflect the council’s values.”
He stopped short, however, of calling for an independent investigation, going so far as to allow Evans to vote on his own discipline. (Evans voted against it.)
Evans was forced to resign as chairman of the board at WMATA in June, after the Post exposed a legal memo prepared by an outside law firm that said he “knowingly” violated ethics rules on behalf of friends and clients.
Only then did Mendelson introduce legislation to authorize the Council to launch its own probe.
A couple of weeks after the Council voted on that measure, Mendelson finally retained O’Melveny & Myers to conduct an outside investigation into Evans’s business activities while serving on the Council.
Mendelson kept signaling completion of the O’Melveny report, which nevertheless dragged on past Labor Day and into the fall legislative session.
In September, the pace of the entire saga prompted Post columnist Colbert King to blast the Council for its “myopic handling of embattled member Jack Evans,” an “exercise in klutziness were the situation not so serious.”
By then, King wrote, Evans had his home raided by the FBI and been fined $20,000 by the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability for using his Council office for personal gain.
Yet the O’Melveny report would be delayed further, Mendelson said, due to the lack of cooperation in the probe by key witnesses. (Again, he allowed Evans to vote on a measure to ask the D.C. Superior Court to enforce witness subpoenas. Evans voted against it.)
It wasn’t until November 5, when the O’Melveny report became public, that Evans’s political future appeared doomed, and Mendelson stated that he had “obliterated the public trust.”
Cautious observers of politics might feel obliged to applaud Mendelson’s deliberative nature–if it wasn’t for the events of the previous legislative session, and the way he handled the Evans scandal.
For Evans–and DeWitt, and Bowser, and possibly Mendelson–sports betting was like the Holy Grail. But the Evans scandal was in the way.
In an early July breakfast meeting of the Council, Mendelson tried to advance the betting initiative while responding to increased pressure to deal with the scandal. He continued to hold off calls to remove Evans from his committees, saying it would “disenfranchise” Ward 2 voters and “emasculate” Evans.
Utilizing a favorite tactic, he placed an “emergency” item on the Council agenda to exempt sports betting from D.C. procurement law, but had to table it when a number of members realized what was happening and objected.
With Evans clinging to his political life, Mendelson eventually succeeded in ramming through a no-bid contract to a financially vulnerable international gaming firm and a local firm with questionable business capacity–on the last day of the legislative session.
That coup, which delivered a major win for the pro-gaming lobby, came just hours after a private meeting between Mendelson and Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and At-Large Member Robert White, two members who changed their votes in favor of sports betting and who walked away that day with plum committee assignments.
At-Large Member Elissa Silverman accused Mendelson of trading committee seats for votes. Though such broadsides caused him to bristle, some were unconvinced:
“Despite protestations to the contrary, Mendelson is widely viewed as buying votes for the gambling bill with the spoils that came from dissolving Evans’ Finance and Revenue Committee while simultaneously protecting the Ward 2 lawmaker from serious discipline over accusations of influence-peddling,” wrote former ANC Ward 1 Commissioner Alan Roth, in a July 15 op-ed in The DC Line.
The Evans scandal has been an extraordinary test of Mendelson’s leadership. It took unrelenting pressure to force him to assign an ad hoc committee to address the findings in the O’Melveny report. The committee voted 12-0 to expel Evans, and on the eve of a final vote of the Council, he resigned in statement, read by Mendelson, retreated to his office, then left the Wilson building.
It could be months or years before Evans’s legacy is fully documented. If anyone bothers. In passionate speeches from the dais on the day of the ad hoc committee’s vote, Silverman and White expressed embarrassment over the notion that Evans had used them over the years to get what he wanted for his clients and patrons.
Mendelson showed no such outrage: Instead, he let it be known that he had counseled Evans to resign months ago. Even now, he disputes the notion that anything he has done is out of deference to friend and former ally–whose allies are looking for a reliable friend on the Council.
In an email reply to questions from, communications director Lindsey Walton disputes that Mendelson slow-walked legislation to authorize an outside investigation of Evans, and that he introduced sports betting at the request of the CFO, “and did so because he believed in the CFO’s recommendation to do so.”
Walton also points out that Mendelson never introduced digital sign legislation, and that her office was only aware of one contribution to his constituent services fund from Donald Maccord in 2016.
But Evans and Mendelson have served on the Council together for two decades. And Mendelson has undergone a metamorphosis during that time period, now more than ever ready to support a pro-business agenda at the risk of alienating his progressive base of yesteryear.
Whether it be a tax break for an international firm with history of racial discrimination; the clever use of internet sales tax revenue to supplant taxes on commercial property at the expense of services for the homeless; or a tax abatement for a college foundation on which Evans’s friend and former client Rusty Lindner serves, Evans has found Mendelson to be indispensible.
“At first glance, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson may appear to have achieved a complete victory last week in his efforts to maintain or even maximize control of the legislature,” Roth wrote in The DC Line at the end of the spring session, which was marked by a day that Evans perhaps considered to be Mendelson’s finest hour:
“Despite strong objections from several colleagues, Mendelson passed his committee reorganization plan; defeated an effort to strip Ward 2 Council member Jack Evans of his committee assignments; enabled WMATA board member Corbett Price to keep his seat despite Price’s lies about Metro’s investigation of Evans; limited the scope of the council’s own investigation; and got a sole-source sports gambling contract approved. With some of these measures approved by a one-vote margin, Mendelson obviously counted votes carefully.
“Were an elected official’s ethics not the central issue at hand, this sort of legislative log-rolling would be neither surprising nor even necessarily objectionable.”
Critics abound. Ward 4 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Erin Palmer contrasted the Mendelson she sees in policy terms with the Mendelson who kept Evans hanging around for longer than many of her constituents would have preferred, and found him lacking.
Sounding dire concerns over issues such as housing, homelessness and health care, Palmer said in a direct message to The Dig: “Does he even know these issues exist? Does he care? I honestly can’t say whether his values have changed or if he’s become so sheltered he’s not even aware how serious these challenges are.”
Only Mendelson knows how much, if at all, Evans and the largesse of Evans’s patrons have influenced his emergence as what he self-describes to be a “pragmatic” lawmaker.
“The Council–and specifically, the Chair–failed to lead in the face of known and suspected misconduct,” Palmer continued. “What was abundantly clear to anyone paying attention as worthy of investigation was brushed under the rug and minimized.
“The public was effectively gaslighted courtesy of [Mendelson]. A Chair who cares about management cares about keeping their house in order and corruption free. That means ensuring Council policy is as proactive as possible, that means paying attention (as opposed to burying their head in the sand), and that means engaging in the needed investigation and remedial action in a timely and transparent fashion. The Chair failed on all fronts.”
