In some ways little has changed since I last stepped foot in a DC federal courtroom over a decade ago. The high ceilings and pretty wood paneling remain familiar, as does the defendant whose case I’m there to see — a financially strapped Black DC councilman. This time around it’s Trayon White Sr., and he stands accused of bribery after pocketing cash-filled envelopes from a DC contractor.

The way things proceed from here, in my experience, is the awesome power of the federal government comes crashing down on the defendant, and his once promising career ends in a prison sentence. And this may have been White’s fate too had he been charged a decade ago, but a lot has changed in the intervening years.

For starters, the Supreme Court unanimously and radically limited the scope of what constitutes bribery in a (pre-Trump) 2016 ruling. It just so happens the Justices are themselves swimming in so much graft it sure looks like bribery, or at least would have prior to their ruling.

That ruling overturned the 2014 conviction of Bob McDonnell, who as governor of Virginia accepted over $175,000 in money, gifts and loans from a businessman hawking a diet supplement called Anatabloc. In exchange for the largesse, some of which went to McDonnell’s wife, the first couple sought to enlist Virginia’s state universities in costly testing to get the supplement approved by the FDA and thereby turn on the money spigot for Star Scientific, their secret patron’s company.

But that’s not all Virginia’s first couple did, as the Brennan Center’s Daniel Weiner noted:

They hosted the Anatabloc product launch at the governor’s mansion and repeatedly pressured senior officials to arrange meetings between state researchers and Star employees. In one memorable scene, McDonnell literally pulled a bottle of Anatabloc out of his pocket and pitched it on the spot to officials in charge of the state’s health plan.

Despite the blatant quid-pro-quo corruption, the Supreme Court overturned McDonnell’s conviction, saying the steps he took weren’t “official acts,” and therefore didn’t amount to bribery. Obviously this is ludicrous; but since 2016 it’s the law of the land.

“Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act,’” even when it benefits a businessman plying the official with money and gifts, the John Roberts-led Supreme Court ruled.

Grappling with this uncomfortable reality, as DC Councilmember White’s trial was underway, was former Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher. Now with City Cast DC, Fisher wrote:

A DC jury may well send White back to the Wilson Building to rip off the people he’s supposed to be helping. And that’s not because White got a jury full of Black Washingtonians with visceral experiences of being on the wrong end of law enforcement as he’d hoped. Instead, the councilmember may be acquitted… in good part because the US Supreme Court essentially legalized political corruption a decade ago when it overturned the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in a strikingly similar case.

Fisher’s obvious dislike of White may explain his claim that White’s case is “strikingly similar” to McDonnell’s, but it plainly isn’t.

Just look at McDonnell’s and White’s respective titles. As governor, McDonnell was his state’s chief executive, with the power to direct his subordinates to, say, meet with a sketchy businessman, with all the implicit pressure imbued in that request. White, on the other hand, is a mere councilmember, with comparatively little power to enact an agenda, corrupt or otherwise. What’s more, White did far less work on behalf of his secret patron, and received far less largesse in return. If McDonnell isn’t guilty of bribery, there’s no way White is.

Fisher’s columns — like the other coverage of White’s case — don’t highlight the irony of White’s prosecutors working for none other than Donald J. Trump, whose presidency marks the greatest bacchanalia of political corruption this country has ever seen.

In broad daylight, Trump, his family, and billionaire cabinet members are using the Oval Office to pocket billions of dollars for themselves. Meanwhile, Trump-appointed US Attorneys turn a blind eye despite the relative ease in building these corruption cases — practically all that’s needed is a working internet connection, thanks to the drumbeat of reports splashed across the fontpages of our country’s leading newspapers.

And it’s not just Trump and his billionaire cronies getting a pass. On the final day of White’s trial, ProPublica published a story about Senator Susan Collins steering $32 million to a defense contractor apparently in exchange for a $150,000 donation to her SuperPAC.

The transaction triggered an FBI investigation, which quickly sprawled to include other legislators, ProPublica reported.

By the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence.

But once Trump returned to office, “the specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated,” ProPublica reported. “Trump’s Justice Department,” the outlet continued, citing former officials, “no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion.”

Yet Trump’s anti-corruption teams are still pursuing White. Lest one think this is due to the salacious nature of White’s case — he was filmed pocketing cash-stuffed envelopes — a parallel FBI sting shows otherwise.

In September 2024 — the month after White’s arrest — Trump’s return to the Oval Office looked increasingly likely, and Tom Homan was slated for a top post carrying out Trump’s promised mass-deportations, sure to be a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle. That same month at a meeting with business executives in Texas, Homan offered to facilitate securing future contracts for them. Unbeknownst to Homan, who would soon become Trump’s “border czar,” the executives were undercover FBI agents — and the $50,000 in cash he accepted from them was caught on camera, MSNOW reported.

But the Homan investigation was quickly shuttered once Trump returned to office in January 2025, and the incriminating video has yet to see the light of day. A stark contrast to White, who upon his arrest had images of his pocketing cash made public in legal filings, coloring the tsunami of media reports that ensued.

Even as our country is brazenly fleeced at the highest levels of government, Trump’s hollowed-out anti-corruption teams avert their gaze to look lower on the food chain, all the way down to a backbench DC councilmember.

“Almost Biblical”

I first interviewed Trayon White back in 2011, shortly after he was elected to the DC school board. It was impossible to miss his talent as an organizer.

We spoke at Woodland Terrace, the Southeast DC public housing complex where White had recently been arrested for “unauthorized” visits. White fought the charges, arguing he had a right, indeed a responsibility to meet with his constituents in Woodland Terrace, and ultimately the charges were dropped.

After our interview, White gave me a lift back to the Metro station and said in passing that folks might be suspicious about him driving around with a white guy. I recall thinking he was probably right and slinking a little lower in my seat.

I liked White then, and still do, even if it’s been many years since we spoke. White’s more recent arrest in a 2024 FBI sting, which led to last month’s trial, was painful to see. Like the Black DC councilmen I’ve seen frog-marched out of office – Harry Thomas, Michael Brown and Kwame Brown – White left himself vulnerable to the feds by letting his lifestyle (and in White’s case gambling habit) outpace his six-figure DC Council salary.

“I’m hurting. I’ve been hurting for a minute,” White told Allieu Kamara in the summer of 2024. Kamara, a DC contractor, was close with White — in fact they were brothers-in-law, according to Gary Kohlman, White’s feisty white-haired defense attorney. To use “one family member to set up another,” Kohlman told jurors, “it’s almost biblical.”

Kamara, unbeknownst to White, turned FBI informant after he was caught stealing nearly $4 million from the covid-era Paycheck Protection Program, and bribing another DC official. “He was facing decades in prison and millions in fines and restitution,” WUSA9 reported.

So Kamara arranged at least four meetings with White in the summer of 2024, in which he gave White a total of $35,000 in cash, with the promise of over $100,000 more to come, in exchange for White’s help securing DC government contracts. The meetings, held in Kamara’s car, were recorded by the FBI, which had been investigating White for over a year prior to flipping Kamara.

The final meeting ended in White’s arrest as FBI agents, some inexplicably armed with battering rams, rushed White as if he were a mobster, not an elected official. “They wanted to humiliate this man,” Kymone Freeman, co-founder of We Act Radio and congressional candidate, told the Washington Informer at the time. “This was a public spectacle.”

Aside from the incriminating images released by the DC US Attorney’s Office, much of the government’s case rested on White’s conversations with Kamara, with prosecutors harping on one comment in particular: “Once you get me, if you lock eyes and get your understanding — I get to work,” White told Kamara.

But a key question jurors had to grapple with is what did White actually do to advance Kamara’s interests?

“It has become a pattern of the trial,” reported City Cast DC’s Emma Uber. “White is caught on camera telling Kamara that he met with high-ranking public safety officials to discuss contracts, but the officials testify that he never did.”

“The contractor never actually got the contracts he was seeking,” Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor and former federal prosecutor, told WAMU.

This led jurors, amid their deliberations, to ask Judge Rudolph Contreras a question: “Is it bribery if the defendant received money to perform an official act, but had no intention of fulfilling the agreement?” No, Judge Contreras replied.

After more than three days of deliberations, the jury came back deadlocked and Judge Contreras declared a mistrial. The outcome didn’t surprise me. The jury looked representative of DC, it reportedly had four Black jurors, and I found it unlikely, in the wake of the McDonnell decision, that all four would vote to convict. That’s because Black Washingtonians have long questioned why exclusively Black DC officials are prosecuted for corruption. It’s something I’ve wondered as well.

Bespoke Corruption

Far and away the most corrupt DC councilmember ever to traipse the halls of the Wilson Building is Jack Evans, a white man who remains free as a bird. Also free are his once-secret clients, a veritable who’s who of elite DC that even included the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

As the powerful chair of the finance and revenue committee for two decades, Evans had outsized influence over how DC raised and spent billions of dollars every year. And for the right price, Evans was eager to sell his public office to private clients.

I’ve written elsewhere about Evans’ corruption, as well as reporters’ years-long refusal to cover it, while they fixated on comparatively trivial matters concerning Black councilmen. (Marc Fisher is a good example of this.) Here I’ll only point out that, like with Trump’s family and his cronies, Evans’ corruption was so blatant that charging him wouldn’t have required an elaborate sting. Yet it never happened.

The stark contrast between who does and doesn’t get prosecuted is openly discussed among Black Washingtonians, which is why, after seeing the diverse jury pool, I didn’t expect White to be convicted. But I also didn’t expect such a lopsided jury vote, with nine of the 12 jurors voting for acquittal, according to Kohlman.

Jeanine Pirro

Despite the stunning rebuke, immediately after the mistrial was declared, Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s US Attorney for DC, said she’ll bring White’s bribery case to a new jury. “Rest assured that we will retry this case and every corruption case to verdict,” said Pirro.

I always get a kick out of seeing Pirro cosplay as a justice warrior. Growing up in Westchester County, New York, Pirro was the local district attorney, and what I remember most was that her husband was tied to the mob and in jail for tax evasion, which was striking considering his wife’s job.

Then Pirro herself came under federal investigation for spying on her husband. After she was secretly recorded by authorities, Pirro — in remarks that White could echo — said, “I said a lot of things, but what matters is what I did and didn’t do.”

It’s appropriate that the most corrupt president would name Pirro his US Attorney for DC. Also fitting, in the final minutes of his first term Trump pardoned Pirro’s tax-evading ex-husband, Al Pirro, who previously worked for Trump.

Prison

While I felt relief for White when the mistrial was declared, I didn’t feel like celebrating — I don’t want to live in a country where it’s ok for an official to stuff cash in his pocket.

No one is cheering what White did, but it’s fair to ask why the feds are so keen to put him in jail, when we’ve got billionaires freely carrying out billions of corruption nationally, and millionaires doing millions in dirty work locally.

I imagine the nine jurors who voted to acquit grappled with similar thoughts. The same goes for the voters in Ward 8, who have returned White to the DC Council twice since his arrest.

Money in politics is a cancer on our body politic that’s destroying us from the top down. But ritualistically flogging a broke Black councilman every few years — following an elaborate FBI sting — is as much a distraction from the problem as it is a solution.

Still, I’m open to putting White behind bars… so long as Trump, McDonnell and Evans go first.