For some D.C. metropolitan area jurists, the question of whether Ward 8 D.C. Councilmember Trayon White (D) committed bribery has been answered at least twice over the last decade. The more recent of those instances involved retired U.S. admiral Robert P. Burke who’s serving federal prison time for awarding a contract to a tech company in exchange for future employment and benefits.
As attorney Thomas T. Ruffin recently explained, the other situation, addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016, led to the overturn of former Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell’s conviction and a narrowing of what’s considered bribery.
“The basis for that was he was just doing something that he could have done as a governor with or without money,” Ruffin said on the Sept. 16 edition of WPFW 89.3’s The AllEyesOnDC Show. “We don’t know whether that was done in exchange for a bribe. They picked on the actual wording of the statute and said that the prosecution didn’t make the proof in the fashion that could have used the statute legitimately.”
White, the four-time elected council member representing what many consider the last frontier of gentrification in the District, faces one count of bribery. If found guilty, he faces 15 years of prison time.
On Sept. 20, White’s attorneys cited 18 U.S.C. § 201, the statute used in U.S. v. McDonnell, in a motion for acquittal. The motion mentioned what the defense called the prosecution’s creation of a “dizzying spin cycle” that combines White’s recorded ruminations about Medicaid and federal contracting with what the jury initially knew as allegations involving violence interruption contracts.
In the 20-page document, White’s defense team also points out what’s described as FBI informant Allieu Badara Kamara, Jr.’s “thrust[ing] of cash without any prior understanding of what it was for.” Days prior, Ruffin predicted that attorney Warren G. Kohlmann and others would engineer such a safeguard. By the time of Ruffin’s appearance on The AllEyesOnDC Show, Kohlmann had already done so by outing Kamara as White’s brother-in-law, and not just a businessman.
“His doing is setting the groundwork so that the judge will let him argue entrapment to the jury,” Ruffin said. “Also so that he can persuade the judge to give an instruction telling the jury that they can find Trayon White not guilty if the government fails to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that White was a person who had…the intent on his own with or without any encouragement.”
The Fight of All Fights in U.S. District Court’s Room 23
By the time that the defense and prosecution rested their case on Sept. 18, the jury had already heard from: Kamara; D.C. Council general counsel Nicole Streeter, FBI special agent Matthew Gano; D.C. Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah; former D.C. grants supervisor Anwar Walker; IRS special agent Sima Sleely; Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) Director Kwelli Sneed; former Ward 8 D.C. council office chief of staff Wanda Lockridge; former D.C. attorney general Karl Racine; and D.C. Public Schools and Harvard University alumnus RuQuan Brown.
White didn’t take the stand.
In his remarks, White’s attorney Bruce H. Searby implored U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to dismiss the case based on what he called the prosecution’s inability to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a play-for-play scheme.
“It’s so clear from these witnesses,” Searby said, “that the words that came out of Mr. White’s mouth were better than that. There’s resistance to quid quo pro. The government’s case is in real terrible shape as of the first day. They want to consider Mr. White in his natural environment.”
Earlier in the week, Gano, who said the FBI had been investigating White since 2023, explained that agents arrested the council member on August 18, 2024, as not to interfere in the outcome of the general election in which he was running as a two-term incumbent who had just won his primary bid. Searby told Contreras that the federal indictment was just as rushed, thus painting in a negative light what defense earlier painted as White’s attempt to help a family member and prevent large-scale changes he deemed interruptive to the violence interruption ecosystem.
“Mr. White is a passionate advocate,” Searby said. “We all know the passion Mr. White has… he came to each meeting [with Kamara] wearing his heart on his sleeve.”
White first entered office in 2017 after an unsuccessful attempt to serve out the rest of his late mentor Marion S. Barry’s term. As mentioned by prosecutors, White won re-election in 2020 and took the oath of office on the steps of the John A. Wilson Building in early 2021. During the earlier part of the trial, prosecutors alleged White’s violation of that oath when he, on camera, accepted what prosecutors described as envelopes of cash given by Kamara.
On the third day of the trial, both sides focused their cross-examination of Kamara on whether the $35,000 could be counted as campaign contributions. Kohlmann, in a briefly tense exchange with Kamara, cited his FBI interview where he acknowledged White’s campaign finance woes.
Soon after, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Ross presented 2024 campaign finance documentation that didn’t include Kamara’s name. “The fact that he never reported the $35,000 as a campaign contribution would clear that up,” Ross said.
In another instance, Sleely presented the findings of her forensic examination of White’s main bank account in which she saw a negative checking account balance of more than $1,000 and a deposit of more than $3,000 she said aligned with one of White and Kamara’s recorded meetings.
During cross-examination, Sleely delved into her process, even as the defense attempted to cast doubt on whether she could tie cash deposits to money received, or if she could tie cash withdrawals from one of Kamara’s accounts to money given to White.
Throughout much of the trial, the jury of 14 heard from Kamara, who explained portions of the FBI tape played in court. Straight out the gate, he denied a familial relationship with White, despite Prince George’s County, Maryland court records showing that Kamara, and who Lockridge later identified as White’s half-sister Danielle L. Simmons finalized their divorce two months after White’s arrest.
Later, in his testimony, Kamara repeatedly told prosecutors that White worked on his behalf to secure an extension of a contract for Life Deeds, a subcontractor for Progressive Life Center, a mental health services nonprofit that received funds from ONSE. He did so as the prosecution showed, as one of their exhibits, a document he showed White outlining what was alleged to be the plan for 3% kickbacks for violence interruption contracts secured.
“It’s pretty much he’s working on our agreement,” Kamara told Ross on Sept. 17.
As Kamara explained on the stand, he took a plea agreement on Aug. 7, 2024 in which he admitted to accumulating $4 million through PPP fraud. In exchange for lesser time, he pleaded guilty to one count of bribery and one count of bank fraud. He also agreed to become a confidential human source against White, who he pointed out to authorities as the inside man in an attempt to get Racine to reverse course on an Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation into Life Deeds for falsifying background check documents related to a Marshall Heights contract.
Kamara, the owner of at least three businesses and what Sleely described as at least 20 bank accounts, said he fabricated documents “to receive kickbacks.” Some of these documents, Kamara admitted, cleared employees of sex abuse crimes. He also admitted on the stand to bribing former D.C. Child and Family Services Agency program manager Markita Bryant and former ONSE deputy director Dana McDaniel in exchange for at least a total of seven contracts.
On the hours of FBI tape that the jury watched, Kamara and White are talking about violence interruption contracts, federal contracts, and White’s efforts to contact Sneed, Appiah, and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. At times, White is heard speaking about violence interruption and constituent services more broadly, including an instance where he criticizes Bowser’s posture toward public safety.
In his cross-examination of Kamara, White’s defense attorney Warren G. Kohlman implies that the business owner, on a number of occasions, redirected the conversation to the alleged scheme.
An incensed Kamara denied Kohlman’s assertion, even telling the attorney he’s not “bullsh—ting .”
“He was the type of person if he said he wants to do something he’ll do it,” Kamara said about White. “There was no pressure to ask.”
At the beginning of the fourth day, on Sept. 18, both sides debated whether to delve deeper into Kamara’s allegation on the stand the day prior that White connected him with an Intralot contract upon their return from the Dominican Republic in 2021.
There was no significant mention of that allegation from that point on.
In a moment that elicited sighs of vindication among White’s supporters in the gallery, Sneed told Kohlmann that the council member didn’t overtly press her to extend Life Deeds’ contract. This was despite what she earlier described on the stand as her apprehensions about her summer 2024 meeting with the legislator without an agenda and after the two of them only communicating via text about ONSE’s presence in Ward 8.
In what some considered another death knell to the prosecution’s case, Racine, White’s former employer and one who expressed his admiration for the council member’s attention to holistic violence reduction, later countered Kamara’s assertion about the politician’s alleged attempt to stop a 2019 OAG investigation into Life Deeds’ falsified background checks.
“I have absolutely no recollection of any such event happening and it leads me to say no,” Racine told Kohlmann on the stand.
Some Talk about What’s Ahead
With White’s federal bribery not yet over, at least one Ward 8 elected official is clamoring for a reinstatement of the legislative power the council member lost immediately after his 2024 arrest.
“Should Councilmember White should be found not guilty in federal court, the presumption of innocence will have been legally affirmed. At that point, any lingering institutional penalties imposed prior to the judicial verdict must be reevaluated,” Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Tom Donahue (8A01) wrote in Sept. 19 statement. “Stripping a duly elected [council member] of committee assignments and leadership positions does not merely penalize the individual— it directly disenfranchises the 80,000 residents of Ward 8 by denying our community a meaningful voice and legislative seat at the table where policy, agency oversight and budgetary decisions are made.”
D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson, who opted not to reinstate White’s committee assignment upon his post-expulsion return to the legislative body last year, told The Informer he hasn’t given the issue much thought.
“I’m just not going to speculate on it,” Mendelson said.
Amid concern about the return of the Control Board in response to White’s acquittal and Ward 4 D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George’s ascension to the Executive Office of the Mayor, Mendelson said he’s taking a wait-and-see approach.
“I’ve taken steps on behalf of the council to improve our federal relations, bringing somebody on board on my staff permanently, as well as hiring a firm to help us and so that we’re in a better position to react to whatever may happen,” Mendelson told reporters on Sept. 20. “So I take it seriously that way, but in terms of do I take it seriously in a way that suggests that, ‘Oh, this is going to happen,’ I don’t know.”
