Mayor Vincent Gray has laid out his defense in the investigation of corruption in his mayoral campaign: He was clueless.
“I really thought, from my perspective, that we had raised a substantial sum of money,” he said Wednesday. On Tuesday, his former consultant, Jeanne Clarke Harris, had pleaded guilty to running an operation in 2010 that raised $653,000 in unreported campaign funds from a single businessman. “I don’t think any candidate can say, ‘I’m going to sit down and review with everybody every check that you give me.’ It’s just not possible.”
In other words, a man whose job it is to oversee a vast city bureaucracy is now claiming he could not have noticed that an amount roughly equal to one-third of his entire primary campaign budget was being spent on his behalf.
In order to accept Gray’s explanation, you would have to believe that no one told him thousands of yard signs, T-shirts and other paraphernalia were showing up at his campaign headquarters, absolutely free of charge. You would have to believe he did not think anything was odd when canvassers, drivers and others not on the payroll began to turn up. In short, you would have to believe that Gray never noticed that campaign costs were significantly lower than what they should have been.
You would have to believe Gray did not know, when he contracted Harris’ services, that she was working with developer Jeffrey Thompson, a man she had worked with for a decade. You would have to believe that Gray never wondered how Harris’ family and close associates were able to raise $38,000 for the campaign — money that Thompson allegedly reimbursed illegally. You would have to believe that Gray had no inkling that Thompson — whose company D.C. Chartered Health Plan has the city’s single largest contract at $322 million — was taking a special interest in the campaign, and that all these other facts together might have suggested something was amiss.
Such cluelessness in a mayor is not unimaginable, but that does not make it likely or even plausible. Gray owes it to the city to come clean with further details beyond those given in today’s furtive press conference. Surely, someone knew something at some point.
