D.C. Councilman Marion Barry should be criminally prosecuted for helping himself to thousands of taxpayer dollars through earmarks, a damning new report has found.
Special counsels Robert S. Bennett and Amy R. Sabrin also recommended that the former mayor be condemned by his colleagues for abusing earmarks.
The 107-page report, issued Tuesday, accuses Barry of helping himself to money he had earmarked for a girlfriend, failing to disclose his relationship with the girlfriend when she was being considered for public funds, using nonprofit poverty-fighting groups as proxies to reward friends and cronies, and obstructing Bennett’s investigation.
The report also condemns the city’s earmark program, which Bennett said “create[s] substantial opportunities for waste and abuse.”
Bennett and Sabrin presented their findings in a packed city council chamber Tuesday. It led to a surreal moment in which Barry, sitting in the chambers, confronted his accuser. He said Bennett had overstepped his authority and was persecuting Barry.
“I never took a penny that didn’t belong to me,” Barry said. He said he would gladly have quadrupled the earmarks for his poverty-stricken constituents. “I will never refrain getting money for the residents of Ward 8 because we need it.”
Barry argued that there are no rules or written procedures for the award or evaluations of personal services contracts. If there are no rules, he said, “then one who engages in that cannot be held accountable for violating something that didn’t exist in the first place.”
Tuesday’s report focused on events that began unfolding last July Fourth weekend, when Barry was arrested after an angry public confrontation with Donna Watts-Brighthaupt, his estranged girlfriend.
It later emerged that Watts-Brighthaupt was paid $15,000 under a “personal service contract” to run a nonprofit group to which Barry had steered taxpayer dollars. During their relationship, Barry paid some of Watts-Brighthaupt’s expenses. But after she was given a city check, Bennett said, he drove his girlfriend to the bank and demanded that she cash the check and hand him money to repay his “loans.”
Barry would later encourage Watts-Brighthaupt to hire a lawyer before her depositions and asked her not to hand over personal e-mails, Bennett said.
Also under scrutiny are several Ward 8 “councils” which were supposed to help fight poverty in Barry’s ward but in fact were wide-open for “waste and abuse” and were unofficial arms of Barry’s political organization, Bennett said.
The council has a week to decide whether to follow the report’s recommendation to ask for a criminal investigation of Barry. But, as first reported by The Examiner, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has been probing Barry’s conduct since last summer. Bennett’s report — and the boxes of deposition transcripts — could tighten the vice around D.C.’s “mayor for life.” A law enforcement source told The Examiner that prosecutors hadn’t yet received Bennett’s report but were eagerly anticipating it.
Barry is already on probation, having pleaded guilty to not filing his taxes.
