D.C. Councilman Jim Graham sought Thursday to defuse the threat of a rare reprimand by District lawmakers, locking himself into an extraordinary legal and political drama that pitted him against the city’s ethics board and D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson.

“We need to set aside this process in order to have a process,” Graham said as he called for a special council committee to investigate his conduct after complaining for weeks that a series of independent reviews of his actions had been unfair. “The rest of this should be held in abeyance until all of that gets resolved.”