A D.C. Council panel has lost deposition testimony collected in a probe of a dubious firetruck donation to a Dominican Republic town, sparking a rebuke from Attorney General Peter Nickles and a demand that the investigation end without a report.
The recorded testimony of two executive branch witnesses, Thorn Pozen and Robin Booth, was mislaid — or maybe copied over — by the council’s government operations committee. That panel, jointly with the judiciary committee, is investigating the donation of a firetruck and ambulance to Sosua, a town on the north Dominican coast.
The council’s final report, days from release, is widely expected to focus on the role of Sinclair Skinner, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s close friend and confidante.
“What we have, as best we can tell, the recording equipment either failed or we taped over parts of those depositions,” Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh, government operations chairwoman, told The Examiner.
Nickles demanded that the council stop the probe given its “frailties” and instead defer to the conclusions of the D.C. inspector general, who also is investigating. “As you can imagine, this loss of testimony is a serious matter and calls into question the integrity of the investigation,” Nickles wrote in a letter to Cheh and Councilman Phil Mendelson, judiciary chairman. Cheh vowed to release the report anyway. The final document, she said, will “note” the missing testimony.
“His attempts to paint this in some sinister fashion is precisely a maneuver we would expect from him,” Cheh said of the AG. “The integrity of the report will stand on its own.”
— Michael Neibauer
