The District’s campaign finance office has dismissed a complaint filed against Ward 2 D.C. Councilman Jack Evans for snapping a photo of a fully uniformed Police Chief Cathy Lanier in the Wilson Building and then using it in a re-election ad.
In an order dated Thursday, Office of Campaign Finance Director Cecily Collier-Montgomery accepted the recommendation of the office’s general counsel and tossed the complaint against Evans.
The claim, filed by four Ward 2 residents who supported Evans’ challenger in the Sept. 9 primary, argued that Evans “improperly used his own Council office to take photographs of himself with Police Chief Cathy Lanier while she was on duty and in official uniform and then…used one of those photos in a campaign advertisement.”
“I strongly urge [Evans] to review the District’s ‘Employee Conduct’ rules,” Collier-Montgomery wrote, “to ensure that public officials always remain vigilant concerning their responsibility to ‘avoid action … [a]ffecting adversely the confidence of the public in the integrity of government.’ ”
Evans declined comment through a spokeswoman.
David Mallof, the lead complainant, said in an e-mail that the decision “opens the floodgates fully for further future abuse by incumbent elected officials using senior civil servants…as their campaign ‘props.’ ”
The ad ran in an August edition of the Dupont Current. It featured a photo Evans and Lanier, in the councilman’s office, above a list of Evans’ accomplishments.
Evans did not break any campaign finance law, the office determined, “because the photograph was not taken for a campaign-related purpose and because Chief Lanier consented to pose with respondent in the photograph for a personal, not campaign-related, purpose.”
The four-term councilman easily won his primary contest.
