The man at the center of the controversy surrounding Vincent Gray’s call for an investigation into the campaign that got him elected told The Washington Examiner on Sunday that he knows he has admitted to breaking the law. “Gray broke the law. I broke the law, too,” Sulaimon Brown said. Brown has accused the Gray campaign of giving him cash and offering him a job so he could stay on the mayoral campaign trail and attack Mayor Adrian Fenty, who was fighting for re-election.
Campaign finance records show that neither Brown nor Gray reported an exchange of money between their campaigns. If exchanges were made, both campaigns would have violated campaign finance laws. The Washington Post reported Brown’s accusation Sunday, citing phone records and text messages as potential evidence of deal making.
Brown said he doesn’t mind implicating himself in a potential crime because he has been “railroaded through the public with a bunch of lies — that’s very hard to defend.”
Brown’s campaign records show he raised nearly $17,000 for his campaign from a variety of donors. The last donation was made Aug. 2. It was for $500 and was one of several made in the weeks before the Aug. 10 deadline to file campaign finance reports.
The Examiner asked Brown if he stopped collecting donations because he was receiving cash payments from the Gray campaign, as he alleges. But Brown said that wasn’t the reason. Instead, he claims to have stopped collecting donations because the people on his donor list were being harassed by the Fenty administration.
“Several of them were threatened by the office of tax and revenue with raising their property taxes,” he said.
Brown also claims that Gray promised him and his brother a job if he kept up his attacks on Fenty last summer. Brown was hired on Jan. 31 for a Department of Health Care Finance job that has a salary of $110,000 a year. His brother didn’t get a job with the administration.
“They reneged on that,” Brown said.
Brown himself was fired just three weeks after he started. Brown claimed that at-large Councilman David Catania pressured Brown’s boss to let him go. Catania has said that didn’t happen.
