With an exquisitely poor sense of timing, District Council members voted last week to give themselves another full year in which to file their 2011 financial disclosure forms. As The Examiner’s Liz Farmer reported, the council’s little gift to itself came in the form of a line item tucked into the city’s 2013 budget that moves the deadline from early this month to next May — months after the November election. The city’s toothless Office of Campaign Finance will be handling any financial disclosures for the rest of 2012, instead of the highly touted but still vacant ethics panel it voted to create last year.

A day after councilmembers punted on their own responsibility to publicly disclose potential conflicts of interest, a top aide to Mayor Vincent Gray pleaded guilty in federal court to obstruction of justice for secretly diverting campaign funds in an attempt to weaken then-incumbent Adrian Fenty. Thomas Gore, the former assistant treasurer of Mayor Vincent Gray’s 2010 campaign, admitted he made unlawful payments to former mayoral candidate Sulaimon Brown to attack Fenty on the campaign trail.