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D.C. Council member Jack Evans to resign over ethics violations; was city’s longest-serving lawmaker D.C. Council member Jack Evans to resign over ethics violations
(about 5 hours later)
Longtime D.C. Council member Jack Evans announced Tuesday that he will resign Jan. 17, ending a 29-year political career that helped revive a foundering city but in the end was deeply tainted by ethics violations. D.C. Council member Jack Evans, for three decades a powerful fixture of District government, said Tuesday that he will resign from office, allowing him to avoid being expelled by his colleagues for more than a dozen ethics violations.
Evans’s colleagues took a preliminary vote in December to expel him, and had scheduled a 1 p.m. hearing Tuesday to summarize the case against him and offer him an opportunity to speak before a final expulsion vote on Jan. 21. The city’s longest serving lawmaker, Evans (D-Ward 2) for months had rebuffed demands from council members, civic leaders and activists that he step down. But as the council was about to meet to offer him a last chance to defend himself, Evans told Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) he would resign Jan. 17.
Instead, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said, he received Evans’s brief resignation letter about 12:55 p.m. “I believe Washington D.C. to be the pride of the nation, and I am proud of the contributions I have made in helping to create a vibrant city,” Evans, 66, wrote in a brief letter that made no mention of the ethical lapses he’d committed. “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve.”
“I believe Washington D.C. to be the pride of the nation, and I am proud of the contributions I have made in helping to create a vibrant city,” Evans (D) wrote in the letter, which did not mention his ethics troubles. “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the District of Columbia and residents of Ward 2.” Mendelson, a longtime ally who had been urging Evans to surrender his seat, characterized the resignation as “a step in restoring the integrity of this institution and the trust of the public.”
Mendelson (D), who had been urging Evans to resign, then cancelled the afternoon hearing. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) did not respond to requests for comment.
“This is the right decision that Mr. Evans has made,” the chairman said. “This is important as a step in restoring the integrity of this institution and the trust of the public.” Read the resignation letter by Council member Jack Evans
Evans started the day as if it was a routine Tuesday at the Wilson Building. He stayed silent during a council breakfast, leaving his waffle mostly uneaten and remaining mostly stone-faced as his colleagues cracked jokes about plans for gaming regulations . For months, Evans had assured friends and supporters — a broad network amassed over decades in the hurly-burly of D.C. politics — that the scandals he faced would pass and he would win another term in November.
He attended the morning legislative meeting, speaking privately to a staffer and to Mendelson between votes on bills and appointments. At its conclusion, he left the dais and walked down the stairs to his first-floor office, ignoring questions from reporters. Yet as evidence mounted that he had misused his office to help private consulting clients, Evans’s political footing grew more tenuous. Allies turned away, and the council stripped him of his prized chairmanship of the Committee on Finance and Revenue. He was forced to relinquish his leadership of the Metro board.
He left the building at 1:10 p.m. His spokesman, Joe Florio, said Evans had no additional statement planned. In early December, all 12 of Evans’s colleagues recommended his expulsion in a unanimous vote, setting him up to become the first lawmaker in D.C. history to face banishment.
Veteran D.C. journalist Tom Sherwood was the first to report that Evans would resign. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who oversaw the council's internal investigation of Evans, described her colleague's 29-year council career as “extraordinary,” but also defined by “extraordinary ethical lapses.”
“He didn’t just slightly tip-toe over the line,” Cheh said. “He ran well past the line, and apparently for a long period of time. It is nevertheless a sad day for him, and a sad day for the council, that it had to come to this.”
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Evans, first elected in 1991 to represent a swath of downtown and western D.C. neighborhoods including Foggy Bottom, Georgetown and Dupont Circle, was a titan of D.C. politics who loomed large in civic life and made several unsuccessful runs for mayor.
A steadfast ally of business interests, he championed the revival of downtown, construction of Nationals Park and attempts to bring the Redskins back to the District. But his close ties to business eventually proved to be his undoing, as his outside employment with law firms and as a consultant to prominent companies with interests before city government came under scrutiny.
Evans struggled to explain what he did for $400,000 in consultingEvans struggled to explain what he did for $400,000 in consulting
In 2018, the local news website District Dig reported that the executive of a digital sign company offered Evans’s son an internship before the lawmaker proposed legislation to make the company’s business plan possible. Ethics investigators started scrutinizing his ties with the company, and federal authorities also launched investigations of his business dealings., though he has not been charged with a crime. The D.C. election board will schedule a special election to fill Evans’s seat for the remainder of the year. In recent weeks, as he mulled whether to resign, Evans also considered running for a new term, according to two people who spoke to him before the holidays. Six candidates are competing for the Ward 2 seat in the June 2 Democratic primary, which is tantamount to the general election in a deep-blue city. The filing deadline is March 4.
Then, The Washington Post reported that Evans solicited employment from local law firms using government email accounts, touting his influence and connections as a member of the council and chairman of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority board as a reason to hire him. Over the course of his council tenure, Evans was a symbol of continuity at the John A. Wilson Building as six mayors came and went and the District’s economic fortunes evolved from near-bust to boom, a turnaround for which he often claimed credit.
That report prompted the transit agency to launch an internal investigation and the council to reprimand Evans. The ethics board later fined Evans $20,000. He faced scrutiny earlier in his career for his use of constituent and campaign funds, but endured while the careers of fellow Democrats — including Mayor Marion Barry, Council Chair Kwame R. Brown and Council members Michael A. Brown, Harry “Tommy” Thomas Jr., and Jim Graham — were upended by scandal.
Evans falsely said that the transit agency’s cleared him of wrongdoing, and stepped down from the board after The Post revealed that investigators found he “knowingly” violated ethics rules to help friends and consulting clients. His political reign began in the late 1980s with his election to the lowest rung on the District’s political ladder:a seat on a Dupont Circle advisory neighborhood commission.
The next day, FBI agents searched his home. In 1991, when then-Ward 2 council member John A. Wilson ascended to the chairmanship, Evans won Wilson’s seat, campaigning as an opponent of Dupont Circle development. It was Wilson whom Evans often creditedfor teaching him a fundamental fact of pragmatic politics: on a 13-member council, he only needed seven votes to get his way.
Under enormous pressure, the council stripped Evans of a powerful committee chairmanship and launched its own investigation, which found in November that Evans violated ethics rules when he used his office to assist companies that paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars for consulting services. Evans presided over a ward that encompassed downtown and stretched from the affluence of Georgetown to what was then the poverty of Shaw. His constituents included business executives, socialites and lobbyists; gays who were gentrifying Dupont Circle; and African Americans who had lived in the rowhouses and apartment buildings east of Logan Circle for generations.
The investigation found that Evans had received $400,000 in consulting payments from prominent local businesses that he failed to disclose, including from EagleBank, developers and a software contractor. A bon vivant, Evans navigated diverse constituencies with ease, whether at community meetings or charity galas, to which he often arrived in a tuxedo, ready to pose for photos with luminaries that ended up framedon his office wall.
Evans struggled to explain what consulting services he provided, and investigators identified numerous instances where he voted on legislation and contacted city agencies to assist his clients while they were paying him. Evans and his lawyers defended his conduct, saying he was providing routine constituent services he would offer to any business or person. Evans grew up in a small town in central Pennsylvania and moved to Washington to work as a lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission. His constituents were well versed in the details of his personal life, including the birth of triplets in 1996 and the death of his first wife, Noel, who succumbed to cancer seven years later, at age 46.
Most of the council called for his resignation, but Evans refused. The next month, all of his colleagues voted to recommend his expulsion. As a widower, Evans managed the demands of raising his childrenwhile serving in his council post and working at a prestigious law firm.
Evans never publicly responded to the expulsion vote, but said the failure of an effort to gather enough recall signatures to remove him from office showed that “the voters in Ward 2 do not want me to leave.” He became an aggressive advocate for ambitious downtown development projects that helped redefine the city, including the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and what is now the Capitol One Arena on 7th Street NW. As finance committee chair, he was a dependable ally for the District’s tax-averse business community.
Evans had been considering running for another term this year even if he was expelled or resigned, according to two people who spoke to him before the holidays and described those private conversations on the condition of anonymity. In the early 2000s, Evans helped then-Mayor Anthony Williams persuade Major League Baseball to move a team to Washington and pushed the council to build a ballpark on the banks of the Anacostia River, triggeringan explosion of luxury development in a part of the city known for strip joints and warehouses.
His resignation letter did not address that possibility. He has not filed for reelection; the deadline is in March. For all his council accomplishments, Evans yearned for a bigger platform. Twice, he ran for mayor, hoping that his record of deal-making would persuade a predominantly black electorate to embrace him, a blonde white man whose blue suits and striped ties made him look like he had stepped from the pages of a Brooks Brothers catalogue.
Six other candidates have filed to compete for the Ward 2 council seat in the June Democratic primary, which is tantamount to the general election in a deep-blue city. It never happened, despitea gush of financial support from developers.In 1998, Evans won 10 percent of the vote. Sixteen years later, he ran again, often asking ask voters, “Is this city ready for a white mayor?”
The D.C. election board must schedule a special election to fill the Ward 2 seat for the rest of Evans’s term. “Not any white guy can win,” he would answer. “But I can win.”
Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who oversaw the council’s internal investigation of Evans, said his resignation was no surprise because he did not want to be the first council member expelled in D.C. history. He got five percent of the vote.
“Jack’s had an extraordinary career and has done many fine things, but he also had extraordinary ethical lapses,” Cheh said. “He didn’t just slightly tip-toe over the line. He ran well past the line, and apparently for a long period of time. It is nevertheless a sad day for him, and a sad day for the council, that it had to come to this.” Ever the pragmatist, Evans quickly heaped praise on Bowser, whom he had dismissed as an inconsequential legislator during the primary campaign.
This is a developing story that will be updated throughout the day. By then, hehad survived several periods in which his spending was questioned. In the early 2000s, he withdrew thousands of dollars from “Jack PAC,” his political action committee, for travel and entertainment expenses, including $6,772 for a friend and him to go to China. The Office of Campaign Finance recommended that he pay the money back.
In 2011, he was criticized for using $135,000 in constituent service funds — money intended to help residents with emergencies such as missed rental and utility payments — to attend sporting events. After defending the expenditures as “perfectly legal,” Evans over the next eight years spent more than $200,000 in constituent funds on Nationals, Wizards and Capitals tickets.
A more intense level of scrutiny began in 2018, after reporter Jeffrey Anderson of District Dig revealed the relationship between Evans and Don MacCord, the founder of Digi Outdoor Media, who sought the lawmaker’s assistance as he tried to install digital signs around the city.
The Washington Post later reported that MacCord gave Evans 200,000 shares of stock just before the council member proposed emergency legislation that would benefit the company. Evans said he returned the stock, along with $50,000 that MacCord paid him.
Last February, The Post revealed a federal grand jury was investigating Evans and had sought documents from city government about Digi.
Weeks later, The Post published business proposals Evans sent to law firms from council accounts in which he proposed using his influence and connections as an elected official and Metro board member to land clients. That prompted the council to reprimand Evans, the city ethics board to fine him $20,000 and the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority to open an investigation.
The probe concluded that Evans violated the transit agency’s ethics code by failing to disclose that he was receiving $50,000 a year from Colonial Parking as he was “waging a campaign” against a competitor, Laz Parking, which held a Metro contract.
Evans and his allies tried to conceal the findings. After the Post reported them in June, Evans said he would step down from the board. A day later, federal agents searched his Georgetown home.
In July, the council voted to strip Evans of his committee chairmanship and launched its own investigation into his use of his public office and his consulting business. That same month, Council member David Grosso (I-At-Large) became the city’s first lawmaker to demand Evans’s resignation. Others urged patience.
Whatever hesi­ta­tion they felt had dissipated by early November, when the report from the council’s investigation was released. Findings included that Evans received $400,000 in consulting payments and failed to disclose his clients.
Under questioning from investigators, Evans struggled to explain the services he had provided for those fees. Investigators identified numerous instances where he voted on legislation and contacted city agencies to assist his clients while they were paying him. Evans defended his conduct, saying he provided routine constituent services he would offer to any business or person.
His colleagues rejected those explanations. Nine members urged Evans to resign. Mendelson said Evans had “obliterated the public trust.”
The preliminary expulsion vote was Dec. 3, with a final vote scheduled for Jan. 21.
At the council’s regularly scheduled breakfast Tuesday morning, Evans left his waffle mostly uneaten and was silent while his colleagues joked about plans for gaming regulations.
During a legislative meeting later in the morning, Evans could be seen speaking privately with Mendelson. He left the dais when the session ended and walked downstairs to his first-floor office, ignoring questions from reporters.
Evans left the building at 1:10 p.m. His spokesman, Joe Florio, said the council member had no additional statement planned.
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