YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING: DC Council expels Trayon White over allegations he took bribes.
The D.C. Council voted unanimously Tuesday to expel Council member Trayon White Sr., an unprecedented rebuke stemming from federal allegations that he took $35,000 in bribes from a government contractor.
White’s expulsion — the first imposed by the council in its 51-year history — forces the Democrat to immediately surrender his seat representing Ward 8, a swath of blue-collar neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.
White, 40, who has pleaded not guilty to the bribery charge, is scheduled to go on trial next January. Despite the council’s action, he is eligible to run in a special election to fill his seat and represent the ward, where he won reelection to a third term in November, four months after his arrest.
Touted as a potent new political voice when he joined the council in 2017, White styled himself as an acolyte of the late former mayor Marion Barry, whose populist touch and deep connections with Black Washingtonians helped him also win a seat on the council representing Ward 8.
Like Barry, White achieved political success despite making critical missteps, including in 2018 when he claimed on social media that a Jewish banking family controlled the weather, an assertion that made him the target of international scorn.
Flashback to 2018: Holocaust Museum tour by lawmaker who said Jews control the weather does not go well.
The photo, taken in 1935, depicts a woman in a dark dress shuffling down a street in Norden, Germany. A large sign hangs from her neck: “I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew.” She is surrounded by Nazi stormtroopers.
D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) studied the image. “Are they protecting her?”
Lynn Williams, an expert on educational programs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and White’s tour guide for the day, stared at the photo.
“No,” she said. “They’re marching her through.”
“Marching through is protecting,” White said.
“I think they’re humiliating her,” Williams replied.
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The tour, scheduled to last 90 minutes, was halfway done. Seven of White’s staff members stayed with the guide, who soon was showing them an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto. As she explained the walling in of Polish Jews, one aide asked whether it was similar to “a gated community.”
Glazer spoke up.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t call it a gated community,” she said. “More like a prison.”
As I said at the time, Larry David’s next Curb Your Enthusiasm just wrote itself: