Politics

Vincent Gray Left Hanging after Machen Resignation

Published

10 years ago

March 27, 2015

Oakland Post

Former D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray (Courtesy photo)

Special to the NNPA from the Washington Informer

(NNPA) – Months into his only term as mayor, Vincent C. Gray surfaced as a central figure in a far-reaching corruption probe, and it turned out that this – as well as leaks and innuendo – were all that was needed to undermine his efforts to win re-election to a second term as chief executive of America’s capital city.

Now, with U.S. Attorney Ron Machen Jr.’s announcement last week that he’s leaving office – without returning an indictment or charges of any kind against Gray – some are more convinced that Machen engaged in a witch hunt.

“I had heard rumors that he said he was leaving, and he did nothing (to resolve the) Gray investigation. This was his highest-profile case,” said Chuck Thies, Gray’s 2014 campaign manager. “For him to leave this high-profile case dangling is reckless. He has already smeared Vince Gray’s’ name. He should be able to say he’ll return indictment or throw out the case.

“He owes it to more than Vince Gray; he owes it to city. He doesn’t care about D.C. and politics. He came out with his dog and pony show, interjected himself into an election and altered the result.”

Thies, a political consultant and former talk show host, said he’s incensed at what Machen did.

“He intimated that Vince Gray was trying to steal an election. There’s a vicious irony in all this. How does Machen dish out justice? He stole the election of 2014. That’s what he did. It’s not up to him to decide what the punishment is. It’s a prosecutor’s job to present evidence and let a judge or jury decide.”

Three weeks before the April 1 Democratic primary, Machen held a news conference to announce that he’d hammered out a plea deal with local businessman, super donor and political kingmaker Jeffrey E. Thompson, in which the maverick pleaded guilty to channeling more than $660,000 into a shadow campaign to pay for voter registration drives, materials and other election efforts for Gray during his 2010 run for mayor.

Most damning was Thompson’s assertion that Gray knew about the shadow campaign and met with him at least twice, requesting large sums of money to finance his campaign.

At the news conference after Thompson’s appearance in federal court, Machen said it was the tip of the iceberg and promised that many more heads would roll. Machen talked about Gray’s purported involvement in a scheme in which Thompson funneled more than $2 million in illegal donations to local and federal campaigns over the course of six years.

“Jeff Thompson’s guilty plea pulls back the curtain to expose widespread corruption,” Machen said at the time. “His plea gives the citizens of D.C. an inside look at the underground, off-the-books schemes that have corrupted election after election, year after year.”

Gray, 71, has always been steadfast in his denials, asserting that he did nothing wrong, adding that Thompson lied to save his own skin.

Machen promised that Gray would be indicted, letting one of the District’s more popular mayors in recent years twist in the wind. Gray supporters argue that if Machen had enough evidence to indict him, he would have done so long ago, and those advocating for fairness and impartiality are asking who will restore Gray’s good name if no indictment ever comes.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Up Next

Michelle Obama, Race and the Ivy League

Don't Miss

Support Grows for City Department to Address Racial Inequality

Oakland Post

Click to comment

Activism

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

20 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

20 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.