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Jack Evans Goes Out With a Whimper

Screenshot from WUSA9 in 2021.

Jack Evans’ bid for DC Council chairman has ended with a whimper. Unable to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot, Evans dropped out of the race last week, he told WUSA9. This is a stunning rebuke for a man who served a record 29 years on the DC Council as the Ward 2 representative, including an incredible two decades atop the powerful finance and revenue committee.

As finance chairman, Evans prioritized government spending on multibillion-dollar stadiums, while shunning efforts to stabilize DC’s vulnerable residents, which helped fuel the city’s unprecedented gentrification — just as the Washington Post, Evans’ longtime booster, envisioned. Amid his remaking of DC, Evans also enriched his private patrons and himself, an arrangement that caught up with him in his last year in office. But from the moment he was forced to resign in disgrace in 2020, Evans has been trying to claw his way back to power. This latest defeat, if you can even call it that, seems likely to mark the final nail in his political coffin.

What infuriates me most about Evans, who I’ve covered for nearly twenty years, is that he’s never been held legally accountable for his corruption — aside from having his DC law license suspended for 180 days, and having to pay $55,000 in ethics fines to DC. Meanwhile, over the years, I’ve watched one Black politician after another frog-marched out of office, and often into jail, for comparatively nothing.

The stark contrast owes in part to the composition of Evans’ secret patrons. They were some of DC’s heaviest hitters, folks like parking magnate Rusty Lindner, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond while he quietly paid Evans. These aren’t the type of folks who go to jail. And I can’t help but believe that Evans was never charged for fear that he might squeal on these heavy hitters to save himself.

Recently, I’ve been thinking back to my biggest scoop on Evans. It involved his employment at a lobby firm that represented both Pepco, the local utility company, and Exelon, the Illinois-based nuclear energy giant that was attempting to buy Pepco at the time.

Back in 2015, only a little-known DC regulator, the Public Service Commission, stood in the way of Exelon’s $6.8 billion takeover of Pepco. So Evans got to work, calling on the three-person PSC to reverse its prior ruling blocking the merger, which it subsequently did.

I detailed this sordid affair in a 2016 HuffPost story, not-so-subtly headlined “Some Go To Jail—Not Jack Evans.” Three years later, the FBI requested documents from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and DC councilmembers related to Evans’ dealings with a number of companies, including Exelon and Pepco, and their lobby firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips, where Evans moonlighted from 2015 to 2017. But the federal investigation, which included an FBI raid of Evans’ Georgetown home, quietly came to a close in 2022. This stands in contrast to other states, where officials with overly close ties to power companies, including Exelon, keep going to jail.

Despite these shady dealings — and many more — Evans has avoided jail time. That’s not just because of his high-society clients, but also due to the handiwork of his friend, DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson.

I recently recounted how Mendelson subtly aided Evans in his hour of need; and how Evans repaid his friend by trying to take his job as chairman. The only thing more astonishing than Evans’ disloyalty is his inability to secure a place on the ballot, which marks an extraordinary rebuke from DC voters, and an appropriate end to Evans’ career.

Pete Tucker is a journalist based in DC. He writes at petetucker.substack.com

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