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UNDER FIRE...AGAIN
New ethics questions raised involving mayor's lobbyist personal lawyer
(Published December 1, 2003)

By MARY LEE MALCOLM
Staff Writer

The mayor is under investigation. Again.

An official with the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics’ Office of Campaign Finance has confirmed that OCF will conduct an inquiry into another ethics complaint brought against Mayor Anthony A. Williams. Dorothy Brizill of the public interest watchdog group D.C. Watch filed the complaint, which alleges that the mayor illegally received free legal services from a registered lobbyist.

Brizill and her organization filed two previous complaints against the mayor, which resulted in a reprimand for campaign use of government resources and in a hefty fine for submitting fraudulent signatures on election petitions.

The latest allegations were filed just two weeks after a group of the mayor’s critics announced that they are launching an effort to have him recalled. The activists organizing the recall include the D.C. Democratic Party’s national committeewoman, who represents the District on the Democratic National Committee. Williams is a Democrat.

Brizill, whom the mayor has publicly referred to as "unrelentingly negative," charged in her complaint to the OFC that the mayor illegally received "gifts of significant value" from a lobbyist, in the form of free legal services provided by local lawyer J. Mark Vincent Policy. D.C. law makes it illegal for a lobbyist to give, or for an elected official to accept, gifts or services valued at more than $100.

Policy is the mayor’s attorney in a civil lawsuit brought against the mayor and the Committee to Re-Elect Anthony "Tony" Williams by political consultant Thomas Lindenfeld. In his lawsuit Lindenfeld claims that the mayor and the committee still owe him $75,000 for his services before, during and after the mayor’s re-election last year.

Lindenfeld stands by the allegations outlined in Brizill’s complaint. In a telephone interview, he confirmed that both Policy and the mayor’s wife, Diane Williams, told him that Policy was not charging the mayor for his services in conjunction with the litigation.

"These are exactly the type of situations the conflict-of-interest policies are designed to avoid," Lindenfeld maintains. "Policy and his firm have a huge amount of business with the city, in front of the city council and with the mayor, because of their relationship with the real estate community. He should not be giving a large gift of free legal services."

Policy’s law firm, Greenstein DeLorme & Luchs, is part of the Hines/Smith/Georgetown real estate development team that just won the right to develop the site of the old Washington Convention Center at 900 Ninth St. NW. A press release issued by the mayor’s office identifies the law firm as "residential for-sale counsel" for the project.

Policy is also on the board of the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington and is listed with the D.C. Board of Election and Ethics as a registered lobbyist for the Washington D.C. Association of Realtors. The Web page for his firm advertises that it represents "clients in virtually all aspects of real estate transactions." Policy and his law partners frequently testify before the D.C. City Council on matters relating to real estate development.

The information came to light, Lindenfeld said, during a mandatory mediation session last July, at which all the parties to the case were represented.

During the session, Lindenfeld said he suggested that the large legal fees being incurred by all the parties would be one good reason to settle the case quickly. According to Lindenfeld, Policy replied that legal fees "would not be an issue for the mayor," because his firm was representing Williams "pro bono" (without charge).

Lindenfeld said that Diane Williams, the mayor’s wife, who attended the session on the mayor’s behalf, immediately agreed with Policy, stating, "We couldn’t afford to pay for this."

At that point, Lindenfeld said, the attorney for the mayor’s campaign committee, a lawyer from the firm of Holland & Knight, replied, "Well, we’re charging."

Lindenfeld also said that during a break in the session, Policy again told Lindenfeld’s attorney, Sherri Wyatt, that he was defending Williams for free.

In a separate interview, Wyatt confirmed that Policy represented to her that he was not charging the mayor for his services and that this "revelation" was made during a break.

Policy did not return numerous phone calls from The Common Denominator asking for his comments on the allegations made in Brizill’s complaint.

Lindenfeld acknowledged that Policy might have been bluffing.

"But I find it hard to believe that the mayor’s attorney and his wife would tell an outright lie in front of an officer of the court in order to gain negotiating leverage," he said.

Although she declined to comment on the situation presented by Lindenfeld’s allegations, an attorney for the District of Columbia bar did confirm that attorneys are bound by a professional code of conduct that prohibits them from "engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation," even in situations where the attorney is not representing a client in front of a judge.

Wyatt subsequently used Policy’s assertion that he was not charging the mayor in her written response to Policy’s request for attorneys’ fees, made to the court as part of a discovery dispute. Because all written pleadings are public information unless sealed, the "no fees" allegation then became a matter of public record.

Policy then sent Lindenfeld and Wyatt a letter, in which he alleged that by making public the information revealed in a mediation session, they had breached a standard confidentiality agreement requiring that all matters discussed in mediation remain secret.

Brizill attached this letter from Policy as a supporting document to the complaint she submitted to OCF. In the letter Policy does not deny that he professed to be representing the mayor for free.

"Given that this involved something illegal, I did not feel compelled to remain silent," said Lindenfeld, when asked about the alleged breach of confidentiality.

"The confidentiality rules affecting mediation are designed to keep information that could be helpful in a mediation setting from being used against you in court, not to hide evidence of illegal conduct. And Policy repeated this to my attorney in a conversation in the hallway — not exactly a confidential setting," Lindenfeld said.

Tony Bullock, a spokesman for Mayor Williams, gave little credence to the allegations.

"As usual, Ms. Brizill is uninformed," he said. "This complaint has no basis...These people [Lindenfeld] have sued the mayor’s campaign, and this is a strategy on their part to affect that litigation. We are not going to discuss, publicly, events in an ongoing, active litigation."

Brizill filed the OCF complaint challenging the authenticity of the petitions collected by the Committee to Re-Elect Tony Williams in 2002. Many of those signatures were disallowed. The Board of Elections ultimately denied the mayor a place on the Democratic primary ballot, forcing him to run as a write-in candidate, and fined the Williams campaign $277,700.

Brizill also filed a complaint with the OCF in 2000, charging that the mayor unlawfully used taxpayer dollars – in the form of government workers’ time and other resources – to campaign for a change in the District’s Home Rule Charter. That complaint, too, resulted in a decision against the mayor. He and his staff were ordered to stop misusing government resources to influence the outcome of the referendum.

In 1999, Williams was fined $1,000 by the OCF for failure to list thousands of dollars in income from NationsBank and Arthur Anderson & Co. on his financial disclosure statement during his original 1998 campaign for mayor.

An investigation of nonprofit fundraising in the Executive Office of the Mayor also found that Mayor Williams participated at least one time in solicitation of donations from city contractors. No one has been charged in connection with that investigation, although D.C. government rules against such solicitations were strengthened as a result.

Asked at his weekly press conference on Nov. 25 whether he had been notified that the OCF planned to open an investigation into Brizill’s newest complaint, Williams emphatically replied, "No, and no. I have not been so informed, and I did not receive free legal services."

While this investigation unfolds, trouble for the mayor may be brewing on the political front as well. Barbara Lett Simmons, the District’s national Democratic Party committeewoman, and other political activists in the District are preparing to launch a campaign to recall Williams.

"We’ve adopted the name ‘Save Our City’ (SOC) for our organization," Simmons said. "We’ve formed our organizational structure and our campaign. We’ve signed up about 347 circulators so far. Once the text of the petition is approved, we’re required to collect 37,000 signatures in 180 days. We expect to have over 50,000."

Simmons is the senior elected member of the D.C. Democratic State Committee, the organization that runs the local Democratic Party. In addition to serving as the District’s representative on the Democratic National Committee, Simmons describes herself as a former educator, administrator and businesswoman, as well as a "longtime advocate for women’s issues, minorities, health care and seniors."

If the signatures are submitted and approved as valid, the Board of Elections and Ethics would then be required to schedule a special election for voters to decide whether Williams should continue as mayor.

Simmons contends that the mayor is out of touch with the majority of the city’s residents, that he misuses taxpayer dollars, and that he promotes high-end development at the expense of D.C. residents’ concerns.

"The mayor does not care about this city or the people in it," Simmons said. "When he was chief financial officer, he lived in Virginia.... He’s never bought property in the city, but he will sell anything owned by the taxpayers — he’s never met a real estate broker he didn’t love. His level of integrity leaves much to be desired."

A recent poll conducted for WTOP radio and WJLA-TV Channel 7 by Potomac Survey Research of Bethesda showed the mayor has a 45 percent approval rating among Democratic voters likely to vote in the District’s presidential primary on Jan. 13. Only 21 percent of those surveyed said they would sign a recall petition. The results were based on a telephone survey of 500 likely voters, with a margin of error of 4.5 percent.

Mayoral spokesman Bullock noted the low percentage of voters polled who said they would support a recall, but he discounted the survey overall as unrepresentative of all D.C. voters.

By law, any recall effort must wait until the second year of the mayor’s term to initiate proceedings. Simmons said SOC plans to submit the text of its recall petition to the elections board in January.

Simmons described the recall effort as "sincere and serious — not frivolous."

"The mayor must know we are for real," she added.