Rachel Kurzius / DCist
“Mr. Evans has obliterated the public trust, and that would speak as well for the trust from his colleagues,” said Council Chairman Phil Mendelson at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “I think the report is damning. When you think about it, there’s no good news in it.”
But in his own 42-page response released late Tuesday afternoon, Evans’ lawyers largely rejected the report’s findings, accusing the law firm of only seeking to confirm predetermined conclusions about him and rushing the investigation to do so.
The response says Evans could have been better about disclosing his client relationships, but that he never intended to do anything corrupt.
“None of his lapses were intentional; none reflected any corrupt agreement with friends and clients; and none ever compromised Mr. Evans’ position, votes, support or work on long-standing issues for which he has been consistent for almost 30 years,” his response reads.
The D.C. Council voted in July to commission the investigation from the firm, which looked into whether Evans had conflicts of interest in his past five years of legislating. While the investigation ran into some roadblocks—namely, key clients of Evans’ consulting business refusing to speak—members of the council received copies of the report on Monday, as did Evans’ legal team.
The report is a key part of the D.C. Council’s ad hoc committee, which will determine discipline for the city’s longest-serving legislator. The committee, chaired by Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh and on which every councilmember aside from Evans sits, will consider sanctions. (The D.C. Council already reprimanded Evans over business proposals he sent from his council email address and from council staff in March.) At-Large Councilmember David Grosso, has been calling for Evans’ resignation for months. Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen is now also calling for Evans to resign, Allen said today.
Cheh said it is her understanding that the Council, with 11 votes, could vote to remove Evans from the office he has held for almost three decades. But she did stress that Evans would be given a chance to respond to the report in an open session with the committee, and that the lawyers who wrote the report would also be on hand to answer questions about it.
And while she refused to say whether she thought Evans should remain in office, she did not hide her feelings with respect to what the report found.
“We’re entitled to be disgusted by what we read in the report,” said Cheh. “This report exposes yet again the undue influence of certain well-connected law firms… have on the work of our government. These sorts of things are corrosive of confidence our public should have.”
Allen shared a similar opinion earlier in the day, calling the report “a very fact-based review that lays out a clear pattern of unethical behavior… the report lays out the definition of pay-to-play. It’s incredibly distressing, it’s incredibly disturbing.”
This isn’t the first investigation into alleged pay-to-play activities by Evans. While D.C. councilmembers are allowed to hold second jobs, his work at law firms has long drawn criticism from government watchdogs. In 2016, Evans started his own consulting firm, which included clients who have business before the D.C. Council and the Metro board, where he served as chair.
Part of the nearly-100-page report focuses on Evans’ work as a consultant.. Investigators found “no evidence of ‘deliverables’—e.g., written reports to clients on business or political trends or developments, advice on specific projects, or introductions to landlords or other business partners,” the report says.. “According to Evans, his clients were mostly paying for the value of having him available on short notice if he could be helpful.”
That consultant work has also prompted a federal investigation, which resulted in subpoenas for his D.C. Council colleagues and a raid on Evans’ Georgetown home. His consultant work was the subject of a Metro board ethics investigation, too, and Evans stepped down from the board after the release of a damning report summing up its findings: “a pattern of conduct in which Evans attempted to and did help his friends and clients and served their interests, rather than the interests of WMATA.” The councilmember contests the findings of that report.
In August, Evans was fined $20,000 as part of an agreement with the Board of Ethics And Government Accountability. He maintains that he never admitted a violation of the council’s code of conduct. Instead, Evans “recognizes that these issues needed resolution in order to avoid a protracted and costly dispute resolution process,” according to a statement his office released at the time.
In the response from Evans’ legal team, Michael Frisch, an expert in legal ethics at the Georgetown University Law Center, said the council’s report relies on “an inaccurate and flawed understanding of a significant number of ethics rules that govern attorney and non-attorney professional behavior.” He added that simply because Evans worked for a law firm that represented a particular client, it did not mean Evans himself stood to benefit from measures in the council that favored that client.
Evans will have the chance to make these arguments himself before the ad hoc committee, but both Cheh and Mendelson hinted Tuesday they weren’t yet swayed by Evans’ early defenses. “It’s quite clear that if there was a line… he went was past that line,” said Mendelson. For her part, Cheh said Evans had consistently engaged in “willful blindness” to ethics rules.
In addition to fighting these allegations, Evans is also facing a crowded primary for his Ward 2 seat. Already, competitors have pounced on this report as the latest example of why they should replace him. A separate recall effort is also underway.
In July, the D.C. Council removed Evans as the chair of the Finance Committee in July, and dissolved the powerful committee, shifting its responsibilities to elsewhere on the council. In a close vote, Evans was permitted to remain on other committees, including the Committee on Business and Economic Development, which now has much of the Finance Committee’s portfolio. The deciding vote? Evans himself.
Moving forward, both Mendelson and Cheh said the Council may have to revisit its ethics laws and Code of Conduct.
“Maybe the silver lining is… it may make us redouble our efforts to look more closely at what’s going on,” said Cheh. “But you’re never going to be able to purge the body of bad behavior if you have bad actors.”
The last time the Council rewrote its ethics laws was in 2011 — after another spate of scandals engulfed the city lawmakers.
This story has been updated with additional comments and details about the report and Jack Evans’ response. 
This story was published originally on DCist.