A big fine for Janeese Lewis George

First Up

Janeese Lewis George illegally coordinated with labor unions and an independent expenditure committee, D.C.’s Office of Campaign Finance has concluded, fining the mayoral candidate $16,000. Among the no-nos: Five campaign employees — including spokesperson Amanda Michelle Gomez — had their salaries paid by unions without the legally required firewalls.

And just like that, both leading mayoral campaigns now have process grievances as election day looms.

For Kenyan McDuffie, the release of the ruling well after D.C. voting has started is an outrage. Dated June 6, the report didn’t drop until late on June 12, classic Friday-night-news-dump timing. By Saturday morning, the Washington Post noted, a new version of the report appeared with the date corrected.

For team Lewis George, who vowed to fight the fine, the timing was also suspicious: The campaign finance office dropped a bombshell when it was too late to rebut it. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, a Lewis George supporter, called it “a threat to free and fair elections from within our own government.” She recalled a scathing pre-election ruling in 2022 on Councilmember Elissa Silverman that was later overturned — but only after Silverman had lost. The winner was McDuffie.

For D.C. voters, the whole thing ought to be concerning — whether or not you believe Lewis George’s denials. For one thing, our campaign finance watchdogs couldn’t manage to release a report that wasn’t riddled with amateurish typos. More importantly, the timing has given supporters of both candidates an excuse to discredit the election.

As city officials belatedly warn people about a potential unprecedented 10-day wait for election results, there may soon be more excuses for partisans on one side or the other to cast doubt on the proceedings. Particularly in our constitutionally marooned city, legitimacy is a fragile thing.

What D.C.'s Talking About

Kennedy Center Goner. President Donald Trump’s name came off the Kennedy Center early Saturday morning. City Cast’s Emma Uber was on the scene for much of Friday as a boisterous crowd gathered to watch. They were in for a disappointment: After midnight, workers put up tarps so no one could see. (A New York Times photographer managed to peek through a gap and snap the crew removing an “A”.) As of yesterday, the tarps were still there — and based on my own visit, they might be there for a while: The scaffolding on which they are hung has been carefully built to allow passage into the building through two side doors, which you wouldn’t do for a quickie project. The legal ruling forcing the center to remove Trump’s name didn’t say anything about obscuring the entire facade. Naturally, MSNow has a “Tarp Watch” livestream that will capture the big reveal if it happens.

UFC Crowds. Even bigger and more boisterous crowds packed the National Mall for much of the weekend. There was Motocross at the White House and a military honor guard for the pre-fight press conference at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday. Somehow, the MAGA-friendly scene got a lot less local coverage than the Kennedy Center jubilation. WTOP ran a collection of photos, which are predictably wild. A stroll around the Mall Sunday afternoon revealed a lot more brick-shaped young men in American-flag muscle shirts than you’d usually encounter. Storms pushed back the start-time of the bout. For a more highbrow read, Post critic Philip Kennicott assesses the visuals of the UFC setup. “Everything about ‘the Claw’ feels tawdry,” he writes.

UFC Parties. It’s not like all the icons of old Washington sat out the fight: D.C.’s lobbying-and-influence industry latched onto the spectacle to push clients’ agendas. Meta sponsored an event at Ned’s Club where D.C. media, diplomatic, and political big shots rubbed elbows for “a celebration of competition, innovation, and America’s next chapter.”

Everyone’s a Biologist Now. Just days after the reopening of the reflecting pool, there is already algae on its surface. Predictably, there’s a lot of gloating about this from anti-Trump voices, including a Daily Show segment. But the greatest take comes from the right-wing influencer Matt Baker, who devoted a segment of his own to saying it was a deliberate act of sabotage by a Trump hater.

NYP on JLG. It took a few months, but national conservative media has finally realized that a socialist may soon be mayor of D.C. The New York Post ran an “exclusive” about how Lewis George bought a 3,000-square foot Tudor-style home in Manor Park for $1.2 million. The piece suggests this is hypocritical because the candidate has blasted exclusionary zoning that forbid people from building anything but single-family homes in certain neighborhoods.

Baby Bust Alert. Medstar is closing a postpartum unit at Washington Hospital Center, the Washington Business Journal reports, chalking it up to fewer babies. “Birth rates in the District have steadily declined,” the hospital chain says. Is this a relevant data point for evaluating D.C.’s economic health? For two decades, the arrival of young college-educated transplants — and their eventual babies — had been factors driving the city’s population growth. The nurses’ union is fighting the change, and says it is not true that there aren’t enough births to justify the closure.

Foie Gras Fisticuffs. With activists on track to put a foie-gras ban on the November ballot, it was only a matter of time before the new Washington Post opinion section seized on the issue to tweak D.C.’s liberal pieties. A column by Butterworth’s chef/owner Bart Hutchins engaged with arguments against force-feeding — and noted that foie gras was first brought to America by Washington dining icon Jean-Louis Palladin. Hutchins, whose Capitol Hill eatery is a hotspot for the MAGA elite, asked people not to sign petitions for the initiative.

Finally: World Cup Freebies: When the U.S. team scored at the very end of Friday night’s World Cup opener to win 4-1, it was an afterthought to most fans watching the game. It landed very differently for the crowd at D.C.’s TallBoy. The Shaw bar had announced that if the U.S. won by more than three goals, bar tabs would be on the house.

What if Washington had an old-fashioned tabloid? Here’s what one recent news story — about the potential for a long wait for election-winners to be announced under ranked-choice voting — would have looked like. For the full collection, visit dc.tab on Instagram.

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