D.C. Council member Trayon White, Sr. has been charged with bribery, after federal authorities say he was caught on video receiving thousands of dollars in kickbacks from a business owner seeking help renewing his companies’ violence-interruption contracts with the D.C. government.
In a news release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of D.C. said White agreed to accept a total of $156,000 in cash payments from the business owner in exchange for pressuring D.C. government employees at two different agencies to extend those contracts.
Details of the charges against White, 40, were made public on Monday, the day after his arrest in D.C.
The council member appeared in U.S. District Court on Monday. He was released from custody and forced to surrender his passport. His next court date is Sept. 19.
As a council member, White, who has represented Ward 8 on the D.C. Council since being elected in 2016, was the chairman of a committee that oversaw some of the District’s violence-interruption efforts.
In a statement, White’s office said they “recognize the seriousness of this matter,” but want to “assure Ward 8 residents” that they will continue to work and serve the public and its constituents as the investigation evolves.
D.C.’s violence interruption efforts involve organizations staffed by community members acting as “credible messengers” who seek to de-escalate neighborhood conflicts.
All told, the two contracts with the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services were valued at $5.2 million. The payments to White represented about 3% of the total contract value, according to prosecutors.
Secret video recordings
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in D.C., says the scheme involving the violence-interruption contracts started in June 2024 when White agreed to meet with the business owner.
In a meeting in the company owner’s car outside White’s apartment building in Southeast D.C., the company owner wanted to know if the contracts would be extended and offered to pay $15,000 for the information, according to the documents.
White replied, “What you need me to do, man? I don’t wanna feel like you gotta gimme something to get something. We better than that,” according to court documents. However, White put the envelope containing the money into his jacket pocket.
From there, the two continued to meet over the summer, as White updated the business owner on his efforts — and continued to accept envelopes full of cash, according to the documents. Overall, the business owner paid White a total of $35,000 in four meetings between June and August. The meetings were captured on video, the documents say.
The business owner also told authorities he had given White gifts earlier, including trips to the Dominican Republic and Las Vegas as well as a $20,000 bribe for help in 2020 with resolving a contract dispute.
The business owner, who is described in court documents as a confidential informant, agreed to cooperate with the FBI as part of a plea agreement on fraud and bribery charges.
DC Council chairman says he will remove White from committee
Chairman of the D.C. Council Phil Mendelson called the charges “deeply disturbing” and that he planned to remove White as chairman of the council’s Committee on Recreation, Libraries and Youth Affairs until the charges are resolved once the council returns to work on Sept. 17.
Mendelson said he would also be forming an ad hoc committee, under the council’s rules, to “assess the situation and review the evidence against the council member,” saying the judicial process “can be slower than the public’s right to accountable government.”
While the council member is innocent until proven guilty, Mendelson said the allegations “are a gut punch to the public trust in the Council.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser was asked to comment on White’s arrest during back-to-school festivities and said she hadn’t yet been able to look at court documents that lay out the accusations against him.
“I think any time you have an elected official that does something wrong or is accused of doing something wrong, people are going to have a lot of heartburn and serious questions and disappointment and anger and all of those things,” Bowser said. “When I know more, we will definitely say if there’s any impact on government operations.”
White is popular in Ward 8, winning reelection with lopsided margins. In 2020, he was reelected with more than 78% of the vote.
Up for reelection this fall, White won a Democratic primary in June with 51% of the vote.
He courted controversy in 2018 when he posted a video on Facebook embracing an antisemitic conspiracy theory that a wealthy Jewish family controlled the weather.
“It just started snowing out of nowhere this morning,” White said in a March 2018 video amid a light snowfall in D.C. “Y’all better pay attention to this climate control,” White said in the video. “It’s climate manipulation and D.C. keep talking about, ‘We are a resilient city,’ and that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”
He later apologized for those remarks.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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