DMV Daily: Gray Admits to “Missteps”

Missteps were made.

The Washington Post ran a devastating front-page story Sunday in which former D.C. mayoral candidate Sulaimon Brown charged that he “struck a deal last summer with the campaign of Mayor Vincent C. Gray to continue his attacks on incumbent Adrian M. Fenty in exchange for a city job if Gray won.” Gray “adamantly denied Brown’s allegations, saying the campaigns did not work in tandem. He said he agreed only to get a job interview for Brown, but not in return for attacks on Fenty.”

Brown is not exactly a credible figure, but the Post story -- which merits reading in its entirety -- contains details of text messages between Brown and the Gray campaign that lend support to his story, without quite proving it.

The Post reports this morning that Gray “acknowledged ‘missteps’ and said he wants the city attorney general and the D.C. Council to investigate” the allegations. Gray “also accepted the resignation of Talib Karim, the chief of staff of the Department of Health Care Finance, where Brown worked as a $110,000-a-year special assistant until he was dismissed.”

WTOP reports Karim resigned Friday, blaming his exit “on the attention from a recent Washington City Paper report, which detailed a messy divorce that resulted in his wife seeking a protective order.” Karim said, “It had nothing to do with my work. I did not want the agency to be tarnished.”

In her Washington Examiner column, Jonetta Rose Barras says the call for an investigation gives the “scandal-plagued” mayor “a credible excuse for not answering any further questions” about Brown’s allegations. “Ironically, ending cronyism and implementing ethics reform were supposed to be top priorities” for Gray and D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown, Barras adds. “Obviously neither the chairman nor the mayor got that memo. The swift decline of the District government’s image under this new regime has been spectacular.”

Elsewhere in the DMV:

* Interim D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson is about to lose the “interim,” the Post reports. In an unsurprising move, Gray is expected to name Michelle Rhee’s less abrasive protégé to the job permanently. According the Post, Gray “has, by most accounts, never seriously considered any other potential leader of D.C. Public Schools.”

* The Post’s Mike DeBonis says he was not kidding when he wrote last week that Kwame Brown is “currently driving a ‘1983 mail truck’ -- that, in lieu of the city-paid 2011 ‘fully loaded’ Lincoln Navigator L he once piloted.” The old truck “appears to have the all-black exterior Brown had once requested for his Navigator.”

* In addition to the signatures of his top campaign aides and his own wife, At-Large D.C. Council candidate Bryan Weaver says incumbent Sekou Biddle has challenged the names of some well-known D.C. activists, DCist reports. Weaver “contends that Biddle’s challenges of his nominating petitions ensnared hundreds of legitimate D.C. voters and were filed as part of an attempt to bury his small campaign staff in the painstaking work of verifying the names, addresses and signatures.”

Meanwhile, Republican Pat Mara’s campaign announced this morning that Mara’s petitions easily survived Biddle’s challenges, meaning Mara will definitely be on the April 26 ballot.

* MSNBC’s First Read reports Tim Kaine “will likely announce his decision this week (or next) whether he’ll run for Jim Webb’s Senate seat.” A “plugged-in Democratic source” puts the odds of a Kaine bid “at 50%-50%.”

* The Baltimore Sun says if the federal government shuts down later this month, “AmeriCorps and several other service organizations would shut down, with no funding to support 170,000 positions in the state,” and the Social Security Administration, which has about 13,000 employees in Maryland, “could end up furloughing all of its workers for a month.”

* The Post reports Gov. Martin O’Malley’s younger brother Peter “was unanimously elected Saturday as chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party at a meeting of its central committee.” Peter O’Malley is a longtime Baltimore political operative.

* The Maryland Daily Record writes that if the state’s same-sex marriage legislation survives a surprisingly tough course through the House of Delegates, Maryland’s first gay marriages would be permitted on Oct. 1.

* Fred Grandy -- the former “Love Boat” actor and Iowa congressman -- is off WMAL, DCist writes. He “resigned under alleged pressure from the D.C. station’s management over comments criticizing radical Islamicism” during “a segment on last Friday’s show with Catherine Mann-Grandy, Grandy’s wife and frequent guest, on domestic terrorism and radical Muslims.”