The D.C. Council member was charged with taking thousands of dollars in cash from a contractor who did work for the city.
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Jurors in the bribery trial of D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. said Friday morning that they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras told the jury — which began its deliberations Wednesday morning after a week-long trial — to keep going because they had “not been deliberating for that long.”
“It’s a difficult statute, and obviously from your thoughtful questions, you’re looking at a lot of different scenarios,” Contreras told the jury of eight women and four men.
The judge, for now, rejected a request from White’s defense to declare a mistrial.
A Democrat who was first elected in 2016 to represent the city’s poorest ward, White could be sentenced to years in prison and lose his seat if convicted. The Ward 8 council member has maintained his innocence since his August 2024 arrest. His attorneys argued he was framed by an FBI informant.
White was charged with accepting $35,000 from a D.C. government contractor, Allieu Kamara, in exchange for agreeing to pressure D.C. officials to renew contracts that Kamara’s companies had obtained for violence-interruption services. The government charged that White also agreed to receive $156,000, or 3 percent of the contracts.
Prosecutors played video of five meetings between White and Kamara — all of them surreptitiously recorded by the FBI in the summer of 2024 — that showed the council member taking envelopes of cash as the two men discussed several unrenewed contracts and which city officials had the ability to extend them.
Kamara pleaded guilty to bribery and bank-fraud conspiracy and began cooperating with the FBI in 2024. Facing a maximum prison sentence of 30 years, Kamara testified at White’s trial that he agreed to help the feds in their investigation of the council member in exchange for a lenient sentencing recommendation from prosecutors.
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Three officials White told Kamara he was in touch with over the contract renewals testified at the trial that White never pressed contractor issues with them. They were Deputy Mayor Lindsey Appiah; Kwelli Sneed, who led a D.C. agency in charge of violence-interruption programs; and Anwar Walker, a former contracting specialist.
White’s attorneys did not dispute that he took the $35,000 from Kamara, but they argued it was no crime because he never intended to pressure the other officials to renew the contracts.
“Trayon White actually did nothing,” defense attorney Gary Kohlman said during closing arguments. “He had no intent other than to look into the status of the contracts that Kamara had.”
Prosecutors said White broke the law when he agreed to take cash to advocate for Kamara’s contracts, regardless of whether his advocacy worked. They pointed to White’s remarks on the video, in which he tells Kamara he would not vote for Sneed’s confirmation to her position full-time unless she supported his initiatives.
In his instructions explaining the bribery charge, Contreras said that to convict White, the jury would need to find that he took the money or agreed to receive money “corruptly” and “in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act,” “being influenced to commit or aid in committing, or to collude in or allow or make an opportunity for the commission of, a fraud on the United States,” or “being induced to do or omit to do any official act in violation of his official duty.”
Jurors appeared to be struggling with the question of what White actually intended to do, if anything, on Kamara’s behalf.
“Is it bribery if the defendant received money to perform an official act, but had no intention of fulfilling the agreement?” the jurors asked the judge in a note Thursday. Contreras said no.
White would remain under indictment if Contreras were to declare a mistrial. Prosecutors in U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office could choose to try the case again before a different jury, or drop the charges.
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