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Vince Gray is taking his own advice about moving on from the shadow campaign so seriously that he’s already forgotten about how he found out about the illicit operation.
In an interview published today with the Washington Post‘s Mike DeBonis, Gray claims that he can’t remember a reported conversation where campaign aide David Dzidzienyo told Gray that he was worried about Gray pal (and now confessed shadow operative) Vernon Hawkins.
Also lost in the mayor’s mind: whether a January 2012 meeting with shadow campaign worker and Jeff Thompson associate Jeanne Clarke Harris was the first time he learned about the off-the-books efforts.
“I don’t even remember when I heard about it at this stage,” Gray tells DeBonis. “That seems immaterial.”
Somebody get this guy some ginkgo biloba. Elsewhere in the interview, Gray campaign manager Chuck Thies interjects that Gray’s not some all-powerful creature who can know the difference between shadow campaign T-shirts and legitimate campaign T-shirts.
“Do you really think that he has some omnipresent ability, some omniscient ability to know what people are doing when he’s not in the room?” Thies says. “Do you really think he was standing on a loading dock, counting yard signs coming off the back of a truck, or figuring out whether a font on a T-shirt matched another font on a T-shirt? It’s absurd.”
Photo by Darrow Montgomery