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Vince Gray has spent more than a year staying quiet about the federal investigation into his last campaign. Everything from questions about his friend’s guilty plea to whether he would even finish his first term elicited only a “no comment” from the mayor.
With the deadline for a re-election campaign looming, though, the mayor has changed his mind about silence. On today’s episode of WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, Gray insisted that he’s innocent.
“I have said that I did nothing wrong from the very beginning,” Gray says. Not only that, the mayor claims, he’s prepared to answer more questions about the scandal in another campaign.
It’s reminiscent of Gray circa 2011, when he was less able to hold his tongue when asked about campaign malfeasance. When this whole thing started with Sulaimon Brown, Gray threw a press conference to deny (incorrectly, as it turned out) that his campaign gave money to the fringe candidate.
Today’s interview makes Gray look like a candidate for re-election, but the mayor stayed cagey about whether he’s running. Gray rejected the Thanksgiving deadline to declare floated by the Post‘s Mike DeBonis, saying only that he’ll announce his decision “within the next few weeks.”
Photo by Darrow Montgomery