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City contractor Christian Carter‘s July 20 mayoral campaign kick-off featured an unlikely guest: an employee of the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services with an affidavit for the new candidate to sign.
Carter, caught in a dispute with the city over payments for producing the 2014 Children’s Budget, claimed that Mayor Vince Gray was punishing him by withholding payments (emails between Cater and mayoral chief of staff Chris Murphy suggest otherwise). By agreeing to the affidavit, he started a process that would create checks for him to sign that would allow his subcontractor to be paid, his own argument with the District aside.
More than two weeks after putting his name on the affidavit, though, Carter now won’t sign over the checks, totaling about $40,000, according to Murphy and allegedly stiffed subcontractor Susie Cambria.
“We have a sneaking suspicious he has kept all the money he was due as the primary contractor and then some—-and therefore any money D.C. might owe him is really owed to the subcontractors, and then some,” Murphy tells LL.
That’s not the only missing paperwork from Carter. His campaign still hasn’t filed the campaign finance forms that were due on July 31. LL tried to ask Carter about the checks and campaign filing, but he didn’t return LL’s calls or emails.
So LL contacted Chad Clinton, Carter’s enthusiastic campaign spokesman. Whoops, make that former enthusiastic campaign spokesman: Clinton tells LL that he’s no longer working for Carter and doesn’t know if he’s been replaced.
Clinton wouldn’t tell LL why he left. “Not sure what the dynamics are with the campaign at this point,” Clinton writes LL.
Photo courtesy Christian Carter