Whether you love him or hate him, you can’t deny that longtime Dupont Circle resident Ed Hanlon has a real passion for filing legal complaints of all shapes and sizes. His latest target in this particular pursuit is Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto.

Hanlon has filed a pair of campaign finance complaints against Pinto over the past few weeks, according to copies forwarded to Loose Lips, and he says he expects to submit a third in the near future. All three focus on different alleged wrongdoing by her campaign (including one that stretches back to her first run for office in 2020) but, broadly, Hanlon claims Pinto has repeatedly and inappropriately used government resources for electoral purposes. 

“Why are taxpayers paying for that kind of stuff?” wonders Hanlon, a lawyer who has filed a variety of legal challenges against other elected officials in the ward over similar concerns. “We have a consistent pattern here.”

Pinto campaign spokesperson Zoe Ades dubs all of these allegations “frivolous,” though some Wilson Building sources LL consulted agree that one of the complaints makes a stronger case than the other. Hanlon says both have been accepted by the Office of Campaign Finance for full investigations (not exactly a pro forma move, as the office has the discretion to reject outside complaints). 

But it’s hard to know how seriously to take these concerns considering how litigious Hanlon has proven to be over his decades around local politics. (One neighbor once remarked to City Paper that Hanlon “has been suing the pants off everybody for everything” for years.) 

“We’re seeing a lot of these meritless, silly attacks and it’s because the councilmember has been so ethical in office that there’s nothing legitimate to grab onto,” Ades says, glossing over some of the first-term councilmember’s past run-ins with campaign finance regulators. 

Perhaps that makes the source of these complaints and their timing at least as relevant as their actual substance. Hanlon, who is currently the first vice president of the Dupont Circle Citizens Association, firmly represents the ward’s old guard, so his dissatisfaction with Pinto is relevant as she mounts her reelection bid. And he just so happens to have been rubbing elbows with Pinto’s predecessor and former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans quite a bit in recent weeks, if Evans’ Instagram is any indication. As Evans mulls a comeback, most ward politicos to speak with LL continue to believe Pinto remains broadly popular. But there may be at least some appetite for a return to the old days. Maybe it’s a bit easier to muddy the waters and distract from Evans’ own history of ethics issues if there’s a cloud around Pinto, too.

“I think that she’s done a very poor job, I don’t hide that,” Hanlon says. “I mean, think about it for a moment. She helped write a crime bill that even Joe Biden, the president of the United States, was willing to veto. When was the last time that happened, 30 years ago?”

Hanlon also believes she’s run her office in a way that’s “sophisticated and sleazy at the same time,” prompting his various campaign finance complaints. 

In one of the documents, filed Nov. 11, he argues that Pinto blurred the lines between her campaign and Council business when she sent out an email newsletter advertising a “COVID-19 and Legislative Tele-Town Hall” in September 2020, just two months before she won her first full term in office (she initially took office after winning a June special election that year). Hanlon believes Pinto’s e-blast violated Council rules that generally prohibit lawmakers from sending out such newsletters in the 90 days before an election. The rules are intended to keep incumbents from using their offices for thinly veiled self-promotion right before voters head to the polls.

The Council rules also restrict the content of any mass mailing like this to limit the use of autobiographical information and photos of lawmakers over similar concerns. Hanlon points out that the newsletter contains a link to a “Meet Brooke” page on her personal website filed with information about Pinto and photos of her with various political figures, including one of her most prominent endorsers, then-Attorney General Karl Racine. LL notes that this information does not appear in the mailer itself, but Hanlon argues this is a distinction without a difference.

Hanlon also takes issue with how she obtained the email addresses for the folks who received this newsletter. He points to evidence he uncovered via one of his copious public records requests showing that Pinto’s Council staff purchased tens of thousands of addresses from a research firm before sending out the advertisement for the town hall. The Council’s rules also prohibit lawmakers sending newsletters to people who did not specifically request them.

Ades argues “it was [Pinto’s] job to get in touch with her constituents and get their opinion on things and keep them updated.” There’s “no there there,” she says of Hanlon’s claims.

However, Hanlon’s complaint about the e-blast is the one that some Wilson Building whisperers believe has the most merit, especially relative to Hanlon’s other claims. Council rules require lawmakers to submit these preelection mailings to OCF for review before sending them, and it is possible for regulators to sign off on them, but Ades says she isn’t sure if Pinto did so.

This would not be the first time such newsletters have gotten councilmembers in trouble, either. Former Ward 4 Councilmember Brandon Todd got slapped with a $4,000 fine back in 2019 after he sent out an email blast supporting a candidate for the State Board of Education relying on emails he compiled through his constituent service work. Hanlon isn’t accusing Pinto of the same scheme, exactly, but the case could turn on the question of whether she was similarly using government resources to send campaign-style materials to people who didn’t ask for them.

Hanlon’s second complaint, filed Oct. 22, deals with another one of his hobby horses: the mixing of official social media accounts with campaign activities. 

He argues that Pinto and her staffers are violating the law whenever they use her personal Twitter account to retweet posts from her official Council account. (All you Elon Musk fans out there can substitute in “X” as needed, but LL will stick with the site’s original name in this column.) Pinto uses her personal Twitter to promote her campaign, and Hanlon argues that it constitutes an improper commingling of government and electoral uses. He goes even a step further to claim this constitutes a manipulation of Google search results, as these frequent retweets ensure that Pinto’s personal account pops up just below her official account in the search results.

“Surely she has expensive media people helping her out, and they would know this happens,” Hanlon says. “Some poor person who is only looking for how to access city services is going to find her campaign account instead.”

Ades dismisses these worries as well, noting that other councilmembers up for reelection routinely do the same thing and have never faced sanctions. That may not be much of a defense against Hanlon, however, considering his similar accusations against his then-colleagues on an Advisory Neighborhood Commission threatened to upend how ANCs and government agencies across the city use Twitter.

In the coming days, Hanlon says he’ll file a third complaint targeting Pinto’s decision to send out an official mailer around Labor Day this year purporting to be a legislative update, but that was light on much substance. “An ordinary person would have thought it was election material,” he says. Plenty of politicians have faced similar accusations in the past, including Mayor Muriel Bowser herself, but this has yet to land any pols in hot water.

The worst case scenario for Pinto if any of these complaints are actually be substantiated is that she’ll need to pay a few thousand dollars in fines. (And it’s an open question how seriously the lightly staffed OCF will manage any of these investigations, considering it’s faced previous accusations of failing to do more than a perfunctory review of alleged problems.) 

But even the hint of wrongdoing, no matter how small or technical, can turn off the sort of highly engaged voters who live in Ward 2—just ask former Councilmember Elissa Silverman how that goes. The difference for Pinto is that she doesn’t yet have an opponent who could capitalize if she falters. But there’s still a few months left until the primary filing deadline. 

In a world where someone is polling Evans’ viability in a challenge to Pinto, it seems prudent to expect she won’t remain unopposed for long.