Loose Lips has got to hand it to the folks working to recall Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen: They sure know how to spin reporters. 

Since launching this long-shot campaign a few weeks ago, several local news organizations (and a few national ones) have breathlessly reported its progress. The anti-Allen group’s recent announcement that it raised an eye-popping $56,000 in just its first month of existence only intensified that interest, generating several detailed profiles of the various Capitol Hill denizens who say they’re just so fed up with rising crime that they’re ready to turn their attention to local politics for once in order to oust Allen. And all along the way, the recall campaign’s organizers have insisted— vigorously—that this is an effort led by Democrats at wit’s end with one of their own, with some articles stressing the pivotal role various lobbyists, fundraisers, and even Congressional staff from the national party have played in this work.

LL read all this and began to suspect they were protesting a bit too much. Any mention by Allen’s supporters that this effort smelled suspiciously like another attempt by Republicans to demagogue over crime in the District has been greeted with howls from recall proponents. These clueless liberals are just too quick to dismiss the recall push as a plot by the GOP, they say, indicative of how they’ve ignored rising concern about violence in the ward over Allen’s tenure as the Council’s judiciary committee chair. Then, lo and behold, the recall campaign submitted its first fundraising report last week and made it clear exactly who is so interested in targeting Allen.

The recall may be spearheaded by some Democrats, but the numbers show it’s being funded heavily by Republicans. It took a bit of research, but LL found that nearly half of the group’s 400 donors are either currently working for GOP members of Congress or otherwise tied to the Republican party. In all, LL was able to connect 162 donors to the GOP, either via their employment history or via campaign finance records showing frequent donations to Republican candidates. 

Those contributors accounted for more than $24,400 of the $56,500 the group raised in the month of January and there could easily be more—the recall organizers very unhelpfully did not list the occupations of most of their donors on these forms, despite legal requirements that they do so. Instead, LL lost several hours of his life combing through lobbying and donation records, LinkedIn profiles, and legislative databases. The result was current (and former) staffers for some of the biggest names in national Republican politics: former Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush; former House Speakers John Boehner, Dennis Hastert, and Kevin McCarthy; current senators Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, Mitt Romney, and Tim Scott. Many are now lobbyists for oil and gas companies, big banks, big pharma, and all manner of other unsavory corporations. Others work directly for Republican campaign arms, such as the Republican National Committee or the National Republican Campaign Committee, or conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute or the Federalist Society. 

There are undoubtedly lots of Democrats backing the recall as well. LL found 85 donors on the other side of the aisle pitching in a little more than $16,000 combined. But the fact that Republicans outnumber them by a nearly two-to-one margin shows where the energy for this campaign is really coming from: the very same people who spent the past year using crime in D.C. as a cudgel against their political rivals. 

“These are people who are misaligned with the values of D.C. pouring money into an opportunity they see to, yet again, attack D.C.,” says Keya Chatterjee, vice chair of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6A, representing the H Street NE corridor. “I don’t know whether this was the intention of the people organizing this to let this happen, but it has … Creating this opportunity for a bunch of Republican congressional staffers to go at us is, you know, unneighborly at best.”

The recall campaign’s chair, Jennifer Squires, and treasurer, April Brown, did not respond to requests for comment. 

As odious as their views may be, particularly when it comes to the District’s autonomy, these Republicans have every right to participate in the political process, of course. 

If anything, LL is struck not only by the involvement of so many GOPers, but the prevalence of so many Hill denizens, regardless of party. The fundraising report lists scarcely any of the political types that participate in most local campaigns—former D.C. crime lab director Jenifer Smith, who clashed bitterly with Allen as the lab melted down three years ago, is one of the few exceptions—but instead is dominated by people who normally pay no mind to local affairs. 

Perhaps that helps explain why they’ve targeted Allen, a puzzling target for anyone anxious about crime in the city, considering he hasn’t even chaired the relevant committee for the past year. Blaming the councilmember who supported a small cut to the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget several years ago instead of Mayor Muriel Bowser, who literally runs said department, is indicative of either pure naivete or a much more willful blindness. A certain (extremely online) set has decided that Allen would make an effective target for all of these anxieties about crime, against all available evidence to the contrary, and so he finds himself in the barrel—look no further than leading Allen antagonist Chuck Thies bragging, publicly, that “we’ll make this smug white guy the poster child” for the ongoing efforts to amplify fears about violence in the city. 

“The sheer amount of misinformation and lies that have been spread is pretty significant,” Allen tells LL, noting that he is one of the few lawmakers who has actually focused on issues that “make us less safe today” including the crime lab’s problems. “The criticism I’ve heard from so many people is that they see these outside voices trying to come in and play this influence on our local elections.”

Most of the local politicos to speak with LL about the recall say the campaign isn’t exactly driven by ordinary ward residents, based on their experience—just over half of the campaign’s donors live in Ward 6. Edward Ryder, the chair of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6B representing much of Capitol Hill, says most people he’s spoken with have not even heard of the effort so far. Social media, as ever, is not an accurate reflection of real life. 

“Most people seem shocked it’s even happening,” Ryder says. “And the neighbors that are aware of it kind of have this perception of, ‘Wasn’t he unopposed last time? Why is this happening now?’”

Allen indeed cruised to victory without even perfunctory opposition in the primary or the general in 2022, even though all of these same complaints about his supposedly soft-on-crime approach existed back then. He won similarly handily, first against a Democrat then versus a Republican, in 2018. Allen may not be universally adored—a common refrain among his more progressive supporters is that they wish he was the sort of radical leftist his critics make him out to be—but there seems to be little evidence that he faces any sort of broad opposition within the ward. Capitol Hill may be the noisiest part of Ward 6, but there are many other parts of it, after all.

“If they actually thought that these were real issues that they could win an election on, they would have run somebody in the election,” Chatterjee says. “They didn’t do that, because they don’t have any kind of support within Ward 6.”

So it would seem that recall organizers have an uphill battle to climb in actually gathering enough signatures to put this question on the November ballot. Chatterjee notes that they’ll certainly have enough money to hire paid signature gatherers—the group claims to have raised another $20,000 or so since filing its January report—but the challenge will be actually convincing 10 percent of the ward’s registered voters to sign. They’ll need to find about 6,100 people to agree, and you can just ask the organizers behind the efforts to recall former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans how difficult that process can be (particularly if the incumbent has lawyers ready to challenge those signatures before the Board of Elections). Some of Allen’s supporters filed papers last week to raise money to fund anti-recall activities, though they have yet to get into gear.

It’s entirely possible that the recall effort face-plants before really getting off the ground. The elections board will decide Tuesday whether it’s even appropriate to issue petitions for the recall. Some supporters have noted that the law bars recall proceedings within the year following the start of an official’s term—Allen officially took office in early January of last year, but the recall supporters filed their papers to begin campaigning in late December. A recall of an elected official has, in fact, never succeeded in the history of home rule in D.C.

“I’m going to let the board be able to take a look at that and do their job,” Allen says, cautiously. “What we do know is: This is an effort that would overturn an election that we just recently had. And we know that it would cost D.C. taxpayers millions of dollars to be able to hold special elections.”

But as LL sees it, the ultimate outcome of this effort is largely immaterial. Even if everything goes wrong for Allen and he somehow loses the recall vote, he could turn right around and run again in the special election necessitated by his removal. The point here is to get attention, and in that endeavor the campaign has already undoubtedly been a success.

The message the recall’s backers want to send to D.C. politicians is clear: Hesitate in backing the crime-crackdown orthodoxy for even a moment, and they’ll raise a ton of money to unseat you (or, at least, cause you a big electoral headache). This dynamic was already clear in December, after Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George attracted the attention of a big business group running ads against her on crime as she faces a primary from her right, and it could easily play out elsewhere. LL has heard rumors for months that many of the same people backing the Allen recall could attempt to launch a similar campaign against Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, even though she too just won reelection.

The question is: How will the city’s left-leaning politicians respond? There’s plenty of evidence over the past several decades that national Republicans (and even moderate Democrats) will jump at any chance to slam the District as a crime-ridden dystopia to score political points. It could be easy to get spooked by their loudest online warriors, but is it really worth trying to placate people so diametrically opposed to D.C.’s interests?

“Every minute that we spend talking about or working on someone trying to overturn an election,” says Allen, “it’s a minute we’re not actually focused on what D.C. needs.”