Trayon White. Photograph by Evy Mages . DC Councilmember Trayon White will continue to represent Ward 8 following a decisive victory in Tuesday night’s election. His win, earned less than three months after he was arrested by the FBI and charged with bribery related to his dealings on the Council, raises questions. White has pleaded not guilty, but now that he’s back in office for another four-year term, what will happen if he’s convicted? White is expected in court on November 13 for a status hearing. He’ll be represented by federal public defenders, following a shake-up in his defense team late last month. But the road to a final verdict could be long.   What would it take to convict White? Randall Eliason spent eight years working in the Public Corruption and Government Fraud section of the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, serving as the division’s chief between 1999 and 2001. Now, he teaches a course on white-collar crime at the George Washington University School of Law. Washingtonian asked for his help in breaking down the FBI’s case against White. In simple terms, the federal government’s “allegation is that (White) took something of value—in this case, cash—in exchange for exercising his official powers in some way to benefit the bribe payer,” Eliason says, calling White’s a “classic white-collar crime case.” Prosecutors say White took money from a confidential informant and agreed he’d pressure various government agencies to extend contracts in return. According to Eliason, “the evidence that he actually took money from this guy is going to be pretty overwhelming,” since the indictment includes photos of White allegedly accepting payment from the informant and screenshots of WhatsApp conversations between the two.  As such, the prosecution’s claim that White took bribe money is not “necessarily going to be in dispute,” Eliason says. “That’s true in a lot of white collar cases, because you’ve got paper trails.” However, White taking cash from the informant isn’t enough to convict him of bribery.  Eliason expects the precedent set by the 2016 Supreme Court case McDonnell v. United States to weigh heavily in the outcome of White’s trial. That verdict—levied in favor of the defendant, former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell—”narrowed federal bribery statutes, including this one, to say that the government has to prove that what the official did in return for the bribe was a—quote, unquote—’official act,’” in Eliason’s words. Per McDonnell, arranging a meeting, talking with colleagues, and other “routine actions that an official might take” don’t qualify as official acts, Eliason says. “To be an official act, it has to be something where the public official is actually acting on or deciding on some particular question or matter that comes before him, that he has the power to resolve.” That might include, for example, supplying a grant, or pressuring another elected official to advance a specific agenda.  The prosecution’s evidence that White committed an official act in exchange for the bribe is “not overwhelming,” Eliason says. One allegation from the indictment that jumps out to him is that White told “Government Employee 3” (a high-ranking official in DC’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement) that he would not support their permanent appointment to their job if they did not approve a contract between the informant’s company and the ONSE. “That has the potential to be an official act, because now he’s actually pressuring the person who has that power to decide to award the contract in a certain way,” according to Eliason. But he’s skeptical that other behavior cited by the indictment—for instance, White’s statement that he’d “talked to” representatives from the ONSE and DC’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services about the informant’s contracts—will meet muster. “Not everything that’s wrong or corrupt is actually criminal,” Eliason says. “And I think the question of whether they can prove official acts is probably going to end up being the key issue in this case.”   What’s next for Ward 8? As an incumbent Democrat running for office in the District during a presidential election year, White’s victory was more or less inevitable—he ultimately secured about 84 percent of the vote in his race against Republican challenger, Nate Derenge. “Because of that, there wasn’t a ton of energy being put into finding someone viable to run against him this time around,” says Washington City Paper politics reporter Alex Koma. Although White’s legal proceedings are ongoing, there is mounting pressure on the Council to oust him sooner rather than later. According to Koma, “the Council is realistic that they would very much rather not have to take the vote to kick him out,” given enthusiastic support for White among a number of Ward 8 residents. “I think that if they are forced to, then they’ll do so sometime in January or February,” Koma says. Should White be removed from the Council, a number of Ward 8 political figures could be in the running to take his place. Salim Adofo, a representative on Advisory Neighborhood Commission 8C, and Rahman Branch, the former executive director of the mayor’s Office on African American Affairs, both rivaled White in the DC Council primary election earlier this year. “They benefit from the fact that their names and faces have been up on campaign signs and in mailers,” Koma says.  If Ward 8 does find itself in need of new representation on the Council, Koma says he wouldn’t count out a crowded race to fill it. “There hasn’t been an open-seat race—without an incumbent in the seat—since 2014, and whenever that happens, that bottles up interest, because a lot of good Democrats don’t want to primary another Democrat,” especially when that incumbent’s fanbase is as strong as White’s, according to Koma. “All those people who have been nervously kind of hoping he would decide to walk away, now they’ve got a window.” The post Trayon White Won Reelection to the DC Council. His Federal Bribery Case is Ongoing. What Happens Next? first appeared on Washingtonian.