Former DC city council member, Trayon White. Photo: WJLA-TV.

In some ways little has changed since I last stepped foot in a DC federal courtroom over a decade ago. The high ceilings and pretty wood paneling remain familiar, as does the defendant whose case I’m there to see — a financially strapped Black DC councilman. This time around it’s Trayon White Sr., and he stands accused of bribery after pocketing cash-filled envelopes from a DC contractor.

The way things proceed from here, in my experience, is the awesome power of the federal government comes crashing down on the defendant, and his once promising career ends in a prison sentence. And this may have been White’s fate too had he been charged a decade ago, but a lot has changed in the intervening years.

For starters, the Supreme Court unanimously and radically limited the scope of what constitutes bribery in a (pre-Trump) 2016 ruling. It just so happens the Justices are themselves swimming in so much graft it sure looks like bribery, or at least would have prior to their ruling.

That ruling overturned the 2014 conviction of Bob McDonnell, who as governor of Virginia accepted over $175,000 in money, gifts and loans from a businessman hawking a diet supplement called Anatabloc. In exchange for the largesse, some of which went to McDonnell’s wife, the first couple sought to enlist Virginia’s state universities in costly testing to get the supplement approved by the FDA and thereby turn on the money spigot for Star Scientific, their secret patron’s company.

But that’s not all Virginia’s first couple did, as the Brennan Center’s Daniel Weiner noted:

They hosted the Anatabloc product launch at the governor’s mansion and repeatedly pressured senior officials to arrange meetings between state researchers and Star employees. In one memorable scene, McDonnell literally pulled a bottle of Anatabloc out of his pocket and pitched it on the spot to officials in charge of the state’s health plan.

Despite the blatant quid-pro-quo corruption, the Supreme Court overturned McDonnell’s conviction, saying the steps he took weren’t “official acts,” and therefore didn’t amount to bribery. Obviously this is ludicrous; but since 2016 it’s the law of the land.

“Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act,’” even when it benefits a businessman plying the official with money and gifts, the John Roberts-led Supreme Court ruled.

Grappling with this uncomfortable reality, as DC Councilmember White’s trial was underway, was former Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher. Now with City Cast DC, Fisher wrote:

A DC jury may well send White back to the Wilson Building to rip off the people he’s supposed to be helping. And that’s not because White got a jury full of Black Washingtonians with visceral experiences of being on the wrong end of law enforcement as he’d hoped. Instead, the councilmember may be acquitted… in good part because the US Supreme Court essentially legalized political corruption a decade ago when it overturned the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in a strikingly similar case.

Fisher’s obvious dislike of White may explain his claim that White’s case is “strikingly similar” to McDonnell’s, but it plainly isn’t.

Just look at McDonnell’s and White’s respective titles. As governor, McDonnell was his state’s chief executive, with the power to direct his subordinates to, say, meet with a sketchy businessman, with all the implicit pressure imbued in that request. White, on........

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