A Washington, D.C., councilman is celebrating a mistrial over allegations that he was involved in a $156,000 bribery scheme.
U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro stated Tuesday that her office will retry Trayon White after a jury could not reach a verdict despite deliberating for four days.
“We want to accept the jury’s decision today, regroup, get back to work, because there’s a lot of work to do in the city to ensure equity and inclusion in the $20 billion budget,” Pirro said in a statement following the mistrial.
White was charged with bribery after prosecutors presented recordings of his conversations with an informant of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about receiving cash on four separate occasions.
When questioned by a reporter about why he received the money, White refused to explain.
“If the $35,000 wasn’t a bribe, what was the money for?” asked the WRC-TV reporter.
“Let’s stick to the topic, man. Come on. You’re smarter than that. I can’t speak to that,” White responded.
“That is the topic,” the reporter pressed.
“We want to accept the jury’s decision today, regroup, get back to work, because there’s a lot of work to do in the city to ensure equity and inclusion in the $20 billion budget,” he replied.
“The prosecutor didn’t submit sufficient enough evidence to convict me of a crime,” White added. “There was no crime in the first place. And so I’ll leave it at that.”
White won re-election despite the looming bribery charge in 2024, but the rest of the D.C. council voted in February 2025 to expel him. That prompted a special election to fill his seat, which he also ran in and won decisively in July.
He could face up to 15 years in prison if tried again and convicted.
White was previously criticized for claiming that the Jews control the weather in a bizarre post on Facebook from 2018.
“Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation,” he wrote. “And D.C. keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city.’ And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”
The Rothschilds are a wealthy Jewish family often used by conspiracy theorists as a stand-in for all Jews.
White later apologized and said he did not realize his comments could be considered anti-Semitic. The Jews United for Justice organization stated they spoke with White and explained the history behind the use of the Rothschilds conspiracy theory.
