Forget about "white privilege." There is a much more serious threat to America: Democrat privilege.

Out of the festering swamp of D.C. comes yet another case that demonstrates how absolutely broken the beltway court circuit has become. 

D.C. Councilman Trayon White Sr. walked out of federal court without a conviction Monday after jurors deadlocked on a bribery charge. 

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras declared a mistrial after more than three days of deliberations, with jurors telling the court that additional discussions had only "cemented" their positions.

The evidence included something prosecutors don't get in every bribery case: video.

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White was accused of accepting $35,000 in cash from D.C. contractor Allieu Kamara during four meetings in 2024. Kamara was cooperating with the FBI, and agents secretly recorded the encounters. Prosecutors alleged that White agreed to use his position to help Kamara's companies secure renewals of multimillion-dollar violence-interruption contracts, with White ultimately expected to receive $156,000, or three percent of the contracts.

Prosecutors played roughly 87 minutes of secretly recorded footage during the trial. In one video, White accepted an envelope containing $15,000 while telling Kamara, "I don't want to feel like you got to give me something to get something done, man."

White's lawyers didn't dispute that he took the $35,000. Their defense was that accepting the money wasn't enough to establish the charged bribery offense because White never intended to follow through by pressuring D.C. officials to renew Kamara's contracts.

Defense attorney Gary Kohlman put it succinctly during closing arguments: "Trayon White actually did nothing."

Three D.C. officials with whom White allegedly discussed Kamara also testified that White never pressured them to renew the contracts. That became crucial because jurors specifically asked Contreras whether it constituted bribery if a defendant accepted money to perform an official act but never intended to fulfill the agreement. The judge told them it did not.

That appears to be where prosecutors ran into trouble. Kamara's credibility was another major point of attack. He had pleaded guilty to bribery and bank-fraud conspiracy before cooperating with the FBI, giving White's attorneys plenty of material to argue that the government's star witness had an incentive to help prosecutors.

Still, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro isn't backing down.

"We have video showing piles of cash being given to a D.C. councilmember as part of a $156,000 bribe," Pirro said after the mistrial. "Rest assured that we will retry this case and every corruption case to verdict."

White was exuberant after the jury mistrial, while maintaining his innocence and acknowledging that the legal proceedings aren't finished.

"Victory is mine, saith the Lord," he declared.

The jury apparently wasn't merely divided down the middle. White's lead attorney said afterward that the final split was 9-3 in favor of acquittal. That's the defense lawyer's account of the jury's breakdown, but if accurate, it shows Pirro could face a substantial challenge when she brings the case before another D.C. jury.

So, what does it take to convict a radical Democrat in Washington, D.C.? Multiple eyewitnesses? Forensic evidence? Fingerprints? DNA? The crime caught on camera?

You can have all of the evidence necessary to convict someone, but he can still walk away without a conviction if you get a biased jury and the defendant happens to be a card-carrying Democrat.

The whole affair gets even stranger when you look at White's political history. The D.C. Council voted 12-0 to expel him in February 2025 following the federal charges. But Ward 8 voters promptly sent him right back, electing White to his old seat in a special election months later. He has remained restricted from committee and leadership positions while the criminal case played out.

Now his colleagues have another mess on their hands. White hasn't been acquitted. The mistrial leaves the federal indictment intact, and Pirro has explicitly promised another prosecution. The Council could act against him again, but Council Chairman Phil Mendelson indicated after the mistrial that he didn't expect immediate action while prosecutors prepare for another trial.

It's important to note that a mistrial is not a finding of innocence, as we saw in the Lindsay Clancy case. It simply means the jury couldn't unanimously agree on a verdict.

But the fact that prosecutors could put secretly recorded cash exchanges before a Washington jury, with the defense conceding the basic fact that White accepted $35,000, and still reportedly end up with nine jurors favoring acquittal is about as disturbing an outcome as it gets.

This comes on the heels of a D.C. judge permanently dismissing charges against an alleged reflecting pool vandal.

A judge has dismissed with prejudice the government's vandalism charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. That means federal prosecutors cannot refile them in the future, despite President Trump's public demands to do so.

In fact, as D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman explained in a 26-page ruling released Thursday, the case should be permanently closed in large part because of the "political pressure brought by the President of the United States upon his subordinate officers."

"While the prosecutors admit that the evidence indicates that he committed no crime, the President's statements create a risk that Mr. Hearn will be prosecuted nonetheless, either because the current United States Attorney and her assistants will eventually yield to his public pressure campaign or because the President will replace them with prosecutors more likely to carry out his wishes," wrote Judge Edelman, an Obama appointee.

Now, it's time for Pirro to find a way to do the near-impossible: convict a radical Democrat in Washington, D.C.