His reason: The city had failed to keep a list of companies it does business with.
A few days later, The Baltimore Sun's Annie Linskey produced just that sort of list, kept by the city's Ethics Board. Ronald Lipscomb's Doracon Inc. was on it.
But the hard-working Weiner had a response. He said Dixon was still off the hook because the board had failed to have the list certified by the city finance department.
That, and Dixon didn't have the computer password she needed to access the list on the finance department database.
No password? Is that what $600,000 in no-bid computer wizardry from Dixon's campaign chairman, Dale Clark, bought her?
City ethics law says a public servant may not accept gifts from anyone he or she "knows or has reason to know" does business with the city.
Just guessing here, but wouldn't Lipscomb's line of work have come up in conversation? If not on their first date, then on that long train ride on Feb. 18, 2004, when the pair traveled to New York for a $3,200 weekend at the Trump International - paid for, the indictment states, by Doracon Inc.?
I imagine something along the lines of:
Dixon: "How was your day, hon?"
Lipscomb: "Great! I got the city's Board of Estimates to give me a 20-year tax break on my $97 million Spinnaker Bay project."
Dixon: "What a coincidence! I chair that board and voted for that tax break!"
Connect the dots
What the heck was Maryland's McCainiac-in-Chief doing in Obama's inaugural parade? Former Del. Don Murphy said he was just helping out his brother, Steve Murphy of Clarksville, a World War I re-enactor who was asked to drive his 1917 Model T troop transport vehicle in the event. "If Rick Warren can give the invocation, I can be in a parade," Don said. ... Addressing the Maryland Bar Association banquet at Martin's West the other night, term-limited Jim Smith said lots of people are lining up for his job, including most of the Baltimore County Council. "And with government deficits all around us, there are a lot of other people who'd probably love to be county executive of Baltimore County: There's Ken Ulman, Ike Leggett, Jack Johnson, just to name a few. Heck, with the bipartisan spirit that's sweeping the nation, and in an effort to let bygones be bygones, I even called former Governor Ehrlich to ask if he'd like to move back to Mays Chapel and run for county executive. It's hard to believe, but he didn't return my call." ... I finally caught up with Del. Craig Rice, the Montgomery County Democrat and member of the House Ways and Means Committee who, I wrote the other day, spent part of inauguration day getting lobbied by Bruce Bereano on the subject of moist snuff. Bereano hoped all the inaugural pomp would lend oomph to his lobbying. Did it? Rice reports: "Bruce said, 'Hey let me talk to you about moist snuff.' Then the music started playing, I looked up at the Capitol and all I could hear was, 'Blah blah blah.' "
