O’Melveny Partners Testify Before DC Council at Hearing on Jack Evans Investigation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, DC—November 21, 2019—O’Melveny partners Steve Bunnell and David Leviss testified before the DC City Council in a hearing about the findings of O’Melveny’s investigation into alleged ethical violations by the Council’s longest serving member, Jack Evans.

As outlined in a 97-page report delivered to the council earlier this month, O’Melveny’s investigation concluded that Evans’s private consulting and legal work likely violated the Council’s ethics rules. The report cited 11 instances since 2014 when Evans took action in his official capacity as a lawmaker that benefited his clients in violation of the Council’s ethics rules governing conflicts of interest.

The DC City Council retained O’Melveny in July 2019, passing a resolution that authorized the firm to conduct an independent investigation concerning councilmember Evans’s outside business dealings while serving on the Council.

At the hearing, Mary Cheh, chair of the Council’s Ad Hoc Committee investigating ethics allegations involving Evans, praised the investigation as “thorough and methodical,” and expressed gratitude for O’Melveny’s pro bono work on the report. “We’ve been well served by your work,” Cheh added.

“O’Melveny has a long tradition of being engaged in local communities, including the DC community, and we appreciate the opportunity to continue that tradition with our work on this investigation,” Bunnell said. “We think this is an important issue, it’s not an easy issue and we appreciate the seriousness with which the council is approaching it.”

Bunnell is a partner in the firm’s White Collar and Corporate Investigations Group. He is also a former General Counsel of the US Department of Homeland Security, and a former Chief of the Criminal Division in the United States Attorney’s Office for District of Columbia. A recognized authority on congressional investigations and the False Claims Act, Leviss was Chief Oversight Counsel of the US House Committee on Energy & Commerce under Chairman Henry Waxman and previously served as a trial attorney with the Civil Fraud Section of the US Department of Justice.

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