By Colbert I. King
Saturday, August 26, 2006

To give you an idea of its length, the opposition research dossier on Adrian Fenty, the Ward 4 D.C. Council member running for mayor, begins with an index that covers three pages by itself. Pages 5 through 10 contain background and personal information on Fenty, his wife, Michelle Cross Fenty, their children, his parents and Fenty's two brothers, as well as the results of police record searches. The report ends 146 pages later.

The intervening 136 pages are devoted to an examination of Fenty's law career, a lawsuit over a financial transaction that he and his wife settled out of court, chapters on his handling of two probate cases, additional background and personal information on two Fenty personal and campaign associates, and a lengthy voting record critique. Interspersed throughout the dossier are disparaging remarks about Fenty and insinuations of improper behavior by him, his wife and his friends.

The identity of the dossier's author (or perhaps authors, since the document contains phrases such as "We know the second law firm . . ." and "We have not identified . . .") was not disclosed by the person who handed the document to me after first demanding anonymity. The name of the client who commissioned the research also was not disclosed.

This much, however, I can say: The report on Fenty was given to me by a longtime supporter of council chairman and mayoral hopeful Linda Cropp.

Welcome, Washington residents, to the politics of disparagement.

The dossier seeks to assassinate Fenty's character, denigrate his family and friends, and discredit him as a public official.

What makes the exercise truly distasteful, at least in my view, is that the opposition to Fenty is attempting to keep its own hands clean by surreptitiously leaking the derogatory information to the press, leaving it to journalists to do the dirty work.

That, of course, explains why the Cropp supporter called to let it be known that a thick document on Fenty was available for the taking, provided the supporter's name was not disclosed.

I don't know whether copies of the "research" have been slipped to other journalists or whether contents of the dossier have been parceled out to individual reporters as "tips."

Between now and Election Day, other anti-Fenty stories may turn up in the media. It's a good bet that some of them will be based on information in the dossier. The only question is whether news organizations, if they use the information, will disclose to the public that the source is a Fenty opponent. Or will they pretend they dug it up on their own? Never mind, I'm not the ombudsman or a news editor.

On Thursday afternoon I met Linda Cropp at a restaurant to discuss the dossier. Cropp, after being shown its table of contents, said she might have seen parts of the report, but not the report in its entirety. She said her campaign had not ordered or paid for a report on Fenty, and she stressed that her charges related to Fenty's record as a lawyer are based on public records. Cropp said members of her campaign staff are under strict orders to confine their scrutiny to Fenty's public record and not his family. Yesterday, after a lunch with Post editors and reporters, Cropp told me that her attacks on Fenty's handling of probate cases were based on news reports and public records her campaign staff gained independently of the dossier.

So who bought and paid for the dossier on Fenty, his family and friends?

Later yesterday afternoon, Linda Cropp's campaign manager, Phyllis Jones, called to say that after talking to Cropp, she had something to add.

Jones said, "We hired a professional to do a public records check on Mr. Fenty, which is standard. We received the report and exercised judgment about what information is relevant."

Asked if her report was the same document I received, Jones said her report was not available so we could not compare the two documents. She added, "I have not seen the document you have, but our report contained information that we did not consider relevant." She said, "In the campaign information we put out, we only talked about the public record."

Now, before some of you conclude that this column is an attempt to portray Adrian Fenty as an innocent victim of poisonous politics, read on.

Fenty himself has been a beneficiary of negative campaigning. I wrote about it in a column that appeared on this page on Sept. 9, 2000. In Fenty's inaugural campaign for the Ward 4 seat against five-term incumbent Charlene Drew Jarvis, two scurrilous postcards were mailed to 11,000 households on the eastern side of Ward 4 accusing Jarvis of allowing trash and rats to invade Georgia Avenue and chaos to reign in the public schools. The political action committee sponsoring the mailings, I learned through investigation, had listed a fraudulent address and telephone number, and its treasurer was little more than a front for the organization.

Fenty, when interviewed, said his campaign had no connection with the phony PAC that was behind the mailings. I later learned that the person responsible for the mailings was a friend of Fenty's and had organized a fundraiser for him only a few months earlier. So Adrian Fenty is not exactly politically chaste.

So what's the gripe?

Going negative, to be sure, has long been a part of American politics. And there are hard but fair ways to play that game. That's not the issue in this case. The problem is that anonymously financed negative campaigning has now made its way into District politics. That is in addition to this year's attack ads and demonizing mailings. What we are witnessing in this mayoral campaign is the corrosive effect of money. More than $2 million has been poured into the mayor's race, not counting undisclosed independent expenditures. That can pay for a lot of mischief.

The question is whether D.C. voters want or will tolerate that brand of politics. Voters aren't the only people on the spot. Will the media allow themselves to be used to do a campaign's dirty work? Worse still, is it too late? Has mean-spirited politics now become a fixture on the city's political landscape? What do you think?

kingc@washpost.com