{"id":11189,"date":"2018-06-21T10:29:25","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T14:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=11189"},"modified":"2018-06-21T10:29:25","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T14:29:25","slug":"unger-fires-campaign-manager-for-stealing-lit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=11189","title":{"rendered":"Unger Fires Campaign Manager for Stealing Lit"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

District 20 House candidate Darian Unger has fired his campaign manager for stealing and destroying literature belonging to his opponents.\u00a0 Unger terminated him immediately upon seeing video of the act.<\/p>\n

Unger\u2019s campaign began paying John Rodriguez<\/a> as a campaign manager in November 2017.\u00a0 Rodriguez was profiled by the Washington City Paper\u2019s Loose Lips in 2016<\/a> for his work with a firm called District Political in D.C. political campaigns, including fundraising.\u00a0 The article ends with these paragraphs.<\/p>\n

Apparently, Rodriguez still has some money to splash out. While LL was reporting this column, Rodriguez called, unbeknownst to his partners, to ask the name of the City Paper employee in charge of ad sales. He went on to ask whether LL would be aware if City Paper suddenly received a lot of money, and pondered how much he would have to spend in ads to gain more \u201cpower\u201d to kill stories like this one.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one more offbeat scheme from an outfit that tried to make its name with unlikely candidates. Unluckily for District Political, though, the problem with underdogs is that they tend to lose.<\/p>\n

Update, 10 a.m.:<\/strong> According to a District Political statement released shortly after this article was published, Rodriguez is no longer a partner at the firm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now to the matter at hand.\u00a0 The video below is security footage from the Silver Spring Civic Center on June 17.\u00a0 At the beginning of the video, Senator Will Smith, Delegate David Moon and House candidate Lorig Charkoudian can be seen delivering lit to a storage area.\u00a0 Smith, Moon and Charkoudian are running as a team in District 20 along with Delegate Jheanelle Wilkins.\u00a0 Unger is a House candidate in the same race.\u00a0 Smith deposits a box of lit on top of other materials and the group departs.\u00a0 Soon after, a man matching Rodriguez\u2019s description enters the room, looks around, grabs the lit box and places it in a dumpster outside.<\/p>\n