
Trayon White Is Suing a Mechanic Over Repairs to His Tesla, One of Many Auto-Related Hijinks for the Embattled Lawmaker
The most prominent court case involving Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White these days is the one where he’s named as the defendant facing federal bribery charges. But in another, more under-the-radar bit of legal action, White is on the other side of the ledger as a plaintiff.
Loose Lips hears that White recently filed a lawsuit against a Capitol Heights car dealership and mechanic, Amazing Auto Center, claiming that the shop screwed up repairs he paid for earlier this summer. White is demanding $5,316.72 from the business to pay for both the work he says they mismanaged and to defray his costs of renting a car in the interim, according to documents filed in Upper Marlboro District Court on June 26. (LL had to laugh that he listed his Wilson Building office as his address on those forms instead of his home in Bellevue.)
“I called and confirmed that Amazing Auto could fix my Tesla car that was in a minor accident,” White alleged in the handwritten complaint. “I dropped my car off and paid them. When I picked it up and test drove it, it was not working properly. The suspension was still bouncy. When I took it back, manager started arguing. I left the car there and now he is not fixing it.”
Neither White nor the Amazing Auto Center responded to LL’s requests for more details about the case, and there haven’t been any additional filings since the mechanic was served with papers on Aug. 13. The case is notable considering both its timing—the FBI claims he accepted a $15,000 bribe the very same day he filed the suit—and White’s checkered history with automobiles. LL has to wonder: Why does it seem like White always has time for antics like these but never his actual job?
The Tesla at the center of this case is as much a part of the lore surrounding White as anything else after more than a decade into his (waning) political career. Not only has he outfitted it with his “Councilmember Ward 8” license plates, but the flashy car is also featured prominently on his very active Instagram account. In one memorable incident in 2022, he posted a video of himself driving the Tesla on a highway at 84 miles per hour.
LL has no way to know whether the “minor accident” White refers to in his lawsuit was his fault or that of another driver. But whatever happened couldn’t have been too bad. White was using the vehicle as recently as last month—it’s the same car that the FBI searched when they arrested him outside a luxury Navy Yard apartment. LL spotted the Tesla just a few days ago, parked outside Union Temple Baptist Church in Anacostia during a service for White, and it didn’t look any worse for wear.
Perhaps White can count himself lucky that things weren’t more serious given his assorted mishaps behind the wheel over the years. LL counts at least 13 different traffic violations tied to White in court records in both D.C. and Maryland dating back to 2003.
Some are routine speeding tickets, but many involve him getting pulled over for driving without proper registration, license plates or insurance—LL can see eight such incidents in court records, including one as recently as April 2023. In that incident, White was stopped by police in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland (on the Eastern Shore), for driving without license plates and and then refused to show his license to the cops, according to court papers, leading to the suspension of his license in May 2023.
Records show he was driving his 2012 BMW when he was pulled over, not his Tesla. Astute observers of White’s many automobiles will remember that this is the Beamer that was broken into last year after a boxing match at Capital One Arena, not the 2007 BMW he lent to a friend in 2019 who was subsequently charged with leaving the scene of a crash on I-295. It’s not clear whether White has paid a fine to resolve the Queen Anne’s case, as he has in most other incidents.
White has frequently been charged with refusing to cooperate with police during these stops. LL can see five charges related to disputes with traffic cops in court records, and White has been vocal about his feelings regarding these stops. He sued D.C. over a 2014 incident where he claimed an officer slammed his head into the trunk of his car. (He later received a $75,000 settlement from the government.) White was also memorably stopped for driving without his headlights on near the Wilson Building in 2017 and told police he didn’t have his license on him. That incident led to a protracted fight with the Washington Post, which filed a lawsuit as the Metropolitan Police Department sought to withhold body camera footage of the interaction.
If anything, LL suspects it’s a minor miracle White hasn’t been pulled over more frequently, given his propensity for using his phone while driving. In addition to the Tesla video that made the rounds on social media, he’s called into at least one Council hearing while actively driving his car (an all-too-common occurrence from attendees of Zoom hearings, in LL’s experience). White also filmed his infamous 2018 video speculating that the Rothschilds might’ve caused a sudden snowstorm while driving on I-695, hardly the most offensive part of that career-threatening scandal. With this sort of track record, White’s persistent skepticism of traffic safety programs starts to make a bit more sense.
LL doesn’t bring all this up to pile onto a councilmember who is currently facing up to 15 years in federal prison. Rather, it’s worth remembering all this stuff as his supporters try desperately to whitewash his reputation in the wake of his bribery charges, claiming fervently that he’s only ever been a fighter for the people of Ward 8 who the feds are desperately and unfairly trying to bring down. White may show up to community events and answer his constituents’ phone calls, but it’s hard to deny that he has consistently spent more time tooling around in fancy cars than he has actually doing his job and serving the public.
The picture the FBI paints in its indictment of White is of a lawmaker utterly unconcerned about experiencing any consequences for manipulating the government for his own ends. When you look over the records of how cavalierly White drives around the D.C. region, seemingly without much concern for getting caught doing so, those allegations become easier to believe.
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