Heather Curtis
WMAL.com

BEIJING– (WMAL) D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Friday she supports the decision to disband the political action committee set up by her supporters because it became a distraction from her work as mayor.

“I think that everybody should recognize that the supporters of, the leaders of the FreshPAC made a hard pivot away from it, and they recognize the level of criticism despite the fact that it was operating completely transparently and aboveboard,” Bowser told reporters during a conference call from China.

FreshPAC leaders said Wednesday they decided to disband the PAC, which was set up this year in an effort to get candidates who would back Bowser elected to the city council. The $350,000 raised will be returned to donors.

“This didn’t look good. Yeah, it was legal, but it smacked of a slush fund,” Harry Jaffe, editor at large of the Washingtonian, told WMAL Wednesday. He thought Bowser didn’t want to be associated with pay-to-play politics, but Bowser told reporters she didn’t agree that FreshPAC was engaging in that practice. She contended the group was just supporting her goals, including creating affordable housing and ending homelessness.

Questions about Bowser’s relationship with FreshPAC donors arose when she left for China Saturday with some of the committee’s biggest contributors. Also, many companies that contributed to FreshPAC were awarded large contracts by the city’s government.

Some accused FreshPAC of asking for donations from Pepco and Exelon. Bowser had originally opposed Exelon’s proposed takeover of Pepco but changed her mind on the merger last month.

“I’m not aware of anybody reaching out to them or soliciting anything from them, nor would I approve of it if I knew about it, and so that is not something that I think that the PAC should have been involved in, and I don’t know that the PAC was involved in,” said Bowser.

This was the first time the mayor discussed FreshPAC since Wednesday’s announcement.

Copyright 2015 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Office of the Mayor)