Sawant addresses ethics complaint at reelection campaign launch party

Supporters of Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is running for a third term, were exuberant Sunday at her reelection campaign launch party at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute.

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“Are you ready to fight corporate developers and big landlords?” asked Sawant to a cheering crowd. “Do you think we should renew the fight to tax Amazon to fund a massive expansion of social housing and end the crisis of sky-high rents and homelessness?”

But the incumbent now faces an ethics complaint filed by District 3 challenger Logan Bowers.

“Kshama is doing two things that are against the law,” said Bowers Sunday in an interview with KIRO 7. “She’s using city resources to do work on behalf of her political organization, Socialist Alternative, and then No. 2 is she’s covering it up by hiding records from public records requests.”

Sawant previously called the accusations of ethics violations “utterly baseless” in an online post and mentioned critics from the podium Sunday.

“They have to resort to this kind of red-baiting nonsense,” said Sawant, who later addressed the ethics complaint to KIRO 7.

“I think that people in the media and big business and others who are saying that this a bad thing that I’m accountable to Socialist Alternative — their real problem is that I’m not accountable to big business and the wealthy and I’m proud of being accountable to working people,” said Sawant.

The Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission will review the complaint filed by Bowers.

“I think voters have a right to have a representative that represents them and no one else,” said Bowers.

By Michael Spears, KIRO 7