Outwardly, Veda Rasheed might look like she’s in a good spot in the Ward 7 Council primary. She’s broadly seen as a top contender among ward activists, she’s raising plenty of money, and she just scored an endorsement from the notoriously deep-pocketed Democrats for Education Reform.
Behind the scenes, however, her campaign has been roiled by a dispute with a contractor hired last fall to build her website. Nick Beauregard is suing Rasheed over claims that she failed to pay him $3,600. The incident was so divisive within Rasheed’s camp that several consultants advising her chose to resign in protest earlier this year, according to emails Beauregard filed as exhibits with his suit.
“I’m a homeowner in the ward, so this race really matters to me,” Beauregard, who has worked for years on local and national campaigns, tells LL. “I’m not going to be pushed over by someone who is running to represent me. Absolutely not.”
The dispute has proven to be indicative of broader problems within Rasheed’s bid to replace Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray, two people familiar with the campaign’s inner workings tell LL. These sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the campaign candidly, believe that Rasheed squandered some key advantages in the race by allowing infighting and disorganization to hobble her bid for office. Rasheed announced her run several months before many of the other top contenders jumped into the race, looking to build off of her second-place finish in the 2020 primary. But LL’s sources feel she’s lost ground to other candidates due to this dysfunction.
“She had such a great head start, she could have done so much more,” one campaign insider tells LL. “And I feel like she just lost that momentum that allowed some room for Eboni-Rose Thompson, Wendell [Felder], even Ebony Payne.”
Rasheed has repeatedly insisted to LL that she has offered to pay Beauregard “the full amount” he’s owed, but declined to identify the size of her offer. “We continue to offer to pay him for his services, but he won’t accept it,” says Rasheed, an attorney who previously served as an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Benning Ridge and worked for former Attorney General Karl Racine. “There is no story here.”
But Beauregard claims equally steadfastly that Rasheed has never paid him for the work he did on the website, nor has she ever offered him the $3,600 they agreed on for his services. He says Rasheed’s attorney proposed paying him $2,200 shortly after he filed his lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court in late January, but he rejected anything less than the money he says he’s owed.
“I wish they would offer me the full amount, I would happily take this money and leave this whole thing alone,” Beauregard says. “She has my number. She knows where I live. I’m her neighbor. I’m not refusing payment from anybody.”
The two sources familiar with Rasheed’s campaign confirm to LL their understanding that the campaign agreed to pay Beauregard $3,600. They feel Rasheed is in the wrong to try to deny him the full amount when her campaign has plenty of money in the bank. The sources believe Rasheed’s refusal to settle this debt—particularly with a Black contractor who lives in Ward 7—speaks to bigger questions about her campaign.
“It’s such a trivial amount of money: Just pay the guy,” says one person close to the campaign. “How are you going to treat the people in your ward if you are stepping on a person because you think that they’re small?”
Rasheed declined to address many of these allegations in more detail, except to say that she is still willing to pay Beauregard.
Beauregard says he agreed to work on the campaign at the behest of Justin Myers, a political consultant and fellow Ward 7 resident advising Rasheed. Beauregard and Myers partnered on several other races around the country, and though Beauregard initially asked for around $6,000 to design and launch a website for Rasheed, he ultimately agreed to scale back the scope of work in exchange for a $3,600 payment late last July. (He never signed a formal contract with the campaign, but emails and text messages he filed in his suit confirm Myers and Beauregard agreed on this work plan and dollar figure.)
The website was ready in time for Rasheed to launch her campaign in September, Beauregard says, and he worked with her team through October on several revisions without incident. At that point, the emails show, he began asking the campaign about how he’d be paid. That’s when he started running into issues.
The campaign’s new manager, Tyler McFadden, informed Beauregard in early November that Rasheed had “decided to host the domain on another site,” and offered to pursue “a payment schedule rather than a lump sum,” according to one email exchange. Beauregard was confused, as he thought the campaign was happy with his work, but he agreed to explore options for getting paid. He proceeded to spend the next few weeks trying (and failing) to secure a check from McFadden without any luck.
“They’re telling me they felt like I didn’t deliver a website or didn’t complete a website,” Beauregard says. “But at one point, they actually went and pulled my website down and put a new one up. It was just crazy.”
The two sources familiar with the campaign both say they felt Beauregard completed the work he promised to do, and they attribute any tension over the issue to McFadden’s arrival as manager. They believe that McFadden blew out of proportion some negative feedback about the website, and that may have contributed to Rasheed’s refusal to pay Beauregard for this work. (McFadden would only tell LL that “we offered to cut him a check” but “he is not accepting it,” declining to discuss other aspects of this dispute. Like Rasheed, she would not say how much money the campaign offered Beauregard.)
As the dispute continued throughout the remainder of 2023, the people familiar with the campaign say that both Rasheed and McFadden, who also held a full-time job at the national civil rights organization Color of Change, were not especially engaged with their work and often difficult to reach. They believe this inaction cost Rasheed dearly, giving other contenders time to raise money and gain name recognition around the ward (particularly a relative newcomer like Payne).
“I didn’t think she was going to clear the field, but I thought she might be able to scare a couple of people out of running,” one campaign insider says. “But she struggled with the internal staff drama.”
Things came to a head on Jan. 11, when Myers and several affiliated consultants quit the campaign. He wrote to Rasheed, McFadden, and other advisers that “a number of red flags” inspired this decision, including “your continued unwillingness” to pay Beauregard. However, Myers also cited a “lack of communication between the candidate and campaign advisors since early December 2023 which has caused the campaign to miss numerous benchmarks having to do with organizing, fundraising, press and endorsements,” according to a copy of the email attached to Beauregard’s suit. He added that he was frustrated by a “lack of transparency as it relates to strategy” from Rasheed.
“The campaign is virtually invisible in Ward 7,” Myers wrote. When LL read back the contents of Myers’ email to McFadden, she would only say that “Justin is no longer affiliated with the campaign and I’m not in his head, so I can’t respond to that.”
In LL’s recent survey of activists around the ward, some sources shared Myers’ grim assessment of things. One person observed that her campaign was virtually absent from the well-attended Ward 7 Democrats’ straw poll in March, and LL cannot recall seeing any of her volunteers there, either.
Others rated her among the most active candidates in the field, rivaling top contenders like Felder and Thompson, so there is at least some indication that she’s turned things around since Myers’ messy departure. And with the charter school lobby’s endorsement, Rasheed has won some powerful allies: particularly if DFER starts spending as lavishly to promote her campaign as it has in other recent D.C. races. The endorsement was only released a few days ago, but LL has already heard from people in the ward who have been contacted by DFER’s canvassers.
“I’m just out here every day knocking on doors, talking to people, feet on the ground,” Rasheed says. “I have strong support in the community all across the ward. I have a very strong team. And we’ve done well on fundraising so we’re able to run a strong campaign.”
Beauregard says he’ll keep pursuing his case against Rasheed regardless of what happens in the June 4 primary. He’s never taken a client to small claims court before, and he remains incredibly frustrated that this dispute has gone on for so long and gotten so complicated, but he figures he should see things through rather than accept less than he feels he’s owed.
“I’ve been working in the political space for about nine years,” Beauregard says. “I’ve done so much work with so many different clients. I have never been through anything like this in my life.”
A judge initially dismissed Beauregard’s case after he failed to properly serve Rasheed, but he won a motion last week to get the suit back on track. He’s now set for an initial hearing in July; Rasheed has yet to file any formal response in court.
