It’s not big-deal inflation, nothing on a George Santos scale. But still …
Manka Dhingra (photo, left), a state senator, is running for Washington attorney general in the 2024 Democratic primary. The AG post is being vacated by Bob Ferguson, who’s running for governor.
Dhingra’s impressive credentials are real (see them here). They include 21 years at the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPO). However, her campaign website (here) and other campaign materials imply she’s still employed there.
That may be technically true if you believe her assertion she’s only on leave of absence. But whatever her understanding with the former prosecuting attorney when she left 3 years ago, the current prosecutor says she’s no longer employed there. (Read story here.)
Ferguson’s chief deputy, Dave Horn, who’s supporting Nick Brown in the primary, alleges Dhingra is “misrepresenting [her] credentials.” He concedes she “has lots of great experience,” but says claiming to still be in a job she hasn’t “been in for a while” is “troubling.”
Expanding on that, he says,
“The attorney general is a powerful position. They enforce a lot of laws, one of the laws they enforce is the Consumer Protection Act, which makes it against the law for a business to mislead its customers even if they choose their words very carefully. If the impression that’s left is misleading, they can’t do that. Now, that doesn’t apply to running for office. But to me, the principle is the same. It’s not good to mislead people about what job you’re doing.”
Voters will have to judge whether this is a dispute over semantics, a misunderstanding, or dishonest resume-tinkering — and whether it’s trivial or important. For what it’s worth, in 2023 Dinghra paid a modest fine for what appeared to be a technical violation of confusing state mileage reimbursement rules (read about that here), which doesn’t look like an act of dishonesty to me.