PHILADELPHIA — There was one point upon which lawyers on opposite sides of Kenyatta Johnson’s federal bribery trial agreed in their final pitches to jurors Tuesday: There is no smoking gun to prove the Philadelphia City Council member accepted nearly $67,000 in bribes disguised through a consulting contract with his wife.
But when it came to what the remaining evidence did show, the attorneys could not have disagreed more.
As Assistant U.S. Attorneys Eric Gibson and Mark Dubnoff told it, the government put on a case that, while circumstantial, left no room for doubt that Johnson had sold the powers of his office to two nonprofit executives who effectively put him on retainer.
