1. The Seattle Times has a followup to its scoop on  Triad Capital developer Brett Allen's attempt to bribe city council candidate Jon Grant (who’s running against council president Tim Burgess) into dropping a Tenants Union lawsuit against Triad in exchange for pulling the plug on an anti–Jon Grant independent expenditure campaign. The crux of the Times piece: Allen has apologized for his boneheaded move.

A couple of things I’ll add: Triad consultant Tim Ceis dropped Allen as a client yesterday—Ceis and Allen were the ones putting the independent expenditure together. Grant consultant John Wyble told me yesterday that he was surprised to get a call from Ceis last Friday—a quick, almost comically hard-boiled call in which Ceis simply told Wyble he could make the IE go away if Grant settled the TU lawsuit, Wyble says. (Ceis told the Seattle Times he didn’t remember the call.) Grant had accused Triad cofounder John Goodman of being the funder behind the planned IE. But other than $250 in in-kind work from its consultant Argo Strategies, the IE reported zero contributions at yesterday’s deadline and appears kaput now.

PubliCola did confirm that the IE was in part going to hype a letter from the veterans group, Volunteers of America, that was critical of the Tenants Union’s activist campaign against a Goodman development. It’s logical that Goodman may have provided the letter, but Goodman was reportedly not involved in the nuts of bolts of organizing the IE.

It’ll be interesting to see if that opposition research now shows up in the remaining pro-Burgess IE, United for Tim, which is being funded by the Seattle firefighters union, the Seattle chamber of commerce, the Washington Restaurant Association, the lefty Service Employee International Union 775, and the state Realtors PAC. Goodman has not contributed to United for Tim, but he has contributed $10,000 to the chamber and $5,000 to the local real estate PAC, two of the main groups backing the Burgess IE. He’s also contributed $700 directly to Burgess’s campaign.

The Times did report one of the most interesting things Wyble noted at yesterday’s press conference: Allen may have violated ethics code by coordinating IE activities with a candidate, Wyble said. IEs are not allowed to coordinate their activities with candidates, though typically that’s assumed to mean they’re not allowed to coordinate with candidates who are benefiting from the IE. Wyble’s counterintuitive interpretation was kind of neat, though. However, Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission director Wayne Barnett pointed me to the ethics code which shows that, indeed, the rules prohibit coordination only with candidates who benefit, ruling out Wyble’s spin. Having said that, there still appears to be a strong case to be made for intimidation and coercion or perhaps even “blackmail” as Grant labeled the whole thing yesterday. That would be out of the purview of the SEEC (they only regulate contributions and expenditures, Barnett told me), but heck, they could certainly take this tale to the FBI it seems to me.

2. Speaking of Grant and fundraising—yesterday was the due date for the latest financial disclosure reports and Grant missed the deadline, so I don’t know how much he raised. But his rival Burgess raised $85,000 in the last month and half, bringing his total to $359,000 with a balance of $5,000.

Other notable fundraising: Kshama Sawant outdid everybody raising $103,000 for a grand total of $383,000 with a balance of $46,000. (Her opponent Pam Banks was no slouch, raising $78,000 for a grand total of $318,000 with a balance of $18,000.)

In addition to the United for Tim IE, the only other active IE was Neighbors for Shannon (Braddock), the “establishment” choice in West Seattle’s District One over tenants’ rights advocate Lisa Herbold. The Braddock IE raised $130,500, including $70,000 from the Seattle chamber, $28,000 from the restaurant association, $22,500 from the realtors PAC, and $5,000 from the firefighters union.

3. In (local) Democratic debate news:

Sawant evidently didn’t like that the debate was interrupted by an Amber Alert. Check out this Twitter exchange between Sawant and Banks.