A Vancouver resident and legal mediator has declared his candidacy in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District.

Peter Khalil, a Democrat, is the first to announce a challenge to five-term Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, who has already said she will be in the 2020 race. Khalil is running on four core tenets, he told The Columbian in an interview on Friday: anti-corruption, health care, environment and infrastructure.

A son of religious refugees from Egypt, he went on to graduate from Columbia University, where he studied political science. From there, Khalil attended law school at Stanford University.

He graduated $180,000 in debt, he said, and went to work on Wall Street in 2007 ­— just in time to watch the economy crumble.

“What I saw in Wall Street was a lot of dysfunction and a lot of corruption. I saw banks openly flouting anti-money laundering regulations,” he said.