Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer received coded emails related to her administration’s response to the local water crisis in an apparent effort to hide sensitive communications from the public, the lawsuit alleges.
The email was disguised in a Greek alphabet font and was sent by Andrew Leavitt, a Michigan energy department consultant, to Whitmer’s senior energy adviser Kara Cook in September 2021, according to the class-action lawsuit filed.
“Hot from the press. As I warned there are some major red flags. It appears we are back to square one for not learning from Flint,” read Leavitt’s decoded email, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon on Wednesday after the June court filing of the case.
Leavitt serves as a consultant for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
The use of the Greek language and alphabet “seems calculated to hide the facts,” the court filing states, noting that Leavitt “prefaced his grave concerns about the water crisis by referring back to his previous warnings and the State and City Defendants’ failure to learn from the Flint tragedy.”
Since the email was written in Greek, it will not be included in public records requests for government communications containing words like “Flint” or “red flag.”
Michigan’s public records department cannot electronically search materials written using the Greek alphabet, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer laid out her fall legislative agenda. AP
Leavitt’s coded emails were only known in the discovery phase of the class action lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed by a Benton Harbor, Michigan, resident against the Whitmer, Michigan state, city, and others.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer delivers her State of the State address.AP
The plaintiffs in the case argued that “despite having clear information that there were elevated lead levels in Benton Harbor’s municipal water, the State and City Defendants lied to residents that the tap water was safe and recommended remedial measures they knew were ineffective.”
The lawsuit was filed in November 2021, the same day a federal judge approved a $626 million settlement for victims of the notorious lead water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Whitmer claimed earlier this year that he “always supports increased transparency in government matters” but has so far refused to use his executive authority to reverse a policy that exempts his office from Freedom of Information Act requests.
The 52-year-old governor was sworn in for a second term in January after winning re-election in November.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
