LANSING, MI – A new report found that a consultant to Governor Whitmer used ciphers in emails to hide from the public emails highlighting “major red flags” in the Administration’s planned public response to the Benton Harbor water crisis. According to the Washington Free Beacon:
“A consultant for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.) used a coded message in a “calculated” effort to “conceal” from the public record sensitive communications regarding the administration’s response to a local water crisis in Michigan, according to a lawsuit. … One month before the residents filed their suit, Leavitt—a partner at a Michigan strategic consulting firm who was advising Whitmer’s energy department—emailed Whitmer senior adviser Kara Cook to express his concern over the administration’s “not acceptable” warnings to Benton Harbor residents. Leavitt’s top-line assessment of the warnings, however, was written using the Greek alphabet. Changing Leavitt’s font to standard English reveals the following message: ‘Hot off the presses. As I warned there are some major red flags. It seems like we are back at square one having not learned from Flint.’”
This is just the latest in the Whitmer administration’s schemes to hide information from the public and serves as another example of Whitmer’s broken promises. Both as governor and as a candidate, Governor Gretchen Whitmer verbally committed to greater government transparency, and Michigan Democrats have called for greater transparency measures in recent months.
“Governor Whitmer and her team are playing games in Lansing, but instead of finding a prize, Michiganders find corruption. No one should need a decoder ring to understand what our government is up to,” said Mary Drabik, Communications Director for the Michigan Freedom Fund. “This scandal is just the most recent example of Governor Whitmer’s desire to deceive and withhold information from the very people she should be transparent with: the citizens of this state. I’m sure the Governor’s Democrat allies who have decried the lack of transparency in our state will be the first in line to call out this shady behavior. ”
The jarring details about the coded messages and people in Whitmer’s circle who knew about the codewords can be found at TheWhitmerCode.com.
Governor Whitmer has a pattern of promising government transparency while simultaneously breaking that promise to protect her image and future aspirations. A few examples include:
- Whitmer’s hush money deal with former MDHHS Director Robert Gordon.
- Whitmer’s claim that she was in Michigan for the entirety of COVID, despite taking a secret trip to Florida while advising Michigan residents not to travel.
- Whitmer’s failed promise to use her role as Governor to increase government transparency.
- Whitmer’s lack of transparency with the recently passed $82 billion budget that was crafted behind closed doors with Democrats and Whitmer’s former Legislative Affairs Director, Curtis Hertel.
- Whitmer’s administration securing contracts with a Democrat-affiliated consultant and firm using taxpayer dollars to collect health data for COVID contact tracing.
- Whitmer’s MEDC and EGLE Departments’ failure to release environmental reports for the Chinese Communist Party-linked Gotion facility planned for Big Rapids.
- Whitmer’s underreporting of the total number of nursing home deaths, brought on by her executive orders that locked COVID-positive patients in facilities with our vulnerable elderly population.
