Flint’s liberal Mayor Karen Weaver has been accused of using the Flint water crisis for personal gain by illegally ordering employees to re-direct donations to a political fund she controlled.
Now those former city employees have turned whistleblowers and are speaking out about the shameful corruption they claim they saw at Flint city hall.
At the center of the corruption scandal are Jody Lundquist and Natasha Henderson, the city’s former chief financial officer and city administrator.
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A huge amount of charitable donations rolled into Flint after Mayor Weaver used her emergency declaration during the peak of the water crisis in 2015 to ask for money from charitable donors to help the city’s residents.
Where this money went is at the heart of the scandal. According to the the city hall whistleblowers, Mayor Weaver directed staff to quietly funnel donations meant for the city into her new account, which made them very uncomfortable.
After Henderson began asking questions about how the donated funds were being handled, she was fired by the Democrat mayor.
“Mayor Karen Weaver asked employees to redirect charitable donors to a nonprofit fund she created shortly after taking office in 2015, an ex-city official testified during a federal whistleblower trial in Detroit on Wednesday,” MLive reported.
The Democrat mayor, of course, is denying the allegations and doing her best to deflect the public relations nightmare, but many observers aren’t buying her story.
“They got slick,” community activist Arthur Woodson bluntly told MLive. “They were trying to steal the money.”
Slick is an understatement. If the whistleblowers’ accusations are correct, the Democrat mayor is guilty of one of the most cynical and craven political maneuvers in living memory.
“By January 2016, Weaver, who was elected and took office the previous November, created her nonprofit, Caring for Flint,” explained MLive. But there were red flags from the start.
“The nonprofit was created as a 527 organization, usually a form of campaign fund created for politicians. Under federal law, a 527 account isn’t required to register or report to the state, can accept direct corporate contributions and is only obliged to report donors and expenditures if contributions exceed $25,000 in a year,” the newspaper continued.
“The termination prompted Henderson, who claims she was fired for pointing out the questionable donation diversion, to file a federal Whistleblower Protection Act lawsuit in May 2016 against Flint and Weaver,” MLive said.
That suit now become a U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals case, which is still unravelling.
While political corruption exists on both sides of the aisle, there does seem to be a disturbing trend of Democrat leaders using their power to create pay-for-play schemes and line their own pockets, often at the direct expense of their gullible voters.
Hopefully, the truth in this case will be allowed to come out — and at the very least, Flint’s voters will think twice about who they’re electing in the future.
