A consultant for Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) used Greek and "coded messaging" to hide sensitive information from the public regarding her administration.
According to a report, In September 2021, Andrew Leavitt, a consultant with the Michigan Department of Energy, used Greek in an email to Whitmer's senior energy adviser, Kara Cook. A lawsuit alleges that the Greek letters were used to avoid having to cooperate with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Using Greek letters, Leavitt's emails would have been excluded from public record requests for government communications containing the word "Flint."
Leavitt reportedly emailed Cook in response to "some major red flags" with the administration's actions following a lead water crisis in southwestern Michigan, in which he compared it to a problem similar to the Flint water situation.
The lawsuit alleges that Whitmer's administration relied on coded messages in a "calculated" effort to "conceal" crucial information from the public record on the local water crisis, which exceeded the federal standards for lead levels.
In November 2021, Benton Harbor residents filed a lawsuit against Whitmer, the state of Michigan, the city, and others.
The same week, a Michigan judge signed off on a $626 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed by residents of Flint, Michigan, over the water crisis.
"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,' Leavitt's email reads.
He "prefaced his grave concerns about the water crises with a reference back to his prior warnings and the State and City Defendants' failure to learn from the Flint tragedy."
The emails in question come several years after the Democrat promised to bring transparency, saying the governor's office is not immune to FOIA requests— a policy Whitmer vowed to reverse during her 2018 campaign.
"Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on," Whitmer said at the time.
However, Whitmer has not yet reversed the policy, exempting her administration from public records requests.