Email To Whitmer’s Office Used Greek In Effort To Evade FOIA Requests, Lawsuit Alleges

Andrew Leavitt, consultant with the Michigan Department of Energy used Greek in an email to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s senior energy adviser Kara Cook in September of 2021. A lawsuit is now alleging that the Greek letters were used in an effort to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which allow citizens to request records from government officials and agencies.

The contents of the email in question relate to the Whitmer Administration’s response to a local water crisis in Benton Harbor, according to a report from the Washington Free Beacon.

A lawsuit was filed Benton Harbor residents against Whitmer, the state of Michigan, the city, and others in November 2021 over the administration’s response after the town’s water supply was found to have exceeded federal standards for lead levels. Just days before the Benton Harbor lawsuit was filed, a Michigan judge signed off on a $626 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed by residents of Flint, Michigan, over the town’s 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. Leavitt “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.”

Leavitt’s use of Greek letters “‘appears to be calculated to conceal the statements,” the lawsuit alleges.

The Washington Free Beacon noted that Leavitt’s use of Greek letters for “Flint” and “red flags” would have evaded records requests, as Michigan’s public records department cannot electronically scan for records written n the Greek alphabet.

For Whitmer, the controversy comes after she campaigned on reforming Michigan’s FOIA standards. The governor’s office is not subject to FOIA requests under Michigan law, something Whitmer vowed to change.