A consultant for Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) used letters from the Greek alphabet as a coded message to hide information in an email.
Andy Leavitt, a consultant from Michigan’s energy department expressed “major red flags” with the administration’s response to a water crisis.
Translated from Greek, the email reads, “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.”
By using the Greek alphabet, the email would have been excluded from public records requests.
The information comes from a class action suit against the Whitmer administration.
The lawsuit explains, “The top of Leavitt’s email contains three sentences rendered in Greek alphabet font (i.e., each English letter replaced with its Greek-alphabet counterpart), which appears to be calculated to conceal the statements. Decoding the text (i.e., by changing the font to a standard English font) reveals that the consultant 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 coded message pertains to lead contamination in water systems across the state.
Reporting from Free Beacon:
The apparent scheme to hide sensitive conversations from public records requests comes years after Whitmer promised to bring transparency to the Great Lakes State as governor. In Michigan, the governor's office is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, a policy that Whitmer promised to reverse during her 2018 campaign. "Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on," the Democrat said at the time. But Whitmer has not reversed the policy. Her office is still exempt from public records requests years after she promised to issue an executive order that would subject her office to such requests. The Democrat during her first term also defended severance payments and confidentiality agreements with former employees, which Republicans characterized as "hush money."
