Good day all. Back in 2014 and 2015, a scandal broke over the Flint, Michigan water system. The long story short, it was serving up contaminated water. There were accusations against the then Republican governor and others that they knew about the issues and did nothing.
I haven’t followed that story at all. What little I remember is that it got political really fast, and that there were appearances that members of the Obama maladministration knew about the problems and did nothing. Eventually a judge issued indictments against Governor Snyder and others. This was challenged and the Supreme Court vacated the charges against everyone. Here are the details from Newsmax:
A judge had no authority to issue indictments in the Flint water scandal, the Michigan Supreme Court said Tuesday in an extraordinary decision that wipes out charges against former Gov. Rick Snyder, his health director and seven other people.
It’s an astonishing defeat for Attorney General Dana Nessel, who took office in 2019, got rid of a special prosecutor and put together a new team to investigate whether crimes were committed when lead contaminated Flint’s water system in 2014-15.
From what I’ve heard and read about Nessel, she is not what you would call, competent. Tyrannical, dictatorial, and politically motivated, yes. Competent? Not so much.
State laws “authorize a judge to investigate, subpoena witnesses, and issue arrest warrants” as a one-person grand jury, the Supreme Court said.
“But they do not authorize the judge to issue indictments,” the court said in a 6-0 opinion.
How the heck did this even slip past the state Attorney General? Isn’t it her job to actually know these things? Why didn’t she go through the normal process to get indictments? I have a suspicion of course. (Cough Politically motivated Cough)
The challenge was filed by former health director, Nick Lyon, but the decision also applies to Snyder and others who were indicted by Genesee County Judge David Newblatt.
The attorney general’s office was reviewing the opinion and had no immediate comment, spokeswoman Lynsey Mukomel said.
I suspect they’re all in their offices trying to figure out how they’re going to dig themselves out of yet another mess they’ve made for themselves. If there was some kind of crime here, shouldn’t the judge and investigators handed everything over to the AG’s office and have them do the indictments?
In a money-saving move, Flint managers appointed by Snyder switched the city’s water source to the Flint River. State regulators said the river water didn’t need to be treated to reduce its corrosive qualities. That was a ruinous decision: Lead from old pipes flowed through the system for 18 months in the majority-Black city.
From what little I recall, the EPA under Obama was also involved, but take this with a grain of salt. As to the charges, I checked with someone I know who lives in Michigan and he said it was politically motivated. Considering the current Govno and Attorney General, this is quite believable.
Snyder was charged with two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty. Lyon and Michigan’s former chief medical executive, Dr. Eden Wells, were charged with involuntary manslaughter for nine deaths related to Legionnaires’ disease when Flint’s water system might have lacked enough chlorine to combat bacteria in the river water.
Regarding the charges against Snyder, my source said that at no time did the governor have any duty to the city of Flint. As to the actual indictments, this is where things get interesting and why the State Supreme Court tossed everything out.
Nessel assigned Fadwa Hammoud to lead the criminal investigation, along with Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, while the attorney general focused on settling lawsuits against the state.
Hammoud and Worthy turned to a one-judge grand jury in Genesee County — a century-old, rarely used method — to hear evidence in secret and get indictments against Snyder and others.
The fact that the process is very uncommon should probably have start alarm bells ringing. I will state for the record that I have no knowledge of how the laws regarding criminal investigations and indictments work in Michigan.
“There are no velvet ropes in our criminal justice system,” Hammoud proudly declared in 2021 when charges were filed. “Nobody — no matter how powerful or well-connected — is above accountability when they commit a crime.”
Nobody is above the law, unless they are a member of the Progressive Liberal Democratic Communazi Elite, or Hunter Biden. The question here is, why didn’t Hammoud just follow the normal processes for getting an indictment instead of using something few people appear to be aware of?
But she and her team, acting on Worthy’s recommendation, didn’t follow a traditional process. Hammoud still hasn’t publicly explained why.
Prosecutors in Michigan typically file charges after a police investigation. A one-judge grand jury is extremely rare and is mostly used to protect witnesses, especially in violent crimes, who can testify in secret.
Obviously, this wasn’t the case. There were no witnesses who were in danger. This appears to have been a politically motivated investigation with the goal to “Get” people in the opposition party. (That would be the Republicans)
“It seems that the power of a judge conducting an inquiry to issue an indictment was simply an unchallenged assumption, until now,” the Supreme Court said Tuesday.
Now why would it be assumed that a single judge could do this? My guess is that since this procedure is so rarely used, no one actually thought about it. On the other hand, it’s possible that the Attorney General’s office thought they could pull a fast one.
The Flint water switch and its consequences have been investigated for crimes since 2016 when then-Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican, appointed Todd Flood as special prosecutor. Schuette pledged to put people in prison, but the results were different: Seven people pleaded no contest to misdemeanors that were eventually scrubbed from their records.
Again, I can see how this looks. People were furious over this debacle. The question is, were actual crimes committed?
Flood insisted he was winning cooperation from key witnesses and moving higher toward bigger names. Nonetheless, Nessel, a Democrat, fired him and pledged to start over following her election as attorney general.
And here lies the problem. Was Nessel correct in wanting to start from scratch? Possibly. However, what she pulled smells to high heaven and reeks of political retribution. Considering her actions, along with Govno Whitmer over the last few years, it looks like she was going to try and railroad the former governor and a few others into prison. Now she has been slapped down, and with the election upcoming, she might find herself thrown out of office. Perhaps the Democrats in this country might want to try something new, actually following the laws and the Constitutions of the United States and of their states.
Thatisall
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