Flint Water Crisis: Governor Not Worried He Will Be Charged

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said Wednesday he isn’t worried he will be charged in the ongoing investigation of the Flint water crisis and lead contamination in the city’s drinking water supply, but at the same increased his criminal defense fund as the investigation reaches closer to his office. Thirteen people have now been charged in the criminal investigation in Flint, and Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has said that “nobody’s off the table.”

Former emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose, who each were charged with two 20-year felony charges of false pretenses and conspiracy to commit false pretenses on Tuesday, are the highest-level officials charged so far in the investigation. Also charged Tuesday with the same crimes were two former city of Flint employees, Howard Croft and Daugherty Johnson, who had served as the city’s public works administrator and utilities manager, respectively.

When specifically asked by a reporter at a Tuesday news conference if Snyder would face criminal charges, Schuette didn’t specifically answer, but left open the possibility.

“It’s serious,” Schuette said. “We’re going up and we’re going broad. We read the emails and put two and two together. If there’s sufficient evidence, we charge. Nobody’s on the table; nobody’s off the table.”

Snyder hasn’t been interviewed by special prosecutor Todd Flood, he told The Detroit News, but as the investigation continues to the upper echelons of state government, he has increased the contract for criminal defense attorneys from $2 million to $3.5 million. In all, the governor’s office is spending about $5 million for private attorneys — all paid for by taxpayers — to pay for civil lawsuits, document production and other matters related to the Flint investigation.

See Also

• Flint Water Crisis: 2 Former Emergency Managers Criminally Charged

• Flint Water Crisis: Charges ‘First Wave’ in Investigation
• Flint Residents Treated as ‘Expendable’ by 6 State Workers Criminally Charged

In an interview with the Detroit Free Press Wednesday, Snyder said he “can’t speak for the attorney general,” but that he has “no reason to be concerned.” Even so, most of the taxpayer-funded $3.5 million he is spending for outside legal fees covered expenses related to turning over documents to the Flint investigators.

“The bulk of their work is document production — a huge amount of document production," Snyder told the Free Press of his taxpayer-funded lawyers. “You probably had the opportunity to read more e-mails from the executive office than you ever would have thought, because we continue to produce documents.”

Most documents have already been turned over, “but as they keep on asking, we keep on responding,” the governor said in the Free Press interview.

Snyder has released thousands of emails related to the Flint water crisis, including some showing his top advisers knew about a potential link between a spike in Legionnaires’ disease and Flint’s lead-contaminated drinking water supply months before the governor told the public about it.

Schuette said Tuesday that though the focus of the investigation is on the lead contamination, possible links with Flint-area deaths from Legionnaires’ disease are also being explored. Twelve people in the Flint and Genesee County areas have died from Legionnaires’ disease, according to state records.

The now criminally charged former emergency managers’ “fixation” with costs and balance sheets had been at the expense of “public health and safety” and had “cost lives,” Schuette said Tuesday.

In February, former Snyder aide Dennis Schornack told the Free Press that Snyder is “basically a good guy,” but said the decisions made about the situation of Flint were too focused on finances, rather than science.

“It's sort of a single dimension for decision making; thinking that if it can't be solved on a spreadsheet, it can’t be solved,” Schornack said of his experience working with Snyder.

Wednesday, Snyder told the Free Press he doesn’t necessarily agree that emergency managers’ focus on the bottom line came at the expense of public health and safety.

“Obviously, if you’re an emergency manager, there are a lot of financial issues that need to be addressed,” Snyder told the Free Press. “That’s one reason you ended up in the job, because of a financial failure

“But usually there was a failure of services,” he said.

Snyder defended Earley and Ambrose in his interview with The Detroit News, saying he believes “they worked hard in good faith.”

The charges against Earley and Ambrose could test the strength of Michigan’s emergency manager law.

“Well, it protects them from being sued,” Wayne State University Law professor and former federal prosecutor Peter Henning told Michigan Public Radio, “but it’s not clear that it protects them from criminal charges.”

Photo by Michigan Municipal League via Flickr Commons