Lansing — When it comes to law and order in Dana Nessel’s office, it appears that justice is furloughed on Fridays.
I drove to the state capital last week to personally deliver a check to the FOIA coordinator.
Almost nobody was working inside the Soviet-style G. Mennen Williams Building save for a surly security guard, a guy pushing a vacuum cleaner, and a lonesome bureaucrat who eventually emerged from the bowels of the office block to accept my check.
My request?
“All responses, correspondence, documents, data sets, memos, briefings, notes, investigation files, emails and attachments, and work product concerning the state’s response to the U.S. Department of Justice request for information regarding Covid-19 and the state’s public nursing homes. That request was dated August 26, 2020. The state of Michigan was given 14 days to respond.”
The FOIA office estimated the cost to assemble that information to be a whopping $3,147.80.
Charging obscene amounts of money for bureaucrats to sit at home in their jammies and electronically comb public records is an old journalism ruse designed to make me go away. But we at Michigan Enjoyer have called Nessel’s bluff.
After all, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is now the target of a federal investigation. He is being investigated not for his response to Covid in the nursing homes, but for lying to Congress about his response to Covid in the nursing homes.
Nessel, who takes big money from the nursing home lobby, refuses to investigate. Maybe she’s protecting her contributors. Maybe she’s protecting Whitmer. Whomever Nessel is protecting, it’s certainly not the senior citizens of Michigan.
Given that Whitmer plagiarized Cuomo’s Covid response, and seeing how nobody has put Whitmer under oath, we figure it’s money well spent. Those documents are due in 90 days, approximately 10 Tuesdays from today. See you then.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools. Follow him on X @Charlieleduff.
