Joe Biden’s been bombarded by one piece of bad news after another in his first few weeks in office.
The Democrats are finding out they are in deeper trouble than they first thought.
A $150,000 hush money payment has this top Joe Biden ally under investigation.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s been one of the poster children for Democrat governors’ coronavirus totalitarianism.
Whitmer locked her state down early, and banned Michiganders from traveling to their lake houses but saw her husband try and get special treatment to get his boat out on the lake, and at one point even banned high school sports.
The lockdown in Michigan has been one of the most punishing in the nation as the average annual unemployment rate in Michigan jumped to 9.7 percent as Whitmer’s totalitarian shutdown crushed businesses.
Now Whitmer finds herself at the center of another scandal.
Whitmer’s administration paid former health department director Robert Gordon $155,506 in a separation agreement when Gordon left his position.
The Detroit News reports:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration agreed to pay former state health department director Robert Gordon $155,506 in a separation deal that also required the two sides to maintain confidentiality about the circumstances that led to his abrupt departure.
The agreement is the clearest evidence yet that the split between Gordon, a central figure in the state’s response to COVID-19, and Whitmer was not amicable, and it shows the Democratic administration used taxpayer funds to ease his departure.
Republicans blasted Whitmer for a hush money payoff designed to buy the silence of a key official who could bring down Whitmer’s re-election campaign.
“That is a public official being bought off with taxpayer dollars – what I want to know is – what are they hiding,” State Senator Steve Johnson declared. “This looks like a hush-money payment.”
“Why did you do this? I mean, this looks like a hush-money payment,” Representative Matt Hall added.
Whitmer was one of five governors—four of them Democrats—that critics contend killed people’s grandparents by mandating nursing homes take in COVID-19 patients.
In a press conference Whitmer denied she paid hush money.
“…I really bristle at that characterization,” Whitmer sneered. “It is the nature of a separation agreement when somebody in a leadership position leaves, is that, there are terms to it and you can’t share every term to it. And that’s simply what it is.”
Republicans in Michigan allege Whitmer may have fudged the data on nursing home deaths and are demanding a criminal investigation similar to the one launched in New York against Governor Andrew Cuomo.
State Senator Jim Runestad authored a letter signed by seven other Republicans to U.S. Attorney General Monty Wilkinson and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel demanding a probe into Whitmer’s handling of coronavirus nursing home deaths.
“Gov. Whitmer’s regional hub policy placed patients with and without COVID-19 in the same facilities and may have exacerbated the death toll in those facilities,” Runestad wrote in a statement.
“Questions remain regarding the accuracy of data, compliance with CDC guidelines and compliance with our state’s Freedom of Information Act. There is a critical need for a full investigation into these matters,” Runestad added.
Republicans are questioning if the $155,000 payment to the former health director was to make sure he never spilled the beans on what he knew about Whitmer covering up the true number of nursing home deaths in Michigan on Governor Whitmer’s watch.
Governor Whitmer is one of the top Republican targets next November and this scandal is a ticking time bomb that could destroy her re-election prospects.
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