Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is having the most terrible week of her career.
She got caught in multiple scandals that could bring her down.
Joe Biden’s top VP pick was caught making a shady payment to a Democrat group.
None of Joe Biden’s vice presidential picks are having a good week.
Amy Klobuchar’s history as a prosecutor is coming back to bite her.
Klobuchar decided not to press charges against Derek Chauvin — the police officer who appeared in a viral video this week and appeared to be pressing his knee into George Floyd — when complaints were made about Chauvin in the past.
Joe Biden needs to win minority voters and he’s probably thinking long and hard about having either Klobuchar or Kamala Harris as his vice president now, given their history as prosecutors.
This would be the perfect chance for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to try and bag the vice president position if she wasn’t battling scandals of her own.
It emerged this week that her husband tried to use her position to get their boat on the water while Whitmer was publicly urging people to stay at home. Whitmer claims her husband was joking.
Now another scandal has come out on the Michigan Governor whose stay-at-home orders were some of the harshest in the country.
New emails appeared to show that Whitmer’s office gave approval for taxpayers’ money to be given to Democrat groups through Michigan’s coronavirus tracing program.
“Whitmer’s office gave the ‘green light’ for a COVID-19 contact tracing ‘arrangement’ she denied knowledge of and canceled amid outcry over a contractor with Democratic ties,” Bridge Magazine reported. “Emails obtained through a public records request appear to show Michigan officials tried to avoid controversy by shifting work to apolitical subsidiaries of firms with known partisan leanings.”
The contract in question was not a small amount of money. Whitmer was paying Democrat groups hundreds of thousands of dollars to track the movements of people in her state “using the coronavirus to strengthen the Democratic Party’s data operation,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Whitmer claimed that she had no knowledge of the contract when it became a scandal.
“When it was brought to my attention, I told them to cancel it,” Whitmer claimed. “This was an unnecessary distraction. Leadership is about solving problems. The correct process was not followed.”
The new emails make it hard for Whitmer to deny that she had no knowledge of the contract if her own office approved the contract.
“We got the green light from EOG [the executive office of the governor] to move forward with a slightly different organizational arrangement of the contact tracing volunteer work. This would still be working with Mike Kolehouse, so work there isn’t lost – it’s just organized somewhat differently – see below,” said Andrea Taverna, a senior adviser in the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, in an email to other officials.
If Whitmer had handled the coronavirus crisis better, she might be on the short list to be Joe Biden’s vice president, but given her underhanded actions, her career is probably only going downhill from here.
