Will anyone remember Hillary’s support for black Democrat Mayor Karen Weaver, who is now facing serious charges of STEALING money from charitable donations (that should have been used to support the people who are suffering in the community where she was elected) and putting it into her own campaign fund?
“I had not been notified by Donald Trump or his people … finally, this afternoon, a call to my press person, but I did not know. These plans were made without contacting me.”
Her reaction when she was contacted by Trump’s campaign?
“That’s kind of not the way it’s supposed to go – I wish that he had come when things were in more dire straits – maybe before we had even received help — when the debates were going on. We were crying out for a long time.”
The fact that then-candidate Donald J. Trump didn’t rush to Flint, MI for a photo-op when Hillary and Bernie were making regular visits, as they shamelessly pandered for the Black vote, in a city that for decades has been ignored by Democrats, spoke volumes about Trump’s serious nature.
On May 19, 2016, it was revealed by the Detroit News, that Flint’s former city administrator, Natasha Henderson, 39, filed a claim in the U.S. District Court, stating that she was terminated on Feb. 12 for seeking an investigation into allegations of misconduct by Flint Mayor Karen Weaver. Henderson, claims she was wrongfully fired for blowing the whistle on the mayor of Flint for allegedly trying to steer money from a charity for local families into a campaign fund.
Specifically, the suit alleges that Weaver directed a city employee and volunteer to steer donors away from a charity called Safe Water/Safe Homes, and instead give money to the so-called “Karen about Flint” fund, which was a political action committee or campaign fund created at Weaver’s direction.
According to the lawsuit, a city employee told Henderson in confidence that she and a volunteer had previously been directing donors to the City of Flint’s website, where they could give money to the Safe Water/Safe Homes charity, which helped families affected by the water crisis. But Weaver directed them to steer donors to the “Karen about Flint” website, which the city council had not approved, the suit claims.
STEVE CARMODY / MICHIGAN RADIO
“A red flag went off when it was an unrecognizable fund,” Henderson’s lawyer, Katherine Smith Kennedy, told the Free Press. “She did the right thing. She reported the matter to the city attorney. And for doing the right thing, she was punished. She was fired.”
On February 14, 2019, Mayor Karen Weaver was dismissed as a defendant in the lawsuit filed by her former City Administrator Natasha Henderson — the Whistleblowers’ Protection Act case is still pending against the city in U.S. District Court.
Now, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver is back in the news again, as MLive is reporting that although Henderson’s lawsuit was dismissed in a 2017 U.S. District Court ruling, portions of the lawsuit related to the Whistleblower Protection Act were reinstated by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2018.
“Henderson has mustered sufficient circumstantial evidence of a retaliatory motive to prevent summary judgment,” Circuit Judge Jane B. Stranch wrote in the ruling of a three-judge panel.
MLive reports that the Democrat mayor asked employees to redirect charitable donors to a nonprofit fund she created shortly after taking office in 2015, an ex-city official testified during a federal whistleblower trial in Detroit on Wednesday, May 8.
Weaver, who took the stand briefly Wednesday and may testify further Thursday, said she created the fund at the recommendation of other mayors or advisers from across Michigan, including former Lansing Mayor Virgil Bernero and Lansing Bishop David W. Maxwell, who assisted in the fund’s creation.
“They got slick,” said community activist and Weaver critic Arthur Woodson, who attended Wednesday’s hearing. “They were trying to steal the money.”
Amid the city’s water contamination crisis, Weaver issued an emergency declaration in December 2015, spurring an influx of donations. However, ex-Chief Financial Officer Jody Lundquist said the city wasn’t set up to receive tax-exempt donations.
This led City Council to pass an ordinance forming a nonprofit community foundation for the purpose of collecting donations to help Flint residents combat the water crisis.
By January 2016, Weaver, who was elected and took office the previous November, created her nonprofit, Caring for Flint, with the help of the Miller Canfield law firm, according to testimony and records entered into evidence Wednesday.
The nonprofit was created as a 527 organization, usually a form of campaign fund created for politicians. Under federal law, a 527 account isn’t required to register or report to the state, can accept direct corporate contributions and is only obliged to report donors and expenditures if contributions exceed $25,000 in a year.
Lundquist testified that she was approached in early February 2016 by Flint City Administrator Natasha Henderson, who told her that Weaver, through her assistant Maxine Murray, had asked her to direct any potential city donors to the mayor’s newly formed account.
Murray independently told the then-chief financial officer she “felt uncomfortable about the direction she received from the mayor,” Lundquist testified.
Lundquist also said she witnessed Henderson telling ex-Flint Attorney Anthony Chubb about the request.
Days later, Henderson was fired.
After two years of working to create historically low unemployment numbers for Black and Hispanic Americans, minority voters got to see firsthand how a successful businessman approaches serious issues vs. how a career politician promises to fix issues with no real plan to ever come back once the press packs it up and leaves these broken neighborhoods. Trump’s desire to create jobs for people who have been unemployed for decades is sincere, and the Democrats biggest fear is that his message is now resonating in these forgotten neighborhoods.
