A lawsuit recently obtained by the Washington Free Beacon has unveiled a clandestine communication strategy employed by a consultant for Michigan's Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
The lawsuit alleges that the consultant, Andy Leavitt, utilized the Greek alphabet as a means to obscure a message within an email, in what appears to be a deliberate attempt to keep sensitive information from public view.
The lawsuit asserts that Leavitt, who serves as a consultant for the state's energy department, dispatched a cryptic email to one of Governor Whitmer's advisers in September 2021. The email, according to the lawsuit, contained Leavitt's apprehensions regarding the water crisis in Michigan.
The lawsuit further alleges that Leavitt's email was composed using the Greek alphabet, seemingly to obscure the sensitive content within. "The top of Leavitt's email contains three sentences rendered in Greek alphabet font (i.e., each English letter replaced with its Greek-alphabet counterpart), which appears to be calculated to conceal the statements," the lawsuit detailed.
Upon decoding the text by converting the font to standard English, the lawsuit revealed that Leavitt began his email by referencing his previous warnings about the water crisis and the failure of the state and city defendants to learn from the Flint tragedy.
The decoded message read, "Hot off the presses. As I warned there are some major red flags. It seems like we are back at square one having not learned from Flint," according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit further revealed that Leavitt's email to Whitmer's adviser, Kara Cook, pertained to the issue of lead contamination in Benton Harbor, Michigan. The residents of this small town filed a lawsuit against Whitmer's administration in November 2021, accusing the state of "deliberate indifference" to their water crisis. This lawsuit led to the discovery of Leavitt's coded email, which contained his initial thoughts on the town's lead contamination issue.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that due to Leavitt's use of the Greek alphabet, his email would likely be exempt from a public records request. This is because Michigan's public records department lacks the capability to electronically search for records containing Greek letters.
As a result, a public records request for correspondence containing the keyword "Flint" would not have retrieved Leavitt's email. Furthermore, a search for keywords in Greek letters would necessitate a manual search, which would be both costly and time-consuming.
A seasoned public records researcher told the Washington Free Beacon that while it is not surprising that a government official would attempt to hide sensitive information from the public using a foreign alphabet, he had never witnessed such a tactic before. "Agencies play games to fight requests all the time. If they're doing it here, where else are they doing it?" the researcher queried.
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