From the beginning, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s explanation of the trip she took to Florida this spring to visit her ostensibly ailing father hasn’t rang quite true.
After it was learned Whitmer left the state, apparently while COVID-19 cases were spiking in Michigan and her administration was advising others not to travel, she offered bare bones details of her journey.
The governor said she made a two-day visit to her father, former Blue Cross CEO Richard Whitmer, whom she said was suffering from a chronic illness.
Whitmer could be forgiven for traveling to visit a sick or dying relative amid a pandemic if she was honest about it. But she didn’t say how she got to Florida, where she stayed or whether she transferred gubernatorial power while she was out of the state, as is customary.
Now, reporting suggests Whitmer may be hiding key details of the excursion that the public has a right to know.
Veteran Detroit journalist Charlie LeDuff, writing for Deadline Detroit, reports Whitmer flew on a private jet owned by a group of Metro Detroit businessmen.
The story raises enough concern that Whitmer must at last come clean about the trip. Specifically, the public has a right to know how she paid for the flight.
If she paid with personal funds, and not a check from her campaign account, the issue of the jet goes away, and what’s left in the way of controversy is the governor’s hypocrisy and lack of transparency.
Her staff has refused to answer further questions about the Florida trip, citing concerns about the governor’s safety. The governor was the target of an assassination plot last year.
Fair enough, for some of the information in question. But it’s hard to see how her safety would be compromised by answering the questions of the jet’s use and how she paid the bill, which LeDuff pegged in the $20,000 to $30,000 range.
And how long was she gone? The governor says two days; LeDuff reports it was four. The length is inconsequential except if the governor lied about it. If so, it calls into question other pieces of her explanation, including that there was no cost to taxpayers.
Did her security detail travel to Florida as well? That would certainly come at state expense. She has said they didn’t travel with her, but did they meet her there? It would seem rather reckless for a governor under death threats to leave the state without at least some security.
She also apparently didn’t follow protocol to notify Florida law enforcement she was in their state. That would suggest the secrecy in which she cloaked the trip was less about safety and more about avoiding political fallout.
This incident fits into the extreme lack of transparency that marks the Whitmer administration, as well as the governor’s apparent comfort with saying things that later prove not to be true.
The claim, for example, that former Health Director Robert Gordon left voluntarily was just recently discredited by Gordon himself, who says Whitmer forced him out of the position.
She’s also fibbed to cover up her hypocrisy involving violations of her own COVID shutdown guidance, most notably last spring when she spun a fabulist tale after her husband pressured a northern Michigan marina owner to jump their boat to the front of the launch line.
When her administration was caught trying to direct a COVID contact-tracing contract to a Democratic-connected firm, she claimed no knowledge. It was later confirmed her staff green-lighted the deal.
This pattern suggests two things:
The governor has no respect for the public’s right to know the truth; and her communications team is not doing its job.
She’d serve herself and Michigan citizens well by not only coming clean on the Florida trip, but also cleaning house of a communications staff that has clearly failed her.
Whitmer ought to rid herself of anyone in the communications department, top to bottom, who is not advocating for telling the truth to the people of Michigan.
Whitmer campaigned under the promise of being a transparent, ethical governor. So far, those have been just words. She needs to start making them a reality.
— THE DETROIT NEWS