Charlotte clears itself of corruption accusation (10-15-2025--Hour2)

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Here's the mayor doing her best Kamala Harris impression. Last night, in closed session, the council was presented with an independent report from. A third party law firm. The firm was contracted to conduct an investigation into allegations made in May of unethical and moral and illegal activities occurring within city government. We took these allegations seriously at the request of some members of council. We retain Cranfill Summer to investigate. That's a law firm, guys, and we are today to sure that we are being transparent about the findings that were made. In all instances, the report revealed that there was no merit to any unethical, immoral or illegal activities occurring within Charlotte City government. I want to repeat that that there was no unethical, immoral, or illegal activities occurring within our city's government. It's Cranfil Sumner. By the way, over the. Past many months, the city has been under a lot of scrutiny. Our nearly nine thousand employees need to know that they are the most important part of the city and we support them. These egregious allegations hurt our team. Hang on well, okay, hand on a second. These allegations were made by a council member, Victoria Watlington. Were not directed at the nearly nine thousand city employees. It was directed at you. It was directed at the mayor, directed at her fellow fellow council members, and directed at the upper levels, the executive level management. It wasn't directed at rank and file cops, the trash collectors, right, the bureaucrats, the people you know at the cashier's desk at the you know, city office taking your water and sewer payments and stuff. It wasn't those people. It was you. And it had to do with the contract or sorry, the settlement that you gave to police Chief Johnny Jennings or as they reframed it after the fact, they called it a retirement package. Right, That's what this was about. And the way that all went down, the way the vote was held, how somebody who was opposed to the deal left the closed session and their vote got counted as a yes in favor of the package, and that allowed it to pass by a one vote majority in closed session. And they didn't realize that that was the case. And all of this and the lack of disclosure, the relying on, oh, it's a personnel matter, and we went over this at the time. When you give out big settlements or retirement package deals to executive level staff, and the police chief is one of those that is not personnel protected. We get to know what the payment is, what the compensation is, We get to know that. And you, guys, after you decided and closed session, you should have come out and you should have disclosed it to everybody, but you refused to do so. That then prompted litigation for you to information requests and the accusation that you were behaving in a corrupt manner. That's what prompted it, she continues, And. We owe it to them to investigate. They work for an organization that can be trusted and operates with the highest degree of integrity. This organization is one of the finest municipalities in the country, the findest and our staff. They're passionate about serving our community and are dedicated to our residents. And although counsel has different ways they express their passion. We care deeply about this community and our team. I don't think she's read this speech before she took the podium. She's reading a speech, a prepared. Statement. I don't I get the sense she has not read this before. She's pausing at weird times. She seems kind of surprised by the next word in the sentence. You know she did not write this somebody else wrote this for her, and I would be surprised if she laid eyes on it before she cracked the mic. This council and I work hard to make sure that the best that it can be. Page Stern, over the past. Times, I want to say thank you that we are going to have you offered her an opportunity for you if you'd like to interview council members. I hope that you'll come down and talk. Okay, what was that sentence over the past times, We're going to offer you the opportunity to come down. See this is where in their full transparency mode, they're going to not take questions from the media from the podium. You're going to have to pull them all off one by one. And there's a reason why you would do this from a pr management, a damage control strategy standpoint. Okay, because when reporters now, instead of a pack of them sitting in front of you, where they're able to just lob all of these questions at all of the members, they have to pick one member to pull off to the side and ask a series of questions too, and hope that after they're done with that member they can then bounce over to another member. So at most you're going to get two, maybe three of the ones who decided to even show up, because not all of the council members were there. Okay, when you are sitting in front of a pack of journalists and you're taking questions from the podium, reporters then get to hear other questions that are asked, and they don't have to ask them, so they can then do a follow up. Or if your answer to that previous question from a different reporter now wasn't clear, they can ask you to clarify, they find an inconsistency, they can then pick at it another reporter, here's the inconsistency. Also, they can pick at it, they can dig deeper. But when you split. Everybody off, the first question is going to be the same. That every reporter is going to stick a mic in the face of every one of those other council members and they're going to ask them generally the same questions. So by doing it this way, they are limiting the universe of questions that. They get subjected to. And if somebody says something that turns out to be cringey or suspicious or something, it gives everybody else deniability. See I understand why they do it this way. It's not transparent. You're not engaging in good faith. You're doing it this way in order to avoid the dynamic that I just laid out, because all the reporters first question is going to be something along the lines of what's your reaction to the report, and they're all going to have an answer for that. You're like, well, I'm just glad that this proves that we did not behave in this way, the charges were unfounded. Blah blah blah, blah blah. I'd be surprised if the reporters even had the report from the law firm before they attended the press conference. That's another trick that they will pull is they don't give you the report until you show up, and then they start the press conference. You have not had time to read the report before asking questions, so all you get is them giving you the top line that they want you to have. That's what I mean. Like, the pattern that this mayor and this city council has been employing is obvious to me, and I'm sure it is super frustrating to the reporters that cover this has their beat. It would be to me. It is to me, I don't even cover the city Council as a beat reporter. I mean I do monitor their meetings and stuff, but that's because I enjoy watching Charlotte City Council meeting. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come. Who you are, visit Creative video dot com. All right, I'm not done with the mayor's entire press conference that lasted three and a half minutes and where she took no questions, So I will I will get to that remaining audio, but first let me get Mike on real quick. Hello Mike, Welcome to the program. Thanks Thanks Pete. Let's take the mayor literally at her word. And I'm wondering if there are other words to describe this situation other than illegal, unethical, or immoral, like opaque or corrupt or insulated or choose anything. She's not saying we didn't do anything wrong. She's saying we literally didn't do anything the lawyers declare unethical, illegal, or immoral. Right. Well, and in fact, after uh, the all of this stuff came out, there were and you know, media started reporting on the settlement with the police chief and uh, and then the accusations came out, like her office said, like, you know, we're going to work to be better, more inclusive and more inclusive of this of Charlotte City Council members, like we're gonna we're gonna try to bridge this divide because there there are these two different sort of cliques on city council, one of you know, that is like led by the mayor, and then there's this other group that is not and Watlington is in that group, that clique. And so she even acknowledged at the very beginning, before they even hired the law firm, she said that, uh that you know, they're they're working to improve transparency and all of that. Yeah, I want to see former or unelectable or uh immediate past mayor immediate passive councilmen. Those are some of the words I'd like to see. Yes, you have a lot of adjectives, Mike. I applaud the use of your adjectives. I appreciate the call man. Thanks all right, see it. Yeah, like there is a very limited view of what they were looking at, right, unethical and moral? Illegal? And also I would this is a question I have asked people for years whenever they involve lawyers. In this case, the law firm Cranphil Sumner that did the investigation, and my question is always who is the client? Who's the client. Who wrote the check for the law firm. Well, the City of Charlotte did I'm not accusing anybody of illegal, immoral, or unethical behavior. I'm not saying that about the investigation. I would note that there are other organizations that could have done an investigation that actually had subpoena power. You could have asked for an SBI State Bureau of Investigation probe. You could have asked the state auditor to come in, do another round, take a look at all of the records. Right. You could have had those people come in, But they hired a law firm, and that law firm cleared them. And then if you are not, if you're not actually trying to bury this story to make it go away, I would submit you do not hold a news conference in the manner in which this was held. But this seems to be the standard operating procedure for the City of Charlotte now. And I will tell you years ago, when I was the beat reporter here at WBT for City Council and County Commission school board meetings like this would not have flown. This would not have been acceptable at all. I'd be chasing all of the reporters, would be chasing people through hallways, mikes and making them do purp walks and stuff. It's the only leverage you have. And here's the other thing too. They are not well served by this strategy. Whoever is advising them to do it this way, it is bad advice because you end up with people like me raising these questions after the fact, and then the issue doesn't go away. You know how the issue goes away if in fact there is no there there. The issue goes away by everybody standing at that podium and answering every single question until reporters don't have another question left to ask. That's how you make these things go away when there's nothing there. Now, if there is something there, then you probably would do a three and a half minute press conference and not take questions from the podium. Here she is again, let's reract this. Have you offered her an opportunity for you, if you'd like to interview council members. I hope that you'll come down and talk with them about the world that's being done. Lindsey is going to provide you with the report that would be distributed because we want to address each other and we also want to make sure that you understand that in transparency we are taking this level in government. I don't even know what that part means, but I don't think she does either, or whoever wrote the script. I saw somebody suggest. Maybe it was like a chat gpt AI generated kind of a script. It very well might have been. I don't know. I don't like that's a question. I would ask, like, Mayor, did you write your speech? Did you write these statements? I would ask her that did you because you seem to stumble a lot on these words, as somebody else writing this statement for you. And there she just acknowledged what I guessed because I saw the audio or I saw the video. Got posted, and so I hit record. I was recording the video, but then I stepped out and came back in. So I didn't hear that part where she said, and we are providing you with the results of the findings or whatever. And so I was right. The reporters are in the stands, they're in the seats, and they don't even have the report, and now they got to go interview people not having read the report. You think you're going to ask better questions being ignorant of what the findings actually say. Of course not so. 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And the law firm's findings were provided to the media after the statement by the mayor, and then she graciously allowed the members of the media to then come down, get the report and interview individual council members off to the side. And I laid out why that is a that is an intentional strategy to try to tamp down more questions. That's the design of the strategy. And I don't know why reporters aren't objecting to it. Maybe they were, and I just don't know. But all right, here's the last forty six seconds of the mayor's comments here after she told them, you're going to get a copy of the findings here and then peel away and talk to individual council members, but not up here at the podium. On the mic. And so today I hope that you'll have an opportunity again to speak up or speak with the members of the council. But more importantly, I hope that you will understand that we know that this community deserves service that we give them and the attention that they are owed. So with that, I'm not going to take any comments or requests or questions from you, but I hope that you will have an opportunity to see what kind of work this council can do and how we can do this. Well, thank you very much for your time. I love the music. Yes, it's cartoonish. I don't know if that was intentional. I don't think it is. I think they just have like some standard music that they play on the YouTube channel before and after the meeting, you know, while you're waiting for the council to finish eating before they come down to the main meeting in front of the public. So it's just like they're they're bump tunes, but that I don't know if that was intentional, but perfect chef's kiss, perfect. For what we just were treated to. Wsoctv's Joe Bruno says the news is not particularly surprising, considering Victoria Wattlington has been clear that her email that she had sent out where she made the accusations was not alleging financial corruption. However, the city said the investigation was needed to make it clear to airport bond investors that the city is conducting business properly, so that's why they did it. Now here is Victoria Watlington. This was from wbt's news director Mark Garrison, who I guess got a chance to speak with her here. Each of us have our own interpretation, our own moral standard, our own what we consider unethical, and I respect that we can agree to disagree. Hmm. Yeah. Doesn't sound like she agrees with the findings, does it. And if the point was to assuage the concerns of airport bond investors, their concerns would have been strictly financial and so maybe that was the focus of the investigation by the law firm hired by the city. I don't know. I have not seen the report. The investigation was launched after the email sent by Watlington entitled power corrupts and saying she was concerned about unethical, immoral, and frankly illegal activities occurring within city government. Channel nine had just broken the news that the Charlotte City Council secretly settled a potential lawsuit from Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department chief Johnny Jennings. He claimed, you'll recall former Councilman tarc Bookari created a hostile work environment during the debate over outer carrier vests for cops because they didn't look right, they looked scary, they looked military like. Within a day of her statement, Watlington made it clear she was not alleging financial corruption. She says she doesn't regret sending the email. The independent Attorneys interviewed Watlington and all members of city council about her claims. They found no evidence that the chiefs settlement was handled in an improper manner. However, they did right that the issue quote appears to stem primarily from procedural and communication challenges. Yes, yes, challenges, and that's corporate speak for problems, right, mistakes, opaqueness. Right, that's what Watlington is talking about, procedural challenges. What was the procedural challenge, Well, it was that one of the council members showed up to the closed session and then left and her vote got counted as a yes, and nobody seemed to know that that would happen, which is why they said, well, we're going to come back and revote on this, And then when they showed up to revote, they were like, actually, we did some digging. We didn't know the rules, and actually the rules are that if you attend a meeting and then leave, your votes from then on out are counted as yes votes. I knew that because I saw that happen several times when I was covering city council back in the early two thousands. They did not. Apparently, Wallington accepted the report's findings, but said she wishes more information was provided on how the attorneys reached these conclusions. Quote, I would have liked an analysis included in the report to really under stand because each of us are our own people, we have our own interpretation or our own moral standard, our own what we consider unethical our own interpretation of what's in the statutes and what's in our own ethics policy end quote. When it comes to disclosing Chief Jennings' allegations to council, the report said that the interim city attorney conducted a risk assessment and weighed the sensitivity of the situation since it was viewed as a personnel issue. So that tells me that the settlement was a pr move. That's why they did it, because it does because the decision process does not make any sense from a logical standpoint, except if you're doing it purely for PR or I guess if you're trying to do Johnny Jennings a solid on his way. Out the door because you like him. The mayor hurried out after reading the statement and did not take questions or as Mayor Vilize Lyles would call that transparency. 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Attorneys being hired to investigate politicians, best laugh, I've had all day an SAI four number says, after careful review, we have concluded we have done nothing wrong us investigating us. Seven o four number says we have the Ron Burgundy of mayors. Seth says the mayor sounds like she had a TMU version of chat GPT write that speech for her. OMG, how embarrassing. Oh wait, dang on a second, the mayor is a ghost, she's a figurehead. OMG, how embarrassing. They won't care. Randy says the mayor's corrupt and calls this a cover up. Shannon says she's an idiot and says, I wonder what the political affiliation of the partners of the law firm that conducted the investigation. That's a fair question too, Or how about this have they made political donations? Do they have any city contracts? Right? Why was this form selected? Nothing says? This is from Sean who says nothing says transparency like the words closed session and that bumper music sounded like the music they play at the Apollo when the Sandman sweeps you off stage. Okay, Eric says, Splitting council members up so you never talk to them as a group is getting really close to the Wanda Green playbook for folks in Charlotte who don't know who Wanda Green is. Wanda Green was the county manager of Buncom County and she was indicted and I believe she eventually. I don't know if she pled guilty or if she was, but she was convicted, she went to well, she was sentenced to prison, but then COVID, so she got to do it all from home. Massive corruption and one of the things that she did. And I railed against this the entire time. I was up in Asheville work in the afternoon and drive and she would do these oh I forget what she called them. Rather than meet with the entire county commission for a briefing on the agenda before the meeting, she would break them off. I think she maybe like two on ones or something like that. She would she would break off and so she would control the dissemination of information to the different commission members. So she would have one on one, two on one meetings. So and they and she said this was so they could get around the open meetings laws, right, because if you have if you have a quorum of the commission, then you have to publicly advertise the meeting. And they didn't want to do that. They didn't want it to be a public meeting. This was just a briefing, one on one. So she would have these briefings, but what she would tell one commissioner would be different than what she tells another commissioner. And that's how she was. Able to engage in her siphoning of counting money for personal expenditures. She went on trips. She went down to the equestrian event and try on with one of the other commissioners because they were both horse lovers and such. And then of course, you know, got taxpayers to fund that. They took a trip up to New York to visit a horse that one of the commissions, the same commissioner, Ellen Frost was her name, to fly up to New York to see your old horse, because like she sold the horse it was old, and so she like sent it out to pasture up in New York or something, and so they flew up there and then never actually visited the horse. You know, stuff like that. They bought a whole bunch of these gift cards, they made all these purchases on them for personal items and such massive corruption. And that's what she would do. Divide and conquer. You keep people in the dark by keeping them isolated, so they can't hear concerns from other commissioners, questions from the other commissioners, and so when you go into the open meetings, at that point, all of your questions have been answered and everybody else's questions have been answered, and so there's no discussion. So the public doesn't even know what questions you may have had before you voted on the item. That's how she did it, Aaron says. So they hired the firm to do the report. Somebody got paid good again somewhere which will never be noted, just saying this, have. A good one. I'm just a guy, a plumber. But the investigation by the law firm seems like a step in advance of an upcoming investigation from the State Auditor or SBI. I'm still waiting to hear her explanation of what they did with the money that was diverted away from law enforcement after the BLM riots and installation of the anti cop city Council. I hope that gets addressed and so and is held to account for that, says Andy. Yeah, so you get there. There are a ton of similar texts that have come in. I'm not gonna be able to get to them all, but that's the vibe, and that's the result of the kind of pr optics you were angling for, and it actually creates the opposite of what you were hoping it would create. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalnarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.