Six officials from Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Environmental Quality have been formally charged with criminal offenses for the role they played in the Flint water crisis.
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Michigan Department of Health and Human Services employees Nancy Peeler, Corinne Miller, and Robert Scott face charges of “misconduct in office, conspiring to commit misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty related to allegedly concealing or disregarding test results showing high levels of lead in the bloodstreams of Flint residents”.
Schuette said Shekter Smith supervised Rosenthal and Cook at the Department of Environmental Quality. Rosenthal is charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to tamper with evidence or engage in misconduct in office, and tampering with evidence as a public officer engaged in a willful neglect of his duty.
Schuette filed a suit against two water engineering companies in June claiming that their negligence both caused and worsened the contamination, and is calling for millions in damages.
The crisis has engulfed the lives of those living in Flint, a small city of with a population of 100,000, as well as the government officials responsible for the crisis.
“Each of these individuals attempted to bury, to downplay, or to hide information that contradicted their own narrative”, Attorney General Bill Schuette said.
Three other local and state employees were charged in April, bringing the total number of people charged in connection to the health crisis to nine.
Schuette said today that his office has interviewed more than 200 people for the investigation.
And Andrew Arena, lead investigator in the case and former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation office in Detroit, added: “You don’t start at the top”. Residents must use filters to make their water drinkable.
A task force appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, to investigate what led up to the lead-tainting debacle found that the agency was unlikely to enforce clean drinking water regulations in the city without “widespread public outrage”.
An independent investigation of the Flint water crisis concluded in March that officials within the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality are mostly to blame, although other officials share some responsibility, and called the prolonged poisoning of the Flint water supply “a story of government failure, intransigence, unpreparedness, delay, inaction, and environmental injustice”. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission is holding public hearings on the matter. It was the Governor’s emergency manager law that kept Flint tied to a poisoned drinking water source and now taxpayer money is wrongfully being used to pay for Snyder’s criminal defense.
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The Associated Press couldn’t reach the employees for comment. AP material published by LongIsland.com, is done so with explicit permission. This includes the preparation of derivative works of, or the incorporation of such content into other works.
