A version of this news analysis originally appeared in the Inside Politics newsletter, out Fridays. Sign up here to get it first to your inbox.
Editor's Note: After this newsletter was published Friday, Charlotte's interim city attorney clarified his previous statements to acknowledge there are not criminal penalties for talking about closed session discussions. Read more on that here.
A half-century ago, Richard Nixon unleashed the “Plumbers,” a squad of loyalists meant to chase down leaks from government officials to the press.
Democrats — and most Americans — were aghast at the idea of that taxpayer-funded hunt for leakers, or whistleblowers, depending on your point of view. That aversion to leak-hunting has persisted for decades, even as government officials at all levels clamp down ever more tightly on the flow of information.
But does Charlotte need its own “plumbers”? Democratic Charlotte City Council member Malcolm Graham is on board with the concept.
At a hastily assembled news conference Wednesday about the city’s decision to reach a financial settlement with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Johnny Jennings, Graham addressed not the circumstances of the settlement — but rather how the public became aware of it. He called for the “mayor and the manager, if appropriate, to begin an investigation on the leak itself. I think that’s really important because we have to build trust internally in the building as well as externally in the building.”
The flap is over the City Council’s decision to pay Jennings more than $100,000 due to threatening text messages he received from former City Council member Tariq Bokhari a year ago. Bokhari wanted the police chief to allow officers to wear new protective vests; Jennings at first declined.
In text messages obtained by WFAE, Bokhari said he would work to get Jennings fired and cripple his legacy.
No elected officials publicly defended the chief or rebuked Bokhari when the messages became public in November. Corine Mack, with the Charlotte NAACP, then filed an ethics complaint against Bokhari, but interim City Attorney Anthony Fox dismissed it in January.
It appeared as though the issue was dead.
Then WSOC-TV reported last week that the City Council was meeting in closed session to approve a financial settlement with Jennings, who sources say was seething over the text messages — and also the city’s lack of any public response.
There are two fundamental questions.
1) Bokhari’s text messages were nasty, and the chief should have arguably received an apology and a show of support. But does he deserve money — especially before even filing a lawsuit? After all, taking verbal hits is part of the job of being police chief of one of the nation’s largest cities, and the legal bar for public figures claiming defamation is extraordinarily high.
2) Why did Fox dismiss Mack’s ethics complaint about Bokhari’s conduct toward Jennings in January, then oversee a six-figure financial settlement in May? Bokhari’s wife, Krista Bokhari, raised that point in a lengthy social media post Thursday. She also alleged that City Council members were never told that Fox had dismissed the complaint before they voted on the settlement.
Victoria has entered the chat
City Council member Victoria Watlington sent an email to constituents on May 7 that took a flamethrower to the city, saying she is “extremely concerned with the level of unethical, immoral, and frankly, illegal activities occurring within City government.”
Watlington may have valid grievances against how the city is run. But she over-shot with her choice of words, allowing the city to blast her in that Wednesday news conference. (Her email also contained a fundraising link … it is a municipal election year, after all.)
She walked some of her rhetoric back a day later, saying "My fundamental desire is to operate with truth, transparency, respect and authenticity."
It appears the settlement is finished. At some point, the city will have to disclose how much money it paid Jennings.
But it may not be easy.
Fox, the interim city attorney, suggested that anything and everything to do with the settlement is off-limits because it happened in a closed session.
“(State) law also provides that when you go into closed session that that information is confidential,” he said on May 7. “It’s not to be shared. And it actually imposes criminal sanctions against anybody, any individual who has been found to violate that law.”
This is a sweeping interpretation of state law — one that goes contrary to the positions of Charlotte’s three previous city attorneys. A professor with the UNC School of Government told WFAE that Fox’s interpretation is an overreach.
In fact, there is no law prohibiting public officials from blabbing about closed sessions. There are only a few things they can’t talk about under any circumstances — trade secrets from a private company, for instance, and contents of an employee’s personnel file.
Is the fact that Jennings threatened to sue the city part of his personnel file? Perhaps.
Is the fact that some City Council members were upset with how the city went about counting votes and managing the process part of his personnel file? That’s a much harder case to make — especially since the state’s public records law explicitly says legal settlements agreed to in a closed session shall be made public “as soon as possible.”
Previous attorney pushed out … in part over public records and ‘leaks’
There’s some interesting backstory to Charlotte City Council’s recent personnel moves regarding their chief legal counsel.
The previous city attorney was Patrick Baker. Mayor Lyles and council members pushed him out last year for a number of reasons. One was personality differences. Another was that they believed he was interjecting himself in economic development deals, possibly jeopardizing agreements with the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Hornets.
An additional reason was that Baker seemed too willing to disclose information to the media. Mayor Pro Tem Dante Anderson accused him in closed session of “leaking” a document about the proposed transportation tax to WFAE.
Baker, in fact, was responding to a public records request.
After Baker was out, they replaced him on an interim basis with Fox — who last week made the bold assertion that if City Council members talk about closed sessions they can suffer criminal penalties.
Meanwhile, City Council could hold a vote soon on Graham’s request to find the leakers.
