No BS Newshour Episode #398
Nasty New Year
(0:04) “It’s a lawsuit!”
An extra special present for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
(3:52) We’re going all the way to the Supreme Court Dana.
(7:03) Meet Phil, my pitbull lawyer.
(26:47) The presser: Fake Mike Duggan saying what the real Mike Duggan is thinking on his way out of the Manoogian Mansion.
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Sponsored by American Coney Island, Pinnacle Wealth Strategies, and XG Service Group
Transcript:
Wait, there’s another present under the tree. This one’s for the Attorney General of the State of Michigan, Dana Nessel, defendant. You see, it’s a lawsuit and I’m the one suing.
Why? Because I wrote her a check for $3,147 and 90 cents for all of Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID nursing home documents. Now Nessel cashed that check 150 days ago, see? And still no documents. Now that’s not legal.
A lot of us are not going to be having Christmas dinner with Granny because Granny died alone in the nursing home. I don’t know what Nessel’s hiding, but I’m going to find it. Madam, you’ve been served.
Merry Christmas. Live from downtown Detroit, it’s the No Bullshit News Hour with my main man, Charlie LeDuc, and Karen Neumann. Let’s just break it up.
No more bullshit. No more bullshit. Happy New Year, everybody.
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And if you’re in the middle of one now and you’re not happy, they’ll take a look at it for you. Just get their opinion, right? Never hurts. Luke Nowacki, you can reach him at 248-663-4748.
What the fuck is going on with silver? Yeah, all time high, right? It’s gotten so high, Red’s wearing it around like jewelry now. He did. He got a silver coin mounted on a chain.
He walking around like a pimp. It’s unbelievable. Let’s hear from Luke.
Is this the hole-in-one? It’s a hole-in-one, $50,000 if you hit it. Luke Nowacki, Financial Wealth Management. What is 50 grand after tax? $37,750.
What about state tax? Yeah, I’m throwing both in there. What about sales tax? There’s no sales tax. Well, you’re buying the beer.
There’s income. You’re buying the beer. Eh, we write that off.
Luke Nowacki, Financial Wealth Management. 248-663-4748 for sound financial advice. I love that guy.
He’s a great man. He’s a true libertarian too. There’s a guy.
Really appreciate your friendship and sponsorship, Luke. Here’s a guy advertising on this program. Don’t mind me sticking a cigarette in his face.
He’s a dude’s dude. All right, ladies and gentlemen, as you heard, I’m suing Dana Nessel and Gretchen Whitmer. Again, it’s about nursing homes during COVID.
Again, at issue. Back in 2020, Trump’s Justice Department was conducting a civil rights investigation into the treatment and deaths of the elderly people in five states, including Michigan. What, if anything, did Whitmer tell them? What were her people telling each other behind closed Zoom doors? I requested all that information 247 days ago.
They’re stalling and delaying is not legal. The Freedom of Information Act law says they’ve got 21 days to produce the goods. So I’m suing.
Nessel’s office had the gall, you’ll all remember this, charging me $3,147.80 to process that paperwork. So I wrote a personal check plus a dime. Call someone who cares.
Nessel’s office cashed my check 175 days ago, but still no documents. That’s not legal either. So again, I’m suing.
What are they covering up? Whatever it is, I’ll find it. I beat these boneheads in court before and I’ll beat them again. That was back in 2021.
I wanted the long-term care facilities death data. Turns out, Whitmer’s Michigan death data was as bad as Andrew Cuomo’s New York death data. Probably worse because Michigan didn’t keep track or count of all the people in all of the facilities they were required to by law.
Cuomo, you’ll remember, stopped mixing the sick with the healthy in New York’s nursing homes after just 40 days because of the public outcry. Whitmer never stopped. The elderly kept getting commingled all through the pandemic.
The media, despicable as they are, covered for her. So what did Whitmer tell the feds back in 2020? What did she know and when did she know it? Why did Nessel refuse to investigate the state’s response? Lawsuits are expensive, but it’s worth it. These were our parents.
I will take this all the way to the Supreme Court if that’s what it takes. You have my word. And after we hear from American Coney Island, you will have my crackerjack lawyer to explain it to you.
I’m Grace Carols and I’m third generation of American Coney Island. People say Detroit’s a comeback city. I say, where you been? We’ve been here for over a hundred years.
My family’s been here on the same corner, serving our famous proprietary American Coney Island hot dog. So like always, we’re keeping things fresh, updated and new. We’d love to have you come downtown and visit us, but if you can’t, you can always go to AmericanConeyIsland.com, order a Coney kit, get it delivered fresh right to your door.
So yep, here as promised is my lawyer, heavyweight Phil Ellison of Outside Legal Counsel, PLC. What’s going on, brother? Hey, good morning. It’s going well.
Man, I’ve been trying to get you to take this case, calling around, who’s, who’s the guy? Who’s the best guy? Who’s the best FOIA guy? The best first amendment guy? You’re it. Are we, sir, going to go all the way to the Supreme Court if that’s what it takes? If that’s what it takes. If that’s what it takes, we’re, we’re prepared.
I’ve been there before and I’ll go there again, but now I get to wave Charlie’s flag when I get to go there this time. So that’s right. Jumping jacks, bro.
We’re going to doing a soap opera because this has to change. I mean, there’s a couple of things going on here. They delay you, delay you, delay you, right? They, they nickel and diamond dollar and $20 and thousands of dollars.
They, these aren’t reasonable costs. So getting the documents is one thing, but getting the law to be applied as written is really another thing, isn’t it? That’s, that’s why you’re working with me. Those are the two things.
In many cases that FOIA lawyers like myself do, the few of the, the few of us scrappers out there that do this kind of work, you know, most of the time it’s, we fight to get the records and the clients just don’t have the resources to go the distance or, and frankly, it’s not even so much resource. It’s just the, the, the time and fight and heavy weight of the government being the opponent in the courtroom just scares a lot of people. And so they, they want their records.
They want to get done and they want to move on. They’re not there to fight to change the law. They’re there to get their records.
But what happens of course is if the law doesn’t get fixed and the law doesn’t get changed, it just perpetuates itself onto the next FOIA requester and the next FOIA requester and the next FOIA requester. I bet you got a lot of calls like during COVID just from citizens, right? Trying to get information from the government that like I tried to get and they couldn’t get it. Well, at that time, if you remember back, Governor Whitmer actually issued an executive order that waived or otherwise delayed most people from getting access to FOIA because they said, well, all the employees are out of the office.
We can’t get access. We can’t give access to these records. And I actually sued on that.
I challenged the governor all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court previously. And I could not get a court to bite on that at the time. I’m not sure we get the same result today with that.
But, but FOIA is unfortunately not treated with the level of respect by our courts and certainly not by our government the way it should be when it’s an extremely, extremely important law for transparency purposes. Yeah. I want to know what happened to grandma.
You know, you’re not getting away with it. So explain to me what the law does say, Phil, in terms of when, when. Yeah.
So the difficulty in this is that, and this is going to be me on my, on my FOIA pro FOIA soapbox for a moment. Nobody’s reading the damn statute. And that’s the problem that exists is that if you actually go through, and of course as lawyers, we, you know, we, we, we analyze every word and we, and we, we go, we look in dictionaries and we try to figure out what exactly these words meant when the legislature enacted them.
What’s important here is FOIA says when a requester makes a request for records, basically one of two things has to happen. You either have to grant the request or you issue a written notice denying the request. What these government agencies are doing is, is they’re thinking and they’re rewording the statute to say, I can grant the request and I’ll just get to the records later whenever I want.
That’s not what the law says. And when you’re a person, a requester that has suffered that same very fate of that very policy, that’s applied, not just the attorney general’s office, but many state agencies and many local governments as well. And I want to fix that.
And then Charlie, you partnered with me to try to fix that. And I, and I’m, and we’re going to do our damnedest to try to make that change. I smell a Pulitzer prize.
Well, it’s either this or knocking on Somali daycare doors, bro. So I, you know, you know, the problem is, is that I get that this is not the most, you know, the republics don’t fall and, you know, rise and fall on a single FOIA request. But they rise and fall on principles, right? And the whole point of the principle of FOIA and laws like it, like the Open Meetings Act and access to records and common law access to records.
We have a lot of laws and a lot of things that are supposed to provide access, supposed to provide, you know, fair and easy and inexpensive access to government records. Because of course, government records is what allows us to decide whether what our governments are doing is good or bad, frankly. And when government officials use and mutilate the law to, you know, delay, deny, and you’ve hit a couple of them.
You just said this morning, we’re talking right now about grant and delay, right? I mean, that’s really what this case is about. We’re not even fighting the fact that you probably shouldn’t have had to pay $3,000 for those records. We’re not even fighting that piece of it right now.
But that’s another barrier that’s put up to a lot of other folks that, you know, they can’t, most people can’t write a check for $3,000 for records like that. But, and of course, what happens is that acts as yet another barrier that way. But I could talk to you all day and all of tomorrow about all the gripes I have about the way government officials and governments operate with FOIA and using it to hide records when it’s supposed to be a pro-transparency law.
Indeed, Michigan being the only one or one of two where the executive, the governor is indemnified, is not required to follow the FOIA law. Is that correct? The governor and the legislature? Michigan and Massachusetts are the only one and Massachusetts is working to change that right now. So we will be the only one in the country, I think here pretty soon.
And it’s sad because as someone who’s made a career, as a career, and I know you, you in the media, you guys use FOIA a lot. Me in my profession, suing to try to get access to records for people, Michigan is embarrassingly always either last or at the very bottom of the list of government transparency. And it’s horrifying.
Wait a minute, wait a minute. If we were to win, you’re out of a job. Hey, well, let’s be clear.
You better not tank this, man. Just soak me for some money. I’ll tell you what.
I always joke when I first started, I’m in over a decade and a half of practice now. And when I first started, what lawyer I know was an extended family member said, you’re going to focus on government corruption. Are you sure there’s enough work out there? And I can assure you, it’s like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon is what it feels like.
So don’t worry about, don’t worry about me. I won’t be going hungry anytime soon. So, okay, let me just, oh, I just wanted to get into the specifics real quickly.
But before I do that, do you have like a social media team over there? I have a combination of people that work, help me on stuff, but mostly it’s me. It’s mostly just me. I work all the time.
So you’re putting the press release together, these slides, the Twitter posts, the hyperlink, all of that. That’s all me. It was all me.
Well, if I do put you out of business, you can work over here as my intern. I like when you kids know this new technology. Charlie, let me tell you, honest to God, you say that, except I got to do this because if I’m responsible for building something, I can’t nail a nail straight.
So I’m going to be like in serious trouble if I can’t be a lawyer and do this kind of work that I’m doing. Okay, so I’ll let you go just after this, but it’s, this is like, I had to call other lawyers I know to like see what you were doing. Cause you know, I mean, we have, I got to check up on you, check up on the work, make sure it’s right.
This seems interesting to me because there’s three counts that you’ve filed. And where can they find this? By the way, give your website where they can, the public can find it. We’ll have it posted on our website at olcplc.com. And also later here, very shortly, we’re also going to have michiganfoya.com up and running as well.
So people can find a little bit more about this stuff as well. Because ladies and gentlemen, it’s all about finding out what happened to our parents and loved ones and why they weren’t counted and what the discussion was. So even if they give me my records back, this cannot be, this case cannot be closed or dismissed because count one, you’re saying, you’re the King’s response, right? You’re saying there’s three things that we want here.
One is you can’t take forever. That’s count one, right? Well, the count one is give me my records, says Charlie Lodoff. Okay.
Give me my records. Okay. So if we only did count one and they gave me my records, this goes away.
That goes away. And that’s a typical FOIA case. Okay.
And we are going to get the records, aren’t we, brother? Because I paid $3,147.90. Absolutely. And in fact, you’ll probably get the records before we even hear from the attorney general’s office formally back in the court, because what happens a lot of times, the lawsuit goes in and all of a sudden they get real excited. And it’s not just this, the attorney general, it’s all the agencies.
They sue, they get motivated because they want to make the case, what’s called moot, make it go away. And they never have to answer for their wrongdoing. But we took a different approach, which is counts two and counts three, which is what you’re just about to jump on right there.
Go ahead. Tell us what those are in regular terms and briefly, please. Yeah.
So the counts two and count three is we are challenging not just the denial of records, but actually the policy and practices of state agencies. And in this case, the attorney general’s office to do what’s called a King response. And King response is just a name given to the court case that it comes from called King versus Michigan State Police, because they’re doing the same thing even today.
It says that if you grant a request and say, but we’ll let you know later what exemptions are applied and when we’ll give you the records, that violates FOIA. Shortly after that, the attorney general’s office under Bill Schutte issued an attorney general’s opinion that says, hey, we can just grant these requests and the records can be produced at quote, a reasonable time in the future. And of course, reasonable time in the future is in the eye of the beholder.
Apparently right now from your court case, apparently six months is a reasonable time in their view to hand over some papers, which any other world, if I was a lawyer and I had a hearing date due or I had a brief due, no judge has given me six months to respond. So I think they’re well beyond any reasonable time at this point. But the whole point of this is to define that this grant and delay, instead of denying that this actually violates the Michigan FOIA statute, the spirit and the language of the statute itself.
So in the end, this is our gift to an open society. Hopefully though, if we’re successful in this, we will establish a precedent that says, when you respond to a FOIA request public body, you either issue a written denial or you hand over the documents. You can’t say we will decide later if we’re gonna grant you it.
You can’t do that King response anymore. That that King response is contrary to the law in Michigan. All right, brother.
Look, they have what, 21 days since they’ve been notified to answer? Yep, they have 21 days and I have not heard anything back from their office. I sent it over to the attorney general’s corp, their chief counsel for the department and I haven’t heard any, I haven’t heard a peep back. I was actually waiting for you to call me this morning and say, hey, a pile of paper showed up at my front doorstep today.
And it still might, but even if it does, even if Charlie, you get all the papers that you’ve paid for and you’ve been promised over and over again, that doesn’t end this case. We are going to attack this policy, this practice of what’s been going on to you and to hundreds, if not thousands of others that have been in that same boat. What if we find out they’ve been withholding stuff? I know I am in possession of some documents, pretty incriminating.
It’s one of the reasons I filed for this. I didn’t get them direct, you know what I mean? I got them indirectly. What if those aren’t in there? You know this happens all the time.
I mean, this happened with Tracy Kornack, the former treasurer of the state democratic party. They withheld documents that were supposed to be in there and I only find out about those after the facts, some extrajudicial stuff. And then I have to write back to the attorney general saying, why didn’t I get those? And then they forwarded those.
So what about that part of it? So that’s an area that the Michigan law hasn’t dealt with very well. We try to deal with those on a court basis where we go in and there’s some different tools we can use in courts. Michigan, when it enacted its FOIA statute in 1976 was the very first in the country.
We were the leading state in the mid seventies for transparency. But as more states went on and some of these tricks and gaps and tricks of the trade that government officials use to hide records, many other states updated their FOIA or sometimes they’re called sunshine laws or open records laws. They have different names for them, but it’s the same thing.
They’ve updated that to prevent these government officials from abusing transparency gaps. Michigan has not followed in that same tradition. They’ve really haven’t changed the law that much since 1976.
So hopefully maybe one of the other things that could come out of this, working with you and working with others to draw attention to this is the legislature can fix this in five minutes, but they don’t, they don’t. And largely because is that there’s just for a lot of government officials, this is not on the top of their Christmas list. Opening up records and transparency is not their top priority.
I wish it was, I think it should be, but it’s not. Here we go. Here we go, Phil.
It’s gonna be hand to God all the way to the Supreme court, right? All the way to the Supreme court. Okay. Take care of yourself.
Happy new year. And I’ll talk to you in 2026. Sounds great.
Thanks for that. That’s my killer lawyer right there. Let’s hear from XG service group.
We’ll be right back. Well, you know, when it rains, the power goes out. And when the power goes out, the internet goes out.
When the internet goes out, I call my friend, Matt and Bernie at XG service group. Look at Bernie here on his hands and knees, giving it everything he’s got. Look at that man crack.
So busy. He forgot to wear a belt. There’s Matt right there.
Getting the board together. That’s 734-245-4100. If you need Matt and Bernie to come take care of your voice over internet, your security cameras, off-campus access control, Wi-Fi and cameras for homes and business.
They’ll design it for you. You got restaurants. They do drive-through systems, railroad cameras for public safety, total wireless camera systems for your home and business.
Yeah, that’s right. Call XG services at 734-245-4100. We really got to do a new commercial for Bernie there, man.
He’s lost half that ass. I know. You know what I mean? He’s all fit as a fiddle.
But it still makes people laugh. Hey, he was talking about that platelet injection for like knees and stuff. Does that work? Yeah, and I would put myself on camera, but I’m frozen.
So you can look at a still of me. But yes, isn’t that a great still? Fix that in post? No, we won’t. But yeah, you know, my dad actually had that done for his knee.
It worked wonders. Did it? Yeah, yeah. The stem cell platelets.
I’m going to do it because it was like on Christmas, I went out to get some wood. Yeah. My knee just went out.
Oh boy. Just walking. I mean, it was bad age.
I’m going to try. Yeah. Yeah, man.
Sorry. Well, you know. Ding dong.
The ding dong is gone. Mike Duggan is done tomorrow at noon. I’m going to miss.
But I haven’t pushed around anymore. He had a press conference. Bullshitting again.
You know, I wouldn’t invite it. What a shock. What a twerp.
What a runt. Yeah, you know what I mean? And nice having it when no one’s paying attention to the news. Oh, and I mean.
Over the course of this, this this demolition shit is getting hot. I mean, inside City Hall, they’re worried about grand juries. They might just start testing them all, which when the OIG turns out the report, I will turn on the heat because they’re going to have to.
30,000 domiciles, they tore down. You know what that is the equivalent of? Flint. Oh, geez.
So speaking of Flint and the mass poisoning, then you took possibly radioactive medical waste. You took sludge from the Detroit River. You have asbestos.
They threw the highways in there. Every time they put a shovel in the ground, it came up dirt. Now the Guardian’s covering it good.
It’s like the Guardian. Yeah, me too. But I didn’t get invited.
I would have been a great press conference. Mike, we would have got ratings. Terrific ratings, Mike.
But we didn’t. So we had to do our own, right? Pretty good work. I was going to take the week off, man.
Enjoyer.com. What’s up, DeLorean? What you’re working on? Sri Tanahar is feuding with Rashida Tlaib. We got ding-dongs everywhere. Oh, my God.
They call him up to settle a score. Thanks for the clicks, motherfuckers. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. Jeez. You’re not going to find that in the news.
You’re not going to find any of this shit in the newspapers. Because Enjoyer.com, fastest growing news network in Michigan. So you can find this there.
You’re going to have video, right, Jay? Yeah, we’re doing it tonight, not today. But you don’t have those two? No. OK, that’s good.
I couldn’t get them in the same room. Yeah. In Grosse Pointe? You could have met in Grosse Pointe, but Sri doesn’t know where it’s at.
Nice leadership. Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, and don’t forget, Ken, Monday.
We got to go to Allegan County. Because Tracy Kornack, the former treasurer of the state Democratic Party, is probably going to get her ass handed to her by a judge in this whole thing. This obstruction.
I won’t go into it, but it’s bad. It’s. OK, let’s see the dugout one.
And actually, nursing home Joe just called me. I wonder what he’s got. OK, this is what the press conference would look like if real Mike Duggan, fake Mike Duggan is saying what real Mike Duggan is thinking.
Mayor Mike Duggan doesn’t invite me to his press conferences anymore. But if he did and he told the truth, it would probably sound something like this. Mr. Mayor, the city is now a toxic landfill because your contractors fill the demolition holes with contaminated soil.
Do you remember when you said this? And it was the trucking expense to bring dirt in from 30 or 40 miles away that has driven up the cost. I lied. What can I tell you? I’m a machine boss.
That’s what we do. Well, this thing’s getting really big. There’s talk about another grand jury.
Well, that’s Mary’s problem now. I mean, she was the one fucking the guy. Speaking of fucking, sir, I caught you funneling public money into your mistress’s nonprofit.
And then you had your people delete the evidence. Yeah, but they found those deleted emails in the trash file. So they weren’t really deleted, were they? Technically.
Look, Charlie, in my brand of politics, the law is optional. Under your leadership, sir, the police made 10% of the homicides disappear over the course of a decade simply by reclassifying. And now we found out that half those murders never even get charged.
I look at murder victims like emails. You just delete them. It’s genius if you think about it.
And in Detroit, if a white guy says it, the media snaps it up like a sardine. One more thing, sir. You said this after two babies died when being turned away from a shelter just earlier this year.
Charlie Wood Duff had posted video outside of a women’s and children’s shelter said it was not authorized for occupation. It’s a bunch of nonsense. It’s a bunch of nonsense.
Again, I was lying. You can’t get elected governor when you’ve got frozen babies laying around. So you have a press conference and you lie your ass off.
It’s really simple, actually. Well, the place still hasn’t passed an inspection. How do you expect to be governor when you can’t even fix a homeless shelter? I’ll say one thing about you, Charlie.
I’ve always hated your fucking guts. I mean, if we’re telling the truth. All right, dude.
The court came out of the champagne. But trust me, it’s fresh. OK, you’ll be.
Where’s your hat? Oh, I’ll put it on. But my camera’s not working. OK, then never mind.
I can get a camera on me. Don’t worry. Let me work on it.
I got one of these popular things that made in China, man. I’m not sure. All right, is this going to work? Oh, it worked.
See you next Tuesday. Happy New Year.
