Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wants the committee’s Republican chairman to subpoena Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder for all documents related to the Flint water crisis, in which residents of the Michigan city could not drink their water for several years because of contamination.
The Maryland Democrat sent a letter Tuesday to committee Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina requesting that the subpoena be issued to the Republican governor to comply with the panel’s “bipartisan request” for documents tied to the Flint water crisis, including all documents related to when Snyder became aware of concerns over Legionnaires’ disease being spread through the contaminated water.
“Governor Snyder has been obstructing our investigation for months, and it is now clear that the only way he will turn over the documents we asked for is if he is compelled to do so,” Cummings wrote. “We must obtain the documents that Governor Snyder has been withholding from Congress since we first requested them on a bipartisan basis back in February 2016,” Cummings wrote.
Flint became national news after its drinking water supply became severely contaminated when a city manager appointed by Snyder diverted the town’s water supply from Lake Michigan to the untreated waters of the Flint River. The decision was part of a measure to cut costs.
The water from the Flint River corroded the drinking water distribution pipes that caused lead to leach into the town’s water supply. The concerns over a 2015 Legionnaires’ disease outbreak arose later after the lead contamination scandal broke. The Flint crisis is one of the reasons why President Trump often cites the goal of “crystal clean water” as part of his environmental agenda.
“On October 6, 2017, Harvey Hollins III, the director of Urban Initiatives for the state of Michigan, gave sworn testimony that he personally informed Governor Snyder about the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in December 2015,” according to a statement from Cummings’ office. “Mr. Hollins’ testimony appears to directly contradict the testimony Governor Snyder gave to the Oversight Committee that, ‘in terms of Legionnaire’s, I didn’t learn of that until 2016. And as soon as I became aware of it, we held a press conference the next day.'”
“We turned over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and cooperated fully with the requests of the full Oversight Committee, which wrapped up its work on this matter last term,” said Anna Heaton, spokeswoman for Gov. Snyder.
Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., who represents Flint’s district, responded to Cummings’ request, saying, “restoring trust for Flint families starts with getting the whole truth.”
Kildee said until Flint families “get the whole truth from the governor, they are right to be skeptical of state government officials who created this crisis.”
