Criminal charges expected Friday in Flint water crisis investigation

“Some may wish and some may worry that the story of Flint will be slowly absorbed by world events, the 24-hour news cycle and the short attention span of tweets and posts”, he said. “Not on our watch”.

More criminal charges connected to the Flint water crisis are expected to be announced Friday. Schuette was scheduled to hold a news conference on Friday about the charges.

The Health and Human Services employees-Nancy Peeler, Robert Scott and Corrine Miller-all face charges of misconduct in office, conspiring to commit misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty, according to Schuette. “But I will make it right, because in MI the system is not rigged”. Equally. No matter who you are. “When our investigation is completed and our prosecutions are successful, then accountability and justice will be delivered to the families of Flint”.

Brian Morley, a Lansing attorney representing Smith, the fired head of the DEQ’s drinking water section, said the charges came as a surprise when he received a phone call from investigators Friday morning.

Schuette planned to discuss the charges later Friday at a news conference in Flint, a poor, majority-black city of 100,000 that for 18 months used the Flint River for tap water as a way to save money while a new pipeline was under construction.

The Environmental Quality and Health and Human Services departments said two workers from each department are off the job for now.

At the Department of Environmental Quality, Smith, chief of the Drinking Water Municipal Division, “intentionally misled and took steps to conceal” that the water was unsafe, Seipenko said. They allegedly hid or disregarded test results that showed high lead levels in Flint residents’ blood. He has accepted a plea deal after being accused of altering and falsifying reports about the lead problem.

More than 8,000 children are believed to have consumed lead-tainted water in the hardscrabble northern city, which has become a focus of the 2016 White House race.

“I sweat the details of policy ― whether we’re talking about the exact level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, the number of mental health facilities in Iowa, or the cost of your prescription drugs”, Clinton said. The 18 charges total include felonies in all six cases, all potentially carrying jail times and fines. That report allegedly showed no significant rise in the blood levels of Flint’s children during the summer of 2014. MDEQ still employs defendants Patrick Cook and Adam Rosenthal.

The Environmental Quality employees, meanwhile, allegedly misapplied federal water quality standards, and some of them misled the Environmental Protection Agency about the crisis. He also filed civil charges in June against two engineering firms that allegedly “botched” their work on the water supply system, contributing to the crisis.