a follow up

some context regarding the Dec. 2017 extortion meeting in DWP

This week a revelatory NBC investigation reported that City Attorney Mike Feuer was scheduled for a 2017 meeting in which an extortion scheme to keep the DWP scandal from leaking was discussed. This shed light on who the “senior officials” who green lit the payment actually were, as described by one former high-ranking Feuer official. Another, via an ethics complaint, directly named Feuer as knowing about the scheme.

Up until the report dropped, there was the possibility that the “senior officials” referenced in the plea agreement could not have been Feuer. But according to the Public Records Act request, Clark wasn’t scheduled for the meeting, and Feuer was. So was Feuer’s former chief of staff, Leela Kapur.

Here’s the document showing who was at the meeting:

Now, we could ask: what if it was a different meeting? But the time of the meeting—4:45 p.m.—corresponds with the time outlined in the plea agreement with Thomas Peters, the former Feuer official who pleaded guilty to aiding the scheme. The plea agreement says the extortion meeting was in the “late afternoon.”

In short, an agreement wasn’t reached that day with the individual who demanded the payment, and Peters relayed that to “senior officials,” according to federal court documents. That night after the meeting, Peters texted Paul Paradis, the city’s private attorney in the matter, telling him (emphasis mine), “Mike is not firing anyone at this point. But he is far from happy about the prospect of a sideshow,” according to Paradis’ complaint.

Translation: Take care of this. Don’t fuck it up.

A few days later, the $800,000 payment was made.