Some of you may recall that I ran for Oakland County Commissioner in 2016 here in Mitt Romney’s old stomping grounds of Birmingham/Bloomfield Hills/Bloomfield Township, Michigan. I got crushed (as I expected) 64 to 36%, but I’m proud that I gave it a shot, and I appreciate the support from the dKos community.
I took a pass on running against Taub a second time in favor of becoming the new Chair of the Birmingham/Bloomfield Democratic Club, where I felt I could make a bigger difference. Instead, a woman named Cherie Happy ran...and while she didn’t quite get over the top, she managed to improve on my performance, losing 57% -43%.
In 2018, as you know, Michigan had a massive wave of women Democratic candidates take charge, from our new Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of State all the way down to State Representative...and Oakland County was Ground Zero for the Blue/Pink Wave. We flipped two Congressional seats (Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens), two State Senate seats (Mallory McMorrow and Rosemary Bayer) and several State House seats...including my own new representative, Mari Manoogian. Happy wasn’t part of the wave but at least she made Taub sweat a bit.
The Republican woman we both ran against, Shelley Goodman Taub, is a local institution—she’s been either a State Representative or a County Commissioner without a break for close to 30 years, I believe, and in all that time she’s never (to my knowledge) had any sort of controversy or scandal attached to her. That, combined with the historic Republican lean of the district, means that she never had anything even close to a serious threat to re-election until last year.
Well, guess what?
Oakland Co. Cover-up? Text that reads 'DELETE, DELETE, DELETE' over L. Brooks Patterson's seat
She’s an elected leader caught telling her own colleagues to delete emails after receiving public records requests from 7 Action News.
In an on-camera interview with reporter Simon Shaykhet, Oakland County Commissioner Shelley Taub was asked if she in fact sent the text messages to eight other commissioners.
“Yes I did. It was to hide anything personal or nasty,” replied Taub.
She went on to say that the messages went out as a preventative measure to keep anything negative from making headlines.
The revelation came after allegations about back room deals being struck to fill the seat of Oakland County Executive after the passing of L. Brooks Patterson several days ago.
But wait, there’s more!
Taub’s goal evidently was to cover up messages by other commissioners on the 21-member county board as they considered backroom deals to choose a successor to Patterson. Taub’s text also said awkwardly, “You are about to receive FOA’s” — her way of saying that media and others were likely to submit requests to see the emails under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, commonly abbreviated as FOIAs.
Deleting emails and otherwise destroying records of government activity so as to avoid FOIA requests is a violation of various state laws, according to legal experts.
A liberal advocacy group — Progress Michigan — called for Taub’s resignation, saying Taub had been “trying to hide public documents from the people of Oakland County, who deserve real accountability from their elected officials.”
Oakland County Treasurer Andy Meisner — a Democrat who months before Patterson’s death announced his intention to run for the office in 2020, and who strongly objected last week to the backroom rush to appoint his chief rival David Woodward, a Royal Oak Democrat — said he, too, felt Taub should resign.
I should note as an aside that Shelley Taub is also an old family friend...her husband and my father attended medical school together. I never liked her politics, of course, and I was appalled that she openly endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 (as a supposedly moderate Republican in an extremely safe seat, she could have easily disavowed him and still crushed me by double digits)...but I never thought she’d do something this stupid, especially with all the decades of experience she has.
Welp. There you have it.
I wonder if I should dust off my old lawn signs...