If Any FBI Agents Still Have A Job ...

... then they should be expecting a call any day now. Atlanta's inspector general may have quit her job, but the cases are still out there.

Shannon Manigault’s resignation speech

When someone calls an outdoor press conference in sub-30-degree weather on three-hours notice, it’s an easy guess that terrible things are afoot because if it’s to announce anything less than momentous news, you only get to do that once.

As it happens, the resignation of Atlanta’s inspector general is big news.

I’ve seen the fracas around Shannon Manigault for the last six months wondering what must be happening under the hood at city hall for her to draw heat like this.

Manigault subpoenaed financial records for some contractors and city staff, and instructed the banks, Zelle, CashApp and other financial institutions not to inform the target of those subpoenas that their records had been viewed. She also pulled city-owned cell phones looking for text messages. Which, frankly, is how an investigation works if you’re going to be serious about it.

Some of what she’s been looking at is relatively petty. The Senior Ball is classic retail politics for high-propensity voters (read: old people) that has been a city function for decades. Dickens booked hotel rooms for his family at the ball. He repaid the city for it, and not a vote was lost.

But other stuff bears closer examination. Tarlesha Smith, the city’s former Human Resources Commissioner, was fired after Manigault credibly accused Smith of using her position to benefit her daughter. Manigault uncovered some bribery in the permitting section of city zoning. More recently, she’s been pulling records related to people who work in the city’s workforce development office. Those targets were identified in the federal lawsuit filed against Manigault by Bernie Tokarz earlier this month.

Tokarz is Councilman Michael Julian Bond’s campaign manager. He’s also been cited by the former IG for accepting city payments as a security consultant, on votes where Bond never disclosed his relationships. Manigault also dinged Councilwoman Andrea Boone for reimbursing Bond’s former chief of staff Vanessa Manley for expenses on a invoice that an IG report says is fraudulent. (Hat tip to the Atlanta Community Press Collective, who as usual is doing the work that should be done by better-paid journalists.)

In response, Manigault is being sued both in her capacity as the IG, and personally, with accusations that she exceeded the law in her investigations of city staff and contractors. The mayor’s office has made increasingly strident public communications questioning her competence and credibility. Boone tore into her when she spoke at a city council hearing. A Kasim Reed-style anonymous website pushed out by an anonymous text message blast started smearing her.

The legislation passed this week essentially eliminates the IG’s role in investigating city corruption - which was the whole point of creating it in the first place, after the FBI had to arrest the city’s chief legal officer a few years go among others for stealing government money. The city council ostensibly believes that, however terrible they look in this moment, it must be worth burning this much political capital to fight her.

[Note: An amendment to the legislation made by Councilman Matt Westmoreland restored some language asserting that the IG has a duty and responsibility to report crimes to the authorities. But the legislation still establishes that investigations are administrative in nature.]

I’ve spoken to some insiders at City Hall about all of this, none of whom would speak on the record, citing the risk to their jobs. But several people said Manigault has told them that she is preparing a package of evidence to present to the FBI, targeting city staff and-or elected officials. None of the people who have told me they know who that package will accuse or what those accusations might be.

Here’s the heart of Manigault’s resignation speech.

The legislation that everyone's been talking about —it's going to be voted on today— is going to destroy the office. I'm not going to mince words about that. It is going to destroy the office. I know it, you know it, and they know it. If the discussions surrounding the office had stayed at the level of policy, and certainly, if that discussion had involved a real review of how offices of Inspector General work, that would have been okay.

But things have taken a turn. Two weeks ago, the abuse that I've been routinely subjected to was then extended to my family, and that is not okay.

Now a multi-pronged attack on an organization and its leader is not new around here. For those who've been paying attention, it should have a oddly, sadly familiar ring to it. For our office, that attack has most recently involved subpoenas and lawsuits. As [Manigault’s attorney] James Radford said, those claims will be defended. I just want to be clear, that's not why I'm here today. This isn't about the merits of any lawsuit, and I use merits there very loosely. There as James noted, the lawsuit claims will be defended and, truly, thank goodness for board-approved James Bradford.

The whole reason the City of Atlanta Office of Inspector General —like any Office of Inspector General— needs an attorney of its own is to protect against potential conflicts of interest. Glaring, obvious, don't-need-to-be-a-lawyer-to-recognize-it conflicts of interest.

You know, like the ones where the attorney who's supposed to protect the office ends up being the same attorney who attacks the office. You know, like, where the same lawyer who's supposed to represent the office is the person who makes a video misrepresenting the office and our work.

Now, some of you heard and some of you reported on the fact that I took some days off. No, it was not because I was put on any leave. It's because I needed to some take some time <pauses> I needed to take some time to step away and reflect and come to grips with everything that these people have been doing to me.

And that's how I've come to the incredibly difficult decision to resign as Inspector General of the City of Atlanta. I hate that it's come to this for the members of the public, including so many those who are behind me and those who are out there who supported this office. For all the employees we've tried to help, please know that I have done everything in my power to fight for the office so that we could continue to serve you.

I wish that there was more that I could do, but ultimately, I can't make the leadership of this city do right by the public. All I can do is try to make sure that the serious allegations that you all have entrusted to the OIG did not die with me or with the imminent death by legislation of our office.

OIG has opened active investigations —serious investigations— that after today, because of the proposed legislation, we may not be able to pursue. Which means that ultimately, the fate of the office now rests in your hands, the hands of the public. I've always fought for this office and for the good that it brings this city, and I'm going to continue to do so, but now just as a member of the public.

I’ve asked someone at the IG’s office to explain what’s going on, to no avail.

But immediately after Manigault’s resignation, Atlanta city officials —including at least one uniformed police officer from APD— entered the IG’s offices and began confiscating documents and computer files, witnesses said.

The city also fired James Radford as the Office of Inspector General’s attorney. Or, they tried to.

After the city attorney began publicly attacking the conduct of the Inspector General’s office, a determination that a conflict of interest had emerged between the city attorney and the office, permitting the appointment of outside counsel.

A curt letter from Atlanta city attorney Patrice Perkins-Hooker to Radford said that not only did the legislation passed by the city on Tuesday allow the Atlanta government to fire him, but that he wouldn’t be paid for his services.

Radford’s reply, in essence, was “lol, no.”

“[T]he procedure to terminate representation of an attorney appointed by the Governing Board under the old version [of the statutes] would be for the Governing Board to so request,” Radford wrote. “[M]y understanding is that the Governing Board does not currently have enough members to conduct any official business.”

It seems that a majority of the board governing the Inspector General’s office resigned en masse with Manigault. And the board cannot conduct its business without a quorum, he said.

“A majority of the members of the Governing Board shall constitute a quorum,” Radford wrote, citing the statute. “The affirmative vote of a majority of the members shall be required for the transaction of business, except as otherwise provided by this Article. In no event shall a decision of the Board be voted upon by fewer than 4 members.”

This sort of legal footsie only lasts so long. The question is whether Manigault can move fast enough for a referral to the U.S. Attorney’s Office … and whether anyone will be home when she comes knocking on the door.

Richard S. Moultrie, Jr. is the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. Ryan Buchanan, the former U.S. attorney here, resigned on Jan. 19. Trump has not named a replacement. The Justice Department is in a state of turmoil after the Trump Administration’s instruction to drop public corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

I would find a similar skin-saving heel turn by Andre Dickens into a Trump ally as not just wildly improbable but a hilarious thought exercise. Nonetheless, if the city is willing to send people into the IGs office to take files —remember, the office is still supposed to be investigating misconduct in the city— then it’s clear that senior leaders believe something is coming.

If there’s some giant ticking time bomb of a corruption case coming to Atlanta’s City Hall, this is not a time to play Deep Throat with cryptic warnings. Everything is on fire. Every journalist I know worth half a damn is in a state of battlefield triage. Communicate plainly. Use small words. Use crayons if you have to.

This is the time to talk.

Bryan Sunderland, Director of Advocacy and Strategy at the Cicero Institute, advocating once again for homeless people to be rounded up and sent to camps. Purportedly, a Christian.

A couple of side notes.

Some of the legislation working through the General Assembly right now is … not bad. For example, a bill to ban red light cameras at schools is fighting a growing, lucrative surveillance menace. A tax subsidy for child care—including a $250 child tax credit—looks like it’s going to pass.

Some of it is just bad, like a bill in the State Senate considers allowing police to take a DNA swab from people arrested for misdemeanor crimes.

But there is no shortage of terrible legislation being considered right now in Georgia, and much of it appears aimed at bringing municipal governments to heel. The State Senate passed legislation that would strip cities of their sovereign immunity if they ever pass “sanctuary city” local legislation —that is, a policy of noncompliance with the federal government on immigration enforcement.

A bill heard yesterday in the House also attacks “sanctuary” policies of non-enforcement, as well as local policies that lawmakers believe fail to attack homelessness —or homeless people— with sufficient vigor.

House Bill 295, sponsored by Athens-area Republican Rep. Houston Gaines, would allow a property owner to demand compensation from a municipality “for loss of property value or expenses incurred due to the local government's failure to comply with or nonenforcement” of anti-camping and public nuisance laws. It places the burden of evidence on a city to prove it is properly enforcing the law, which is nuts.

Essentially, the bill’s supporters demand that Atlanta and other cities ignore the death of Cornelius Taylor, a homeless man killed by a bulldozer in a sweep of an encampment 4,600 feet northeast of the hearing room five weeks ago, in order to appease the interests of visitors.

“You know, people are coming down here. They're coming to the city for conferences and stuff ,” said Rep. Jordan Ridley, a Republican from Cherokee County. “They're seeing the issue with the homeless everywhere. The homeless are also taking up our emergency services. They're going into Grady because it's cold or things like that. It's a cold night. They're hungry, which I get. They need to go somewhere, they want to eat, they don't need to freeze to death. But if the city of Atlanta would do their job as a city and actually do something about this, then they wouldn't be going and taking up all these services.”

I note in passing that Cherokee County’s 2025 budget allocates not one dime for emergency housing. It did, when the federal government was offering money as a pass-through. That ended and with it ended the county’s marginal commitment. The county government does not maintain a shelter for homeless individuals and does not appear to field any of the other services one would expect to accompany the sweep of an encampment.

Georgia remains under the force of a consent decree mandating the provision of housing and mental health services for seriously ill people on Atlanta’s streets. The city is not effectively honoring that agreement right now, said Elizabeth Appley, Public Policy Director of the Georgia Supportive Housing Association, in comments to the committee yesterday.

If the state passes this legislation, it would fly in the face of that judicial order and agreement with the federal government. The problem is that those agreements are conditioned on a federal government that isn’t actively malevolent toward the interests of cities. The question is whether the Trump Administration thinks it can screw Atlanta harder by forcing compliance with the order or dropping the order entirely to allow the state to force Atlanta to round homeless people up and put them into camps.

The House public safety committee is gambling on the latter. The encampment enforcement bill passed out of committee on an 8-5 vote.

Note for later: something peculiar and local related to homelessness has got to be going on in Athens in a very specific, pain-pinching way for Gaines to even consider sponsoring this bill. That bears later examination.

---

DeKalb Police Chief Mirtha Ramos announced her resignation this morning. Which is to say, new DeKalb CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson walked to the mound and took the ball back.

Ramos is on “administrative leave,” according to the county.

Her departure is unsurprising and should not necessarily be taken as a sign of personal disfavor or misconduct. A new chief executive should be expected to appoint new department heads as a matter of routine. Ramos was the longest-serving DeKalb police chief in 20 years.

That said, homicide numbers have been rising on her watch, even as they fell in other parts of DeKalb County. Her recruiting efforts have been a notable failure even in an era of chronic and startling police staffing shortages. The county is rolling out a plan to spend an additional $10.4 million to bolster recruiting; DeKalb is short more than 300 officers, a third of its authorized force. Cochran-Johnson may want someone else directing that spending on general principles.

---

And finally. An anonymous —now former— federal employee sent me this letter, a plea for attention in a time when everything is on fire. It’s worth reading.

This is why I care about public health. I’m hoping you will too.

Raised as a mountain girl in a conservative home and in the Christian faith, I personally have experienced rural poverty in America. Partially because my parents were recovering hippies, and mainly due to a simple lack of resources, the early part of my childhood lacked running water and electricity. We had an outhouse with a beautiful view of the canyon below and my mother carried water in buckets from a nearby stream.

At the age of fourteen, my aunt, a medical missionary in rural Haiti, invited me to visit. My first trip out of the country, my days were spent volunteering in a small hospital. It was here that I first heard the screams of a family who had lost their child to malnutrition. These screams left an indelible mark on my soul and changed the trajectory of my life. Thirty years later I can still hear them — even louder now that I know the consuming love of being a mother who has held her own babies.

I am just one among many in the global public health workforce that is driven by the core belief that protecting the world’s most vulnerable is our patriotic duty while creating a healthier, safer and more economically stable America. I have been working on United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded projects globally since 2010. Despite consuming less than 1% of the national budget, USAID leads the world to ensure that lifesaving support and humanitarian assistance reaches populations in over 100 countries.

I received my ‘Stop Work Order’ on Monday, January 27th like hundreds of others due to President Trump’s Executive Order. Countless lives are now at stake.

To bring readers up to speed:

While the Administration told the public there would be a ‘pause’, our buildings have been emptied, signs have been taken down, and the administration has reduced from the workforce from 10,000 to 290. Meanwhile, lifesaving food and medicine that US taxpayers have purchased is sitting in warehouses only to expire or rot.

USAID’s website was deleted overnight. Valuable health resources have been scrubbed en masse. This is government censorship and a waste of valuable tax-payer dollars. Employees are no longer allowed to use terms such as ‘vulnerable’, and ‘marginalized’. Before my departure, I deleted language on gender equality as a human right, climate, and gender-based violence in hopes that the workstream would not be entirely suppressed.

Consider the panic you would feel if you brought your child to the clinic, only to be refused lifesaving medication that sits on the pharmacy shelf in front of you. This is the situation. Through PEPFAR —started by George W. Bush— the United States is the global leader working to eradicate HIV. We have prevented millions of infections and saved millions of lives. While the administration issued a waiver for HIV treatment, the mandate is unclear, and the workforce has been demolished. Lives are now at risk.

People are already dying of preventable illnesses and starvation, including infants and children. Without HIV testing, pregnant women are unknowingly transmitting the virus to their babies. Activities for orphans and vulnerable children, and other deadly infectious diseases were also ceased.

Stopping treatment of infectious disease increases the likelihood of drug resistance which will then be transmitted to more individuals. As we know, deadly viruses including COVID-19, malaria, Ebola, TB, and others do not recognize borders. Without intervention, they will inevitably reach the United States.

To comply with Executive Orders, for the first time in its 60-year history the Centers for Disease Control did not publish the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. With domestic malaria, Bird Flu, Tuberculosis, Dengue, Measles, Polio and newly elevated risk of lethal drug-resistant HIV and Tuberculosis in circulation, this administration is restricting the ability of clinicians to care for their patients and putting American lives at risk while disabling the mechanisms that allow us to identify and prevent those risks.

As public health workers, we are a dedicated workforce compelled to do good work despite incredible challenges. I have been kidnapped, strip searched, tied up and held at gunpoint. I have trembled uncontrollably as young boys—gripping machine guns—searched my vehicle, their faces lit only by the glow of burning oil barrels in the dead of night. Some of my colleagues have experienced much worse. We spend time away from our families, and when we are home, part of our mind is always at work because that is also where our hearts are.

We now find ourselves at the precipice of multiple public health disasters, with a significantly diminished workforce and decimated public health infrastructure. Please take it from someone who has experienced poverty in this country and who also understands the grave consequences for Americans if we abandon our duty in the global sphere. In this context, less than 1% of the national budget is not a burden—it is a lifeline.

Let us raise the consciousness of the nation so we all understand that dismantling public health infrastructure is placing countless lives globally and domestically at risk. It is a soulless act. I implore you to take immediate action through sharing this essay and reaching out to your representatives. This link provides a script to use when you call and/or email. To save lives, we urgently need the support of our Republican and Democrat leaders.

Please join us to prevent the chorus of mothers and families wailing in grief, which will inevitably happen if we do not act, including within our own country. When we take action to protect the most vulnerable populations around the world, we are in fact putting America first.

---