On the early morning of March 20, 2023, a call came in from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s communications director while I was driving to Clinton Township to moderate a public policy discussion at a Macomb County Chamber of Commerce breakfast event.
“Change the (expletive) headline,” Bobby Leddy screamed at me over the phone.
The headline Whitmer’s chief spokesman was incensed about in that day’s Detroit News read: “Whitmer appointee, donor gets $20M business grant with disputed sponsor.”
The headline was completely accurate and fair, I told Leddy, and we stood by reporter Beth LeBlanc’s detailed reporting on how Fay Beydoun — a Democratic Party insider, Whitmer campaign donor and appointee of the governor to two state boards — had secured $20 million for a new business venture in the Legislature’s $1 billion spending spree the previous June.
Leddy was adamant on that phone call that the Democratic governor’s administration played no role in Beydoun getting millions of dollars for a vague business accelerator program that didn’t even exist at the time Whitmer signed a budget negotiated by her team with a Republican-controlled Legislature.
The public has learned a lot more about this years-long caper since that heated phone call amid efforts to shield Whitmer from the fallout.
The criminal complaint accusing Beydoun of trying to enrich herself from a $20 million state grant makes one thing pretty clear: Whitmer’s administration was definitely involved in helping the Oakland County businesswoman secure the dough.
This is despite three years of denials and evasions by the governor’s office as they’ve tried mightily to pin the tail on the donkey of Republican then-House Speaker Jason Wentworth, a convenient out that never fully explained how a Whitmer appointee and campaign donor enjoyed such access to a GOP-controlled Legislature.
Beydoun’s text messages and emails, as well as handwritten notes from Whitmer’s state budget director in 2021, reveal that the governor’s staff definitely did not try to stop Beydoun from effectively securing a no-bid contract embedded in the state budget, with little to no accountability or oversight.
When Beydoun wanted meetings with the right Whitmer administration officials, she got them. She used her Whitmer-appointed seat on the Michigan Economic Development Corporation board to work over executives at the state agency until she finally got the MEDC’s current CEO, Quentin Messer Jr., to bless the project. This came as one of Messer’s top deputies, Trevor Pawl, described Beydoun’s business attraction initiative as “one of the worst concepts that I had ever, ever seen,” according to the criminal affidavit used to charge Beydoun last week.
The Messer blessing helped Beydoun secure an audience with Whitmer’s then-state budget director, Chris Harkins, in a meeting set up by an aide to the governor, records show. While Whitmer’s team could support an influential donor’s pet project, they couldn’t secure a sweetheart deal without help from the other side. It truly takes two to tango in Lansing.
Beydoun uses GOP businessman to help secure $20M grant
Beydoun’s use of Okemos businessman Shariff Hussein, a Republican, gave the Michigan Democratic Party’s second vice chair access to the other side.
Hussein had direct access to Wentworth and his staff, records show, as he effectively told the Speaker of the House what was expected of him — and then wrote big checks to Wentworth and Whitmer’s political funds during the off-the-books lobbying.
Wentworth went along with the funding request, as the Legislature was in the midst of a historic spending spree fueled by excess cash from the pandemic. He’s now cooperating with Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office in its criminal prosecution of Beydoun, who faces 16 counts related to how she spent the money on personal luxuries, patio furniture, catering dinners at her home for then-Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and her alleged attempt to doctor documents.
Hussein worked his side of the aisle, while Beydoun worked hers.
When Whitmer’s State Budget Office raised questions about the legitimacy of the shell company Beydoun set up using her home address in Farmington Hills, Hussein got a high-level Wentworth aide, Phil Browne, to intervene, records show. Browne did not return messages seeking comment.
And then, stunningly, Beydoun cut Hussein out of the deal completely and almost made off with $20 million in taxpayer cash — until LeBlanc started asking questions about the mysterious pet project.
It’s a remarkable lesson in backroom dealing, and the closest thing to a full-fledged scandal that Whitmer, a popular outgoing governor, has experienced in her eight years in office.
It also underscores just how loose the state budget process can be. The sausage-making ain’t pretty, and the public rarely gets this kind of glimpse at what goes on under the Capitol dome.
If you’re someone with clout, like Fay Beydoun, the longtime head of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn, you can get access to the halls of power.
When I first wrote on March 25, 2023, about how Beydoun and Hussein secured $20 million without a lobbyist, she sent the column to Hassan Beydoun (no relation), who previously was an attorney for Wentworth and other Republican speakers. At the time, Hassan Beydoun was the head of economic development for Duggan. He left the Legislature in the fall of 2021, just as Fay Beydoun was pitching her initiative to officials in the Whitmer administration.
Hassan Beydoun, who once worked at the Arab American Chamber of Commerce while in college, sent along a congratulatory note, of sorts.
“Doesn’t look great for the process or Governor but you came off as a boss who learned how to work the system,” Hassan Beydoun wrote. “About time that our community benefits from the same process that benefited old and rich white guys for years. Screw the haters and double down on earning your fair share. It’s our time.”
Hassan Beydoun, who is now a senior attorney for Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield, declined to comment on the missive.
Did Beydoun dupe Whitmer, Wentworth and others?
The process has been broken for a long time. Everyone in Lansing knows it.
Michigan’s lack of a public records law that applies to the Legislature and the governor’s office enables people with clout to walk into the Capitol and get theirs.
After LeBlanc first identified Beydoun’s Global Link International as the supposed not-for-profit entity receiving the grant, Whitmer’s office went to work trying to distance itself from Beydoun and the project.
Over and over, they blamed the whole thing on Wentworth, even while a scent kept emanating from the executive branch.
“This was a grant sponsored by Republican Speaker of the House Jason Wentworth, and the second time a grant of his has resulted in charges,” Whitmer spokeswoman Stacey LaRouche said Wednesday in a statement, referencing another grant involving a former Wentworth aide that resulted in criminal prosecution.
But the Democratic governor had originally proposed funding international business accelerators, albeit through a competitive grant process rather than the direct appropriation Beydoun secured in the Legislature’s nearly $1 billion pork spending splurge on June 30, 2022. Messer told his MEDC board that Beydoun had been the “champion” of that proposal baked into Whitmer’s budget. Again, these things don’t happen by mistake.
The paper trail that Nessel’s office dredged up in its two-year investigation shows that Beydoun was pitching her plan to Tricia Foster, a longtime Whitmer pal and the governor’s chief operating officer. In one email to Foster, Beydoun used the name Global Link almost nine months before she created the entity that would eventually collect $10 million of the grant money (much of which has been frozen by prosecutors).
“The MEDC has giving (sic) their nod of approval as the governor requested,” Beydoun wrote, strongly suggesting Whitmer wanted Messer to vet the project.
The affidavit used to charge Beydoun last week with a series of crimes portrays her as brazen and greedy.
In one text message to her own son at 7:59 a.m. on July 1, 2022, hours after the Legislature passed the $76 billion budget in the middle of the night while most Michiganians were sleeping, Beydoun said Whitmer would sign the budget in a few weeks and that all that was left to do was to “get the money in our bank account.”
But with $10 million in hand, Beydon started paying herself $550,000 a year and bought an infamous $4,500 coffee maker that set this whole scandal in motion.
On March 10, 2023, as Beydoun was about to receive the first $10 million payment, she made an audacious request in a 64-word email. It is the only disclosed instance in which the MEDC told its own board member no when she asked for all of the money all at once.
“I would like to ask, if possible, to receive 100% of the money up front. I have an entity that will match the $20 million if it is allocated in one sum. Your consideration is greatly appreciated,” Beydoun wrote in an email to MEDC officials 10 days before The News’ first article on the grant.
The MEDC denied the request based on language in the budget law splitting up the grant into two payments.
Beydoun’s $20M grant exposed holes in MEDC’s oversight
But Beydoun’s eventual use of the taxpayer money exposed numerous holes in the process of how a grant is lobbied for, secured and then accounted for after the money has left the state treasury.
One of the charges Nessel’s office brought against Beydoun stems from $40,800 in payments for two bogus rental properties at addresses with vacant lots.
“All you got to do is a Google search to see that these addresses don’t even exist,” Nessel said Wednesday at a press conference in Lansing. “And not even that was done.”
One of the larceny charges against Beydoun is connected to her purchase of two rugs she bought in Tunisia for $6,148.88. Beydoun sent the receipt to the MEDC, and no one there seems to have questioned it. The attorney general said she thinks she knows why — the words “two handmade rugs” were written in French.
“The MEDC never had this receipt (translated), but my investigators did,” Nessel said.
At some point in this whole affair, Whitmer’s staffers started to realize they had an out-of-control donor on their hands.
Whitmer’s chief of staff, JoAnne Huls, was dispatched to Dearborn to deliver some kind of mea culpa to the American Arab Chamber of Commerce, purportedly claiming the administration didn’t know Beydoun was going to run off and create a new organization to collect the money.
Whitmer herself has since acknowledged that she and her office were surprised to learn Beydoun had used the money for a different entity, contrary to how it was sold to her administration.
“It was a surprise to all of us that that wasn’t the case, and I think that that’s one additional point of why this is so unusual, and why it’s my hope that the attorney general initiates a lawsuit to get the money back from Fay Beydoun,” Whitmer said in October. “I don’t know why that hasn’t happened yet. It’s long overdue.”
In announcing the charges, Nessel carefully navigated the proverbial what-did-Whitmer-know-and-when-did-she-know-it questions. Beydoun’s own records claim she “had a meeting with the governor” on Dec. 9, 2021, about the proposal, which, if true, would be the proverbial smoking gun.
Nessel said her subpoena-wielding investigators could not substantiate this claim. Whitmer’s public schedule shows she was at a memorial service on Dec. 9, 2021, for one of the teenagers killed in the Oxford High School shooting, for at least part of the day.
Nessel suggested that Beydoun embellished her own political connections to advance her agenda. There’s a strong implication here that Whitmer, Wentworth, and their legions of deputies involved were hoodwinked by a politically savvy operator.
“What I see often times are people who brag about things, people who take credit about things, people who want other people to think they have very, very close relationships with people who are high up, because it helps them to elevate their status. But it doesn’t always make that true,” Nessel said.
“Just because somebody said, ‘I just had a meeting with the governor,’ doesn’t mean they had a meeting with the governor,” the attorney general added. “It says they told people they had a meeting with the governor, for instance.”
Still, Nessel said, “it’s clear” that Beydoun “used her political connections to get this grant.”
Those connections rested in the governor’s office, Whitmer’s MEDC, and through Hussein’s access to Wentworth and Republican staffers.
clivengood@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Livengood: Smoke surrounds Whitmer on Beydoun’s $20M. Who was duped?
Reporting by Chad Livengood, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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