Whaley was suspected of bribery by the Feds. Esrati.com told you first

The Dayton Daily news now officially has egg on their face.

But, so does Politico, The Huffington Post, The NY Times, the Washington Post, all the major newspapers in Ohio, the local TV stations.

While I didn’t have the unsealed warrants, I did know that the tapes were played to the Grand Jury and sought them out. The FBI and the DOJ were going to prosecute her for corruption. I wanted the actual tapes and filed in Federal Court- on August 10, 2021 to get them:
Esrati files in Federal Court to expose Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley’s part in the “Culture of Corruption” investigation. No news outlet picked up the implications, but apparently, others dug into the Federal PACER system (a convoluted online system from the Federal Courts that acts as a paywall to stop the public from accessing their own public records) and found that Whaley was a target of a criminal investigation.

Well, so was Joey D. Williams, and he had become a confidential informant according to the records I published, well before he ran and won re-election. My question stands- did Whaley do a plea deal too, in exchange for being a CI? And when are some of the white people in Dayton going to get in trouble for being the “everyone else was doing it” that Williams claimed?

Again, this story goes after the dead Willis Blackshear as a bagman and Rhine McLin as another accomplice. Still nothing on the public servants and quasi-public corporations like the director of planning, the HRC (under Roshawn Winburn), CityWide Development- who have been funneling money to Steve Rauch Inc for decades.

This is only the opening of the story- I recommend you go read the whole thing. And remember, you read it on Esrati.com first.

The FBI suspected Dayton Mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Nan Whaley in 2014 of accepting cash bribes from a city contractor, according to unsealed search warrant applications filed in federal court.

Whaley was not charged with any crime. The warrants detail sworn statements from FBI agents to a federal judge outlining their suspicion of impropriety. In both instances, federal magistrates found probable cause to grant the warrants.

In the documents, the agents told the judge that a controller for demolition company Steve Rauch Inc. — which pleaded guilty last year to a charge of conspiracy to engage in mail fraud regarding subcontracting work — said in recorded phone calls with another company official that Whaley accepted cash bribes from Rauch on multiple occasions.

The search warrant requests were filed for phone records and permission to place a GPS tracker on the vehicle of Willis Blackshear Sr., then the Montgomery County recorder, who the FBI agents alleged worked as a courier between Rauch and Whaley. Whaley served on the Dayton city commission and was running for mayor at the time.

“What he [Blackshear] does is he acts as the intermediary, so Nan [Whaley] doesn’t have to come out here,” said the controller, identified as Dan Feucht, in a recorded phone call detailed by the FBI.

“You know the City of Dayton Commission doesn’t have to come out here. So he [Blackshear] does all the running. He comes out here and collects all the money.”

The other party to the phone call, identified only as a former project manager for Rauch’s company, asked if “even Nan Whaley is in on that deal?” Feucht responded, “Oh yeah, very much so.”

Whaley, through her campaign, declined an interview. In a statement, she denied any wrongdoing.

“These seven-year-old claims are baseless and categorically untrue,” she said. “In the course of federal investigations into illegal activity in Dayton, unfounded claims were made against me. Investigators did exactly what they should do: thoroughly looked into it and found nothing. I can only assume investigators saw through these claims because I only learned about them this week, but I’m glad they were taken seriously and I’m grateful for the FBI’s work to root out corruption.”

The Whaley campaign said it would be issuing a research document Wednesday countering the allegations contained in the warrant requests.

About six months before announcing the Rauch indictment in October 2019, federal prosecutors announced indictments against Dayton City Commissioner Joey Williams and city employee RoShawn Winburn alleging bribery involving the procurement of city contracts. All eventually pleaded guilty.

The search warrant applications also accuse then-Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin of accepting bribes and steering demolition contracts to Rauch. Feucht estimated Rauch gave McLin $100,000 a year, according to the FBI affidavit.

McLin was not charged with a crime. She declined to comment Tuesday on claims lodged within the search warrant affidavits, as did Rauch….

Whaley allegations
According to the FBI’s description of Feucht’s statements in interviews, recorded calls and meetings, Feucht attended a meeting in Rauch’s office in the summer of 2013. There, the agents wrote, Rauch handed Feucht an envelope that Feucht believed — given its weight, size, and previous experience with Rauch — contained cash. Rauch, they wrote, asked Feucht to give it to Blackshear.

Again in October 2013, just before Whaley won her first mayoral election, Rauch handed Feucht a similar white envelope and asked Feucht to give it to Blackshear, according to the FBI.

“Specifically, Rauch told [Feucht] he gave [Whaley] $50,000 in cash, and has ways to get the cash to Whaley that is not detectable,” the FBI wrote in the search warrant application.

“On another occasion, Rauch told [Feucht] he is using Blackshear as a ‘go between’ to Whaley.”

Additionally, Feucht claimed he witnessed Rauch, during a March 21, 2014 meeting with Blackshear at his office, reach into his front pocket and grab a roll of cash wrapped with a rubber band. He then removed an “unknown amount of cash” and gave it to Blackshear, per the FBI.

The affidavit attached to the warrant is comparatively light on detail regarding any supposed favors from Whaley in return for the alleged payments. Agents who wrote the affidavit cite two instances, without specific dates, where they say Rauch was having “issues” on a project and allegedly told Feucht that Rauch “gave Whaley money and she needs to take care of it.”

Additionally, the agents told the judge they needed to record a looming meeting between Rauch and Blackshear.

“The meeting is expected to include a payment from Rauch to Blackshear for Blackshear’s involvement in [Steve Rauch Inc.’s] City of Dayton contracts in furtherance of the above described violations of federal law,” the agents wrote.

Source: FBI suspected Dayton Mayor Whaley of bribery in 2014, court documents show – Ohio Capital Journal

Whaley can try to explain this all she wants, but the only real way to prove her innocence is to ask the Feds to release all tapes of her made by Williams and other FBI CI’s or agents.

The FBI and the DOJ still have some real explaining to do on why they allowed Williams to run for office after already cutting a plea deal and an agreement to resign- and him being allowed to dictate when this would all be made public.

They also need to explain on how they can’t seem to indict a single white person.

Read the full indictments here:
And the missing white people from the indictments for the Culture of Corruption

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