The emails were between Democrat Mayor John Cooper's senior advisor, Benjamin Eagles, and an official from the Metro Health Department, Leslie Waller. The discussions revolved around the low number of COVID-19 cases emerging from bars and restaurants in Lower Broadway. Instead of doing the proper thing and allowing the district to slowly and rationally reopen for business, the officials talked about how to keep these revelations from the public.
A contact tracing program implemented in Nashville found that the majority of coronavirus clusters in the city were coming from nursing homes and construction sites, with more than a thousand cases in each category. The program also reported that the city only had 22 cases come from bars and restaurants.
“This isn't going to be publicly released, right? Just info for the Mayor's Office?” asked Waller in one of the emails.
“Correct, not for public consumption,” replied Eagles.
Different interactions between other members of the mayor's office and the Metro Health Department show that this is a conspiracy with potentially dozens of actors.
Nate Rau, a reporter from local media outlet Tennessee Lookout, asked health department official Brian Todd about the rumor that there were only around 80 cases traced back to Lower Broadway's bars and restaurants.
Rau pointed out that, at the time he asked Todd, there were over 20,000 cases of COVID-19 in all of Davidson County. If only around 80 of those cases could be traced back to restaurants and bars, they should be reopened.
In response, an unknown member of the health department sent an email providing a guide for how Todd can answer the reporter's question:
“My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per site. We could still release the total though, and then a response to the over 80 could be because that number is increasing all the time and we don't want to say a specific number.”
Councilman Steve Glover of the Metropolitan Council said that his office was able to get verification from both the mayor's office and the health department that the leaked emails are authentic. (Related: Nashville councilwoman suggests charging people who refuse to obey mask mandates with murder or attempted murder.)
Nashville business owners furious at artificial COVID-19 numbers
Since the leaks, Councilman Glover says he has been contacted by dozens upon dozens of business owners and bar and restaurant employees demanding answers.
“We put hundreds – literally thousands of people out of work that are now worried about losing their homes, their apartments… and we did it on bogus data. That should be illegal.”
Several bar and restaurant employees and business owners have come forward to local news outlets like WZTV to talk about their frustrations with the Democratic officials who participated in the cover-up.
“We've lost millions of dollars,” said Anthony Marsella, the general manager of Nudie's Honky Tonk, a bar in Lower Broadway that's nearly a century old. “As a company, millions of dollars. As individuals, our income has been cut to 25 percent, while rent has increased. Everything is getting more expensive in Nashville.”
When asked what he feels about the fact that bars and restaurants received some of the harshest lockdown restrictions despite the fact that even the artificial numbers showed them having some of the lowest number of coronavirus cases, Marsella said he was disgusted, and that it feels like “a slap in the face, 100 percent.”
Marsella says he and other bar and restaurant owners are very furious at the revelations, stating that people have been blaming them for the spread of the coronavirus in Davidson County all summer long even though the truth was that they had very little to do with its transmission.
Marsella said somebody needs to be held accountable for all of the income they lost, although he isn't sure who exactly to blame – either the mayor, his office, the health department or somebody else who was in the know.
Despite being in conservative Tennessee, Nashville is very much a liberal city, having been run by Democratic Party mayors for nearly a century. Listen to this episode of the Health Ranger Report, a podcast by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, as he talks about how, with the mass exodus of patriotic Americans, the gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and generally ineffective governance, liberal cities across America like Nashville are on the brink of collapse.
Mayor's office says claims made against them are untrue
Mayor Cooper, who is coincidentally the brother of Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, held an in-person press conference – the first he's had in months – following the spread of the news regarding the leaks.
During his press conference, Cooper announced that Nashville was moving into Phase Three of its reopening plan starting next month. For bars and restaurants in Lower Broadway, this means they can operate at 50 percent capacity with social distancing, a maximum of 50 customers per floor and another 50 for their outside dining areas, and they will be allowed to remain open until 11 p.m.
When somebody asked him if the health department's COVID-19 stats were misleading, Cooper tried to deflect blame by talking about how a White House official came to Nashville to talk to his office about the importance of keeping bars and restaurants closed because they were considered to be “super-spreaders.”
“Of course there's no effort to withhold information,” said Cooper. “We'll do all we can to open up all information.”
Benjamin Eagles, one of the main conspirators found to be complicit in the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, flat out denied that the mayor's office was trying to cover up real coronavirus infection data.
Eagles tried to argue this by stating that they have held over 75 press conferences in the last six months to help keep people informed of the latest information. He also tried to use the metro's contact tracing efforts to plead his case.
“We've been pretty transparent about the sorts of activities and events that would be risk factors,” he said.
Unfortunately, these flimsy defenses are not enough, and a group of bar owners on Lower Broadway are already gearing up to sue the city for all of the income they lost over the past six months.
“The hurt to these families, the revenue lost to the city, the revenue lost to these business owners who have been struggling since March, it's just absolutely criminal,” said Bryan Lewis, an attorney representing several bar owners.
Lewis announced his plan to sue the city at the end of June. In gathering the evidence, the city's legal department was forced to release around 500 pages of emails between the mayor's office and the health department. Lewis claims that a lot of them prove that the city was trying to cover up the real data.
“We are using these emails right now in an attempt… to get federal court to allow us to oppose Mayor Cooper, [Health Director Michael Caldwell] and the officials in the health department about these emails and why you would shut down this industry based on such a low number of cases to put thousands of people out of work.”
Once word of the emails came out, Lewis said that many other people – bar and restaurant owners and employees – wanted to sign up and join his lawsuit. Lewis plans to get the mayor and select members of his office and members of the health department to give depositions, which they will then have to answer for in front of a jury.
Learn more about how public officials are trying to lie about the need for extended and overzealous lockdowns by reading the latest articles regarding the coronavirus in the United States at Pandemic.news.
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