Democrat vice-presidential nominee hopeful Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan has landed in hot water over trying to give a state contract to track coronavirus cases to her own campaign team. Former Nevada GOP Attorney General Adam Laxalt called her on the obvious conflict of interest in an interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” late last week. This will be another strike against her in the veep sweepstakes.

Laxalt commented, “Let’s see what happened here. So, this contract gets awarded to this Democratic group. And, politics and your official office are never supposed to overlap. And, Michigan is one of the only states in America where the governor and the legislature are exempted from [the] Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests. So, she doesn’t have to turn over these records. She’s already rejected them.”

“So,” Laxalt continued, “she’s basically said: ‘Look, it’s the pandemic and I’m just not going to be accountable to the people during a pandemic.’ Which, obviously, I think is outrageous.”

The Washington Post reported Whitmer stopped an almost $200,000 no-bid contract just a day after announcing the hiring of these consultants. She did so because she got caught funneling cash to her own campaign team. The contract cancellation was a feeble effort to cover up her actions.

“I think if the public understood what this means, they’d be incredibly outraged,” Laxalt said to Carlson. “It is now the time when she’s making these huge decisions on liberties and peoples’ lives and spending money that the public should have more of an insight into how she’s making these decisions, not less.”

This is another instance of a Democrat governor trying to use virus-related funds to feather the nest of their cronies and also to get their badly-run states out of self-inflicted budget shortfalls. Whitmer thought she could get away with it because of the intense media and political focus on the virus. But she didn’t count on Adam Laxalt.