This is Part Three of a three-part series. Part One is available here and Part Two is available here.
A Nashville attorney who represents Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk owner Steve Smith said Mayor John Cooper misstated facts when he said White House officials influenced him to close bars on lower Broadway to contain COVID-19.
That attorney, Kirk Clements, said so to The Tennessee Star and in a document he said he’s already disseminated to the public.
“He [Cooper] claims the White House told him to shut down bars, but they [members of the White House] didn’t make that phone call to the cities until July 22. Cooper shut the bars on July 2,” Clements told us.
“Some information may have been disseminated between July 14 and July 22, but it was long after July 2 when he shut down bars. Cooper continues to mislead the public by claiming now it was the White House that directed him to close down the bars, and that is simply not true.”
Cooper spokesman Chris Song did not return a request for comment about Clements’ remarks. Clements said he plans to argue these points in a federal lawsuit he’s filed against Cooper and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.
But Cooper, in a recent interview with the Nashville-based WSMV, said he acted consistently with White House guidance and that his COVID-19 restrictions have reduced the number of cases in the area.
As reported, Cooper ordered those bars and restaurants closed because he said they posed a health threat because of allegedly too many COVID-19 cases. Metro Davidson County Health Department officials just two days earlier — on June 30 — said they had traced only 19 cases of COVID-19 to bars in the city. In contrast, at the time they had traced 1,159 cases to long-term care facilities and, as reported, 251 cases to the construction industry.
But Cooper told WSMV that bar patrons on lower Broadway — a tourist hotspot — could have carried COVID-19 to areas outside Davidson County, suggesting Metro Nashville’s contact tracers couldn’t find them.
The White House
Clements, in the document he submitted to The Star, said he can find no evidence that Cooper closed bars at the behest of the White House.
“In the September 19 press conference, Cooper asserted that the closure of bars was, in part, in response to information provided by the White House and Dr. Deborah Brix of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Cooper closed bars on July 2nd, 2020,” Clements wrote.
“The White House directive and that of Dr. Brix’s were made weeks after Cooper’s decision to close bars. As seen below, in a July 22 article, The Tennessean reports the White House was recommending aggressive action. Despite Cooper’s recent statement that he relied on the White House guidance, Chris Song, his press secretary, states clearly in the below article that not only did they not need such advice, Metro was not even on the call when the advice was given.”
Song, in The Tennessean article, said members of Cooper’s administration ignored the White House call because they had “more pressing” tasks. Song also said that White House officials’ input was “nothing new” and that “frankly, they’re late to the game.”
Draw Your Own Conclusions
As The Star reported in Part One of our three-part series, Clements alleged that Cooper and his senior advisor, Ben Eagles, misled the public. Clements said the two men never intended to reveal the actual number of confirmed COVID-19 cases that Davidson County officials traced back to bars on Nashville’s lower Broadway.
As reported in June, Smith said in a federal lawsuit that city officials impose hardships on his business because of COVID-19 — but they look the other way when it comes to allowing social justice protests. Smith joined The Local Spot owner Geoffrey Reid in the lawsuit that Reid filed in May against Cooper and Lee.
As reported in Part Two of our series, Clements said Smith’s lawsuit brought out Cooper’s vindictive side. Clements said Cooper wouldn’t hesitate to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to incapacitate those businesses, so Cooper imposed harsh restrictions on lower Broadway’s bars and restaurants immediately after Smith joined the lawsuit.
But Clements said in the document that it only contains his “opinions and conclusions as a hired advocate of parties who have sued Cooper.”
“Additional research and consideration should be given to these matters by readers and they should reach their own conclusions,” Clements wrote.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
The apple does not fall far from the tree. Their father, the governor was a crook, got rich off the govt from a land deal and now his sons Goober Jim and Commie John are following in his footstep. The father made a ton selling worthless land to the government that would not grow moss somewhere in Shelbyville. A crook begot two crooks and the stomach turns!
This is the scenario that is being played out where liberals control governments all over the world. Skewed data and bizarre , ineffective mask and lock-down mandates are destroying economies , and people’s lives. There should be some way in Nashville for people to connect who see what is going on.
Let’s not forget the 34% property tax increase that Cooper and his Metro comrades passed while our businesses were being shut, we were being laid off and Nashville’s economy came to a standstill.
To add vinegar to this grievous wound, while everyone else in the city is suffering, these same government officials voted themselves a pay raise! The mayor and the Metro council are truly enemies of the people they are supposed to serve.
Yes! And here it is. This is what I’ve believed for months. My wife thought I was crazy, but the headline says it all. This ruse was a planned to derail Trump’s re-election bid.
It is amazing how the Democrat party has morphed into a bunch of perpetual two-year-olds who stomp their feet when they don’t get their way. But in this case, stomping their feet equates to burning down the country.
Once we do the post mortem on the lockdown cadaver it will be easy to see that Cooper and his administration along with cronies in the health department misrepresented the data to shut down the city. The lack of logic will demonstrate that they were causing economic pain for political reasons. They lump in prisoners and nursing facility residents (people already quarantined) into our reopening metrics – and the hospital metric is unattainable under usual conditions:
https://fox17.com/news/digging-out/digging-out-hospital-metric-not-usually-reachable-in-normal-times-nashville-covid-19-coronavirus
It is past time to stop talking about this political hack corrupt mayor and take some serious action to get him removed. The degree which he has hurt Nashville to accomplish his political goals cannot be measured. Take all legal actions possible.
There is only one conclusion: Mini Cooper is waging war against Broadway for political purposes. Cooper is a ghoul.