DETROIT – Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan responded Tuesday to a story that claims he outed a confidential FBI informant who was working behind the scenes of a federal corruption investigation.
You can watch his full briefing above.
The Detroit News reported overnight that Duggan was involved in a chain of events that led to the identification of a confidential FBI informant who was wearing a wire as part of the towing bribery and extortion investigation.
According to the story, former Detroit City Councilman Andre Spivey told Duggan the identity of the informant during a meeting. Spivey was recently sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to a bribery charge in connection with the federal probe.
Duggan then shared the informant’s identity with people within and outside city government, alerting a target of the investigation and endangering the informant, according to the Detroit News article.
“I did not and would not ever disclose the identity of a person I knew to be a confidential source in an investigation,” Duggan said in a statement before the briefing. “Any suggestion that I did is just plain false. Neither Spivey nor anyone in the federal government ever told me the tower who paid Spivey was a confidential source.
“For the last five years, DPD, the City Law Department, and I have worked relentlessly to rid Detroit of dishonest towers through multiple city-run investigations and lawsuits.
“I have the highest respect for the work being done by the U.S. Attorney and other federal agencies and would have fully complied with any request for confidentiality or any request to defer the city’s own efforts to clean up the towing.”