Kansas City mayor accused of retaliating after whistleblower revealed nonprofit spending

The whistleblower who revealed financial transactions he felt were potentially unlawful by a nonprofit that bankrolled travel and entertainment for Kansas City’s mayor says he is now being targeted with defamation and retaliation.

Tom Keating has worked on ethics compliance for political campaigns for two decades, including for Lucas’ campaign and for a nonprofit called the Mayors Corps of Progress for a Greater Kansas City.

Late last year, Keating provided documents to The Independent detailing how the Mayors Corps was used to finance travel, meals and Kansas City Chiefs tickets for Mayor Quinton Lucas. The records revealed that the Mayors Corps spent more than $23,000 for Lucas, a staffer and security personnel to attend the Super Bowl in 2023.

Kansas City mayor accused of skirting city gift ban by using nonprofit to pay for travel

A day after the game, the Mayors Corps took in $24,000 from a politically connected trade group — a move critics said could violate the city’s gift rules, which require elected officials to disclose any gifts they receive worth more than $200 and bans gifts worth more than $1,000.

Lucas has denied any wrongdoing, saying the spending was reviewed by legal counsel and fits within the Mayors Corps’ mission to help him promote the city. He has also suggested in interviews and in a letter from his general counsel that Keating was responsible for the finances of Mayors Corps and that Keating provided slanted information to The Independent.

Keating responded to the mayor’s accusations in a letter written last week by his attorney, Max Kautsch, accusing Lucas of retaliating against Keating for serving as a source for the coverage and attacking his First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

Kautsch gave Lucas’ office until Monday to apologize.

“The city can expect a demand from Mr. Keating in the future specifying monetary compensation for his injuries,” Kautsch says in the letter. “The nature of that demand will depend in large part on whether the city apologizes to Mr. Keating as outlined above.”

He adds: “Thank you for your assistance in correcting this flagrant constitutional violation.”

The mayor did not apologize by Monday evening. Neither his office nor an outside law firm that has represented Mayors Corps returned requests for comment.

Super Bowl trips

In December, The Independent reported that, during Lucas’ first term in office, Mayors Corps spent more than $35,000 on travel, meals and entertainment for him and a top aide, including the Super Bowl trip.

The reporting was based on documents provided by Keating, who volunteered to do compliance for the nonprofit.

Keating raised concerns to Lucas and a top aide at the time of the 2023 Super Bowl trip. He suggested returning the $24,000 donation, reimbursing the nonprofit for the cost of the trip and paying for the flights, tickets and accommodations through United We Stand PAC, a political action committee that supports Lucas.

Last year, Keating came forward with the documents and concerns about how Mayors Corps funds were being used, saying he had agonized about whether or not to speak up since his departure from the nonprofit in October 2023.

“The real question about the Mayors Corps paying for Mayor Lucas and staff to attend the 2023 Super Bowl has never been, as Mayor Lucas has suggested, about if the mayor should attend a Super Bowl the Kansas City Chiefs are playing in,” Keating said in a statement Monday. “The real question is how it should be paid for and if the public has a right to know who is picking up the tab.”

Lucas also attended Sunday’s Super Bowl using funds from the Mayors Corps. His office and attorneys associated with Mayors Corps did not identify recent donors to the nonprofit.

While volunteering for Mayors Corps, Keating was also working on behalf of United We Stand PAC on compliance issues. He was asked at that time by the mayor’s then chief of staff, Morgan Said, to alter descriptions of two expenses on the PAC’s quarterly filing to make them more vague, according to a transcribed, recorded phone call provided by Keating.

Keating saw that as an attempt to obscure information about the organization’s spending from the public.

One of the expenses, which Said requested be labeled “inaugural reimbursement,” was for $1,694.42 at Halls, a high-end department store in Kansas City, for a tuxedo for Lucas’ second inauguration. The other, which Said asked be labeled only as “research,” was a $9,500 payment to Bold Decision Consulting LLC for a poll of 300 Clay County voters that showed 70% were opposed to the idea of a new sales tax to fund a Kansas City Royals baseball stadium in North Kansas City.

At the time the poll was released, it was not clear who paid for it. It was seen by many as an attempt to scuttle any hope of a Clay County stadium deal to ensure the team would land in Jackson County.

Campaign committee controlled by KC mayor requested poll he denied involvement in

Following The Independent’s stories, both Keating and news organizations in Missouri received letters from either attorneys for the mayor or Mayors Corps that Kautsch calls “a coordinated attack on First Amendment rights.”

Kautsch says the letters are “rife with misstatements” and ruinous to Keating’s livelihood and reputation.

Keating received a letter on Dec. 18 from Jon Berkon of the Elias Law Group on behalf of the Mayors Corps. The letter claims it was Keating who approved the 2023 Super Bowl expenditures and that Lucas had offered to meet with him to discuss any concerns he had raised. Keating did not take Lucas up on that offer, Berkon writes, and “decided to leak confidential financial materials to the press” and “attack the mayor and his staff publicly.”

In an email, Keating called the insinuation that he didn’t make any efforts to meet with Lucas ridiculous. Lucas offered to meet, Keating said, but never followed up with suggested times for a meeting to take place.

Berkon also wrote that Keating was “the person with the authority” to approve expenses.

That’s not true, Kautsch said, since Keating “never had any decision-making authority.”

Kautsch, in his letter to the mayor’s office, wrote that Lucas also appeared on a Kansas City talk radio show after the coverage and “insinuated that Mr. Keating was solely responsible for making financial decisions for the organizations at issue.”

Berkon also accuses Keating of accosting a Kansas City staffer in public.

“If you have substantive concerns that you would like to address, please reach out to us,” Berkon writes. “We are happy to discuss them on behalf of the mayor and entities for which he fundraises, but the mayor takes the safety and wellbeing of staff seriously; we will not tolerate this ongoing conduct, and if it continues, we reserve all rights to take legal action to stop it.”

Kautsch’s response says Berkon “fails to give even a hint of detail about the basis for such an allegation” of Keating accosting city staff. Kautsch suggests Berkon is hinting at a “chance meeting” between Keating and City Manager Brian Platt at a restaurant in Kansas City.

According to emails Keating sent Platt at the time, a mutual friend had invited them to the same restaurant and Keating introduced himself to Platt. Keating says in the email that he wants to give Platt “the opportunity to know the entire story and defend yourself because this is a public matter.”

Kautsch said emails from Keating to Platt following the encounter strike a conciliatory tone.

“There is simply no evidence that this interaction, or any other my client may have had with city officials, was anything other than protected expression under the First Amendment,” Kautsch wrote. “To suggest, without evidence, that Mr. Keating is somehow a threat when his motive is to simply promote government transparency, shows retaliatory animus.”

First Amendment freedoms

Kautsch also takes issue with a letter the mayor’s taxpayer-funded general counsel, Gavriel Schreiber, sent to The Independent and KCUR, which republished the stories about the Mayors Corps and United We Stand.

Schreiber’s letter, which was also sent on Dec. 18, was shared with numerous members of the media as an attempt to “shift the blame for the Super Bowl reimbursement from Mayor Lucas to Mr. Keating,” Kautsch wrote, “and suggesting that anyone involved in bringing Mr. Keating’s concerns to light would be subject to legal action.”

Schreiber’s letter accuses The Independent of inaccuracies in its reporting and requests corrections and an apology. Schreiber claims the stories rely on a “single biased source and demonstrate such reckless disregard for the truth as to potentially constitute actual malice.”

The mayor’s general counsel also accuses Keating — without providing any evidence — of posting comments on the articles under a social media handle Kautsch says Keating has never used.

The letter requests, in a footnote, that The Independent preserve its communications with Keating. Kautsch calls that a “baseless implication that a defamation lawsuit related to the critical coverage spurred by Mr. Keating’s communication was in the offing.”

“Singling out Mr. Keating is further evidence of the city’s true intent in sending the letter to The Independent and KCUR: to retaliate against Mr. Keating,” Kautsch wrote.

The Independent replied to Schreiber’s letter on Dec. 20 through its attorney, Eric Weslander, who said the letter “can be constructed only as an attempt to blame the messenger, divert attention from the central issues raised by my client’s reporting and deter practitioners of ground-breaking, important investigative journalism from doing further digging into the mayor’s affairs.”

Crucially, Weslander wrote, the mayor’s office did not challenge any of the facts about spending by the nonprofit or the PAC that were central to The Independent’s stories, instead focusing on “highly technical distinctions” such as the makeup of the Mayors Corps’ board of directors and whether the mayor formally denied knowledge of who paid for the Clay County poll at the time it was released.

“I understand that you may have a wide range of responsibilities in the mayor’s office,” Weslander wrote, “but impinging on First Amendment freedoms should not be one of them.”

He added: “My client stands behind its work.”