The city of Charlotte on Tuesday released a five-page report by an outside attorney that found no unethical, immoral or illegal conduct in the city. The City Council hired the firm after member Victoria Watlington made those allegations about the city’s decision in closed session to pay police Chief Johnny Jennings a $305,000 settlement in May.
Watlington made the inflammatory comments in a fundraising email to constituents. She said she had seen “unethical, immoral, and frankly, illegal activities.” She then quickly walked the comments back, saying in a second email that she wanted the city to operate with “truth, transparency, respect and authenticity.”
Stung by her original comments, Mayor Vi Lyles and the majority of the council pushed for an investigation. At first, interim City Attorney Anthony Fox pushed to do the investigation himself; the City Council decided to hire the law firm Cranfill Sumner after Watlington said Fox would be investigating himself.
Interviews with City Council members were conducted this summer. Council members discussed the report in closed session Monday night.
At a news conference Tuesday, Lyles repeated the report’s findings that it uncovered “no evidence of illegal, immoral or unethical conduct.”
“These egregious allegations hurt our team and we owe it to our team to investigate,” Lyles said.
The mayor then left the news conference and did not take questions from the media.
While the firm said numerous times it found no evidence of illegality, it also wrote “that certain processes could have been handled more effectively and that the city could have been more structured and transparent.”
The report didn’t elaborate on what those processes might be.
The settlement with Jennings stemmed from threatening text messages he received from former City Council member Tariq Bokhari. The two men were having a dispute as to whether officers should be allowed to wear new protective vests, in the wake of a shooting that left four law enforcement officers dead while trying to serve a warrant.
Jennings later came to the city and threatened to sue. In the report, the outside firm wrote that “it appears that Chief Jennings presented a credible claim, was represented by a highly competent employment attorney, and that the City Council was appropriately informed of the matter before approving a settlement.”
Watlington and some other council members were upset that Fox didn’t tell them that he had dismissed an ethics complaint filed by Corine Mack of the NAACP in early 2025 about the text messages. They have said that it would have been important to know that Fox had dismissed the ethics complaint before approving the settlement.
The report by Cranfill Sumner does not address whether council members should have been told about Fox’s decision to dismiss the complaint.
After Lyles spoke, Watlington said she has no regrets and that she wished the report had gone into more detail about what the city could have done better.
She also said that the title of the first email “Power Corrupts” was meant in a figurative way, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. She said it was never meant to be about financial crimes.
The report said: “Based on most of the information reviewed, (Watlington’s) concerns appeared to center more on procedural issues than on any legal or ethical violation.”
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