A Republican commissioner in Fulton County, Georgia, is crying foul after two of her appointees to the county’s first-of-its-kind Reparations Task Force were allegedly ordered by its chair not to speak to the media.
The order was given soon after Fox News Digital spoke to Reparations Task Force member Mike Russell last month, the site has learned.
“I prefer if my two appointed reparations task force members felt welcome to speak to the media. But currently the head of the reparations task force does not want them speaking to the media. And to me that’s concerning because they’re the ones who I appointed to be on there, and they’re privy to all the information and follow everything closely,” commissioner Bridget Thorne told Fox News Digital in a new interview.
ATLANTA REPARATIONS TASK FORCE MEMBER SAYS COUNTRY MUST MOVE FORWARD RACIALLY: ‘HAVE TO LET GO OF THE PAST’
“So I would love if they could speak on my behalf. But one of my Reparations Task Force members was given an executive order that he was not allowed to speak to the media. But I think it’s important that we have dialogue and we talk and people aren’t censored or shut down, that voices are heard,” she added.
Thorne said she “was a bit puzzled” when she learned that Russell, one of the two appointees that she made to the Reparations Task Force, was given that instruction. The task force has been allocated $250,000 to investigate Fulton County’s past and whether it should financially atone for past transgressions against its Black population. Fulton is Georgia’s most populated county and home to the capital city of Atlanta.
The task force will get $210,000 of the previously approved county funding to hire researchers, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported last week.
Russell told Fox News Digital in June that America should be proud of its history righting past wrongs while discussing the work of the task force. “Of all the places I’ve been, I’ve never been anywhere where the society has taken such an…
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