Oklahoma Governor Calls for Resignations After Threatening Audio Surfaces

Audio of parts of the conversation, which took place after a public meeting of McCurtain County Commissioners on March 6, was published by the McCurtain Gazette-News, which left a recording device in the meeting room, according to the newspaper. The publisher and his son, both of whom write for the paper, were the subject of the comments about killing reporters, the newspaper said.

“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” Mr. Stitt, a Republican, said late Sunday. “I will not stand idly by while this takes place.”

The governor called for an investigation and the resignations of McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy, Commissioner Mark Jennings, sheriff’s investigator Alicia Manning and Larry Hendrix, the jail administrator, who were identified by the newspaper as being in the room March 6 during the time the recording was made.

The sheriff, Mr. Jennings, Mr. Hendrix and Ms. Manning couldn’t be reached for comment.

Robert Beck, another of the county’s three commissioners, said he was in the room when the other officials made the comments quoted in the newspaper. “I was finishing up signing my papers and taking care of county business,” he said. “It’s just a bad deal.”

McCurtain County District Attorney Mark Matloff had no comment and no other county officials could be reached for comment.

The newspaper said audio of the meeting had been turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office. The FBI declined to comment. The Attorney General’s office said it had launched a probe into the situation, but declined to comment further.

A crowd of protesters gathered Monday in Idabel, the county seat, calling for the officials to resign.

Christin Jones, a Dallas-based attorney representing the newspaper and the two reporters, said they were grateful for the outpouring of support but hoped to “continue to report the news and not be the news.”

“For nearly a year, they have suffered intimidation, ridicule and harassment based solely on their efforts to report the news for McCurtain County,” Ms. Jones said of the reporters, Chris Willingham and his father, Bruce Willingham. “They love their county and the people in it dearly—the family has lived in the county for nearly 120 years and run the Gazette for over 40 years.”

Chris Willingham began writing stories scrutinizing the sheriff’s office in 2021, Ms. Jones said. He filed a lawsuit on March 6 accusing county officials, including Mr. Clardy and Ms. Manning, of defaming him. The meeting in which officials were recorded by the McCurtain Gazette-News took place on that same day.

In the section of the recordings that the newspaper made public, people are heard discussing the hiring of hit men and the use of deep holes, ostensibly to hide the bodies of the two reporters, according to the newspaper. One person can be heard on the recording, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, saying he would run for sheriff “if it was back in the day when” someone would “take a damn Black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell.” Chris Willingham and Bruce Willingham are both white.

“Well, it’s not like that no more,” another person responds in the recording.

“I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got,” one person is heard saying in the recording.

Joey Senat, an associate professor of mass communication at Oklahoma State University, said recording a public meeting is legal in Oklahoma and that since the officials stayed in the same room and the room was ostensibly still open to the public, the officials likely wouldn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

“It’s a very sad day for our county,” said Idabel Mayor Craig Young, who is Black and has also called for the officials to step down. He said he had worked closely with Mr. Jennings as the county helped the city recover from a tornado in November, so he was particularly surprised to hear that the newspaper said Mr. Jennings took part in the conversation.

“I was shocked,” he said. “I had my doubts about the sheriff but the county commissioner—I wouldn’t have never thought it from him.”

He said that race relations in the county are generally not bad. “We had a nice little nonviolent protest today and there were as many whites there as there were Blacks.”

Mr. Beck also said race relations had not been problematic in recent times. “We haven’t had any kind of trouble for years and years. Everybody kind of got along,” he said.

He declined to comment on whether the officials should resign. “I’m not in their shoes. So I can’t tell you right now. They are facing a lot of pressure, I’ll tell you that, but I don’t know what’s gonna happen yet.”

Write to Shannon Najmabadi at [email protected] and Joe Barrett at [email protected]