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Local news stations aired images of agents from the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service carrying out box after box of documents and other items seized from at least six locations, including Pugh’s second-floor office in City Hall and her two homes in northwestern Baltimore. The coordinated raids sought financial records related to the children’s books.
Hours later, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, called for the mayor, a Democrat, to resign, saying she could no longer govern effectively. “Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust,” Hogan said in a statement. “She is clearly not fit to lead.”
The governor’s demand for Pugh’s resignation comes a little more than two weeks after the Baltimore City Council urged Pugh to step down, and three weeks after Hogan ordered a state investigation into the business relationship between Pugh and a health care system with extensive financial ties to the city.
In addition to the searches at City Hall and at Pugh’s homes, agents executed search warrants at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program that was once led by Pugh; the officer of her lawyer, Steven D. Silverman; and the home of Gary Brown Jr., a former mayoral aide.
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Pugh, who has denied wrongdoing, has been embroiled for weeks in a scandal over hundreds of thousands of dollars she received for the books before and after she became mayor in 2016.
On April 1, Hogan asked state prosecutors to investigate $500,000 that Pugh received from the University of Maryland Medical System, a nonprofit health care company that operates hospitals and other health care facilities in Baltimore and around the state.
The payment was for 100,000 copies of Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” books, which promote healthy children’s eating and exercise. The books, which she began writing in 2011, were to be distributed to schools in the city.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.