Citizen Requested Info. About County Employee, Chief Asst. Prosecutor Threatened “Criminal Charges”

Note: This article has been updated to include the email sent by Victoria Burton-Harris.

by P.D. Lesko

Emails shared with The Ann Arbor Independent showed that on Jan. 31, 2022, an Ann Arbor man phoned and then sent an email to the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s office asking for information (“background information” or a “biography”) naming an Assistant County Prosecutor. The next day, he received a response from Victoria Burton-Harris, the County’s Chief Asst. Prosecutor. Burton-Harris in her email stated the man was not entitled to ask about the public employee’s professional qualifications or experience. Burton-Harris then threatened the long-time city resident: “You will not be receiving this information on anyone who works in my office. Further emails from you demanding such information may be seen as making a threat to a prosecuting attorney, and will be swiftly responded with a consideration for criminal charges.”

“I can’t tell you how shocked I was when I got that email. When I contacted them by phone, I gave my name, why I was calling, and the case number. To me, it was a routine question,” said the man, obviously still stunned that he was threatened with criminal prosecution for asking a question. He is a former housing inspector and his wife is a local psychotherapist.

The Michigan Penal Code says charges of threats and intimidation may not be brought against citizens who make legal requests to branches of government. As for lawyers, ethics rules of the Michigan Bar Association (MRPC 3.1) “compel lawyers to only pursue meritorious claims and contentions, and prohibits a lawyer from making frivolous bad faith assertions. The Rule prohibits a lawyer under any circumstances from making a frivolous or bad faith assertion, including an insupportable and unjustifiable implication of criminality or threat of criminal prosecution.”

Victoria Burton-Harris was an assistant prosecutor in Wayne County. In 2020, she unsuccessfully tried to unseat her boss, long-time Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy. Like Eli Savit, Burton-Harris was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and John Legend sang the praises of her progressive cred. The Change of Color PAC endorsed her and told voters she was committed to “Hold[ing] powerful people and corporations accountable to our communities.” She received around 34 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary election, a respectable showing against a political powerhouse like Worthy.

Burton-Harris was hired by Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit as his Chief Asst. Prosecutor in Jan. 2021, the first woman to hold that position. She is the second most powerful prosecutor in the County and supervises around 35 prosecutors paid from Savit’s $7 million taxpayer-funded budget.

Victoria Burton-Harris’s written “insupportable and unjustifiable implication of criminality and her threat of criminal prosecution,” put her boss, Prosecutor Savit, in an awkward position. The ethics rules of the Michigan Bar Association, MRPC 8.3(a) also state: “A lawyer having knowledge that another lawyer has committed a significant violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as a lawyer shall inform the Attorney Grievance Commission.”

When asked if he has policies and procedures in place to investigate abuse of power by attorneys employed in the Prosecutor’s Office, Eli Savit did not respond.

In his email, the Ann Arbor resident had written: “Please either send me a bio and picture please or give me a link to get information about [the assistant prosecutor] and her background. I feel since my taxes pay her salary I’m entitled to know something about who she is and her background, where she went to school, etc.”

He’d asked for the information because the Assistant Prosecutor was involved in a case brought against a very close friend.

“I was looking out for my friend who was very fragile at the time. The Assistant Prosecutor’s behavior was somewhat concerning to me. For instance, my friend was charged with a 10-year felony and a gun charge out of thin air. The charges were dropped because there was no evidence, but he was so confused, so crushed. I wanted to understand why the Assistant Prosecutor had done this, understand her professional background.”

Burton-Harris in her Feb 1, 2022 email said: “Your demand for my staff’s biography, photo, and background information based on your mistaken belief that you are entitled to it because you’re a taxpayer is concerning, to say the least.”

Burton-Harris ended her email with: “Have a wonderful day.”

“I showed her email to a local attorney with connections to the Trial Court. He was shocked,” said the man.

The “insupportable and unjustifiable implication of criminality” and a threat of criminal prosecution, in writing, from the County’s Chief Asst. Prosecutor elicited this response from a local lawyer who has practiced criminal defense law for almost two decades: “Her email is off the wall. Not a good look for either Victoria or Eli considering the number of ‘Recall Eli Savit’ bumpertickers I’m seeing.”

A colleague of Victoria Burton Harris shown her Feb. 1, 2022 email called it “chilling” and “thuggish.”

When contacted and asked if she wanted to comment on that characterization of her choice of words in the Feb. 1 email, Burton-Harris declined to do so.

Victoria Burton-Harris was incorrect in her assertion that the resident was not entitled to information about the public employee, or to ask for information. In fact, the resident had the legal right to do both.

According to Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act citizens are entitled to a broad range of information about public employees. For example, it is a well-established legal fact that citizens may request to see the personnel files of public employees. The Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has no exemption for those records, except in the case of police officers, but then the exemptions are strict and narrow, favoring the public’s right to know over secrecy.

Citizens may obtain the names, payroll records, cell phone numbers/records (if the phone is paid for with public money), email addresses, work attendance records, and even the business credit card records of all public employees. In addition, emails, text messages and other digital communications sent during the course of a public employee’s work are public records, with very few exemptions.

Ms. Burton-Harris implies in her email that “her staff” are entitled to privacy above and beyond that which is afforded them by Michigan law. They are not. Moreover, her staff members are subject to the same public information disclosures to which the rest of us are.

For example, Assessors’ records include the names and addresses of homeowners and may be searched by name, parcel number or address. In addition, records of building permits, property tax and water payments are also publicly available. When Ms. Burton-Harris ran for office in 2020, she may have obtained Wayne County resident voting records from her County Clerk. Voting records (not how an individual voted, but rather a record that shows the person voted in a particular election) are public. College attendance and graduation records may be purchased for a small fee. Divorce proceedings, DUIs, domestic violence arrests and convictions? Trial and District Court records may be searched online using a number of delimiters.

Public employee salaries are not secret. After she was hired into the Prosecutor’s Office, Victoria Burton-Harris landed a job in the U-M Law School. In the 2021-2022 academic year, she had a 0.1 appointment at a salary of $63,345. She was among the lowest paid LEO Intermittent Lecturers in the Law School, according to U-M payroll data made available at UMSalary.info.

In addition, in 2021 she was paid $128,926.20 by Washtenaw County, according to the County’s Open Book disclosures. That was just $3,000 more than the salary paid to the white man who had her position in 2018, despite the fact that between 2018-2021 inflation rose 17.24 percent.

It took six minutes to find Burton-Harris’s home address and cell phone number using public records, and information she disclosed herself to public entities. Those records included photos of her dwelling. She has put numerous photos of her young child online, including in campaign materials.

As for Burton-Harris’s refusal to provide a headshot of her employee, court proceedings are, as a rule, open to the public and videoed. Copies of videos may be obtained directly from the courts’ records offices. Burton-Harris’s assistant prosecutors’ faces are broadcast to the public via Zoom during hearings. Recordings can be captured, copied and shared easily. District and Trial Court records are searchable online and include the names of attorneys.

While Burton-Harris’s email intimates she may be concerned for the safety of the people who prosecute County residents, over the past 100 years only 14 prosecutors in the U.S. have been killed as a result of their jobs. None of those 14 deaths happened in Michigan. In comparison, over the past decade over 800 journalists have been murdered worldwide (two in Michigan).

While the Chief Asst. Prosecutor may fret over the privacy of her employees, her staff participate in the fun of social media and post photos of themselves online; they connect with the community and chat on Nextdoor. They participate in local giveaway groups, where porch pick up is the name of the game.

The bullying and vindictiveness evident in Burton-Harris’s Feb. 1, 2022 email to the Ann Arbor man contradicts a carefully cultivated public persona as a progressive reformer who values transparency.

As a temporary faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Law, the Chief Asst. Prosecutor’s biography states that, “She believes a progressive prosecutor is one who believes in fair and equal justice for all; ….a prosecutor who is transparent and accountable to the people.”

On her campaign Facebook page in a post dated Aug. 7, 2020, she wrote: “For those asking what’s next for Victoria…prosecutor accountability.”

“Prosecutor accountability?” said the resident against whom Burton-Harris threatened to file criminal charges of making a threat to a prosecutor. “That’s interesting.”

When asked if she regretted threatening a County resident, Victoria Burton-Harris did not respond.

The resident said he has received no apology from her, and that he may hire an attorney to help him file a complaint with the Michigan Bar Association against Eli Savit’s Number Two.