A2Politico: When Will Voters Get Wise? County Dem Pols Are Wolves in Progressive Clothing

by P.D. Lesko

Dem County Prosecutor Eli Savit, running for AG, has demonstrated the leadership and ethics he’ll bring to Lansing in refusing to make public his handling of the alleged unethical conduct and perjury of Asst. Prosecutor Marieh Tanha. Court records, including Tanha’s notarized financial disclosures, bank statements and a deposition, show Tanha repeatedly deceived the 22nd Circuit Court to hide marital assets, and to obtain a PPO against her ex-husband. Circuit Court Judge Jinan Hamood was told of the misconduct and alleged perjury on Sept. 3, 2025.

While Judge Hamood is not legally required to investigate perjury allegations, she is legally required to report lawyers who violate their ethical obligations to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. A judge may also refer allegations of perjury to police or the County Prosecutor.

Circuit court records show that Prosecutor Savit habitually asks our circuit court judges to dismiss felony charges against three-time domestic violence abusers. Worse still, our circuit court judges play ball with the Prosecutor. Instead of telling the Prosecutor our Circuit Court takes domestic violence seriously, these jurists, who should be protecting the public, agree to drop felony domestic violence charges. They set domestic abusers loose to beat the life out of their victims another day.

In one example, Circuit Court judge Carol Kuhnke has presided over cases brought by the County Prosecutor against Jason P. Kovacs. Those cases began with domestic violence charges and assault with a weapon, and most recently (no surprise) included felony domestic violence charges.

In 2023, court records show Judge Kuhnke agreed to put Kovacs on probation, a white, 6′ 4,” repeat domestic abuser who was charged with a second notice of assaulting a pregnant woman and a third time notice of domestic violence (a felony with an automatic prison stay). “Progressive” Eli Savit asked the judge to dismiss the third time domestic violence notice against Kovacs and Judge Kuhnke did so.

The County Sheriff

“Progressive” County Sheriff Alyshia Dyer recently hired Ardis Lewis, Jr. as a Corrections Officer. Corrections officers asked to train Lewis circulated a protest petition, and Alyshia Dyer punished them, including threatening to fire experienced corrections officers for the sake of a new, unqualified hire.

Lewis and his “club” Men Like Us were the subject of a 2023 public nuisance suit by Ypsilanti Twp. Lewis’s club was the site named in over two dozen police complaints within a 24-month period, complaints which included gun violence, attempted murder, and a variety of assaults. This resulted in Men Like Us being shuttered by Circuit Court Judge Timothy P. Connors. Lewis moved his business across the county line into Wayne, MI and opened a new club, the Plus One Lounge. The Wayne Administrator, a former Wayne County Commissioner, shut down the Plus One Lounge for unlicensed sales of liquor and food.

Then, Ardis Lewis, Jr. passed a background check, and Sheriff Alyshia Dyer hired him. Officials contacted in the course of Lewis’s background check contacted the newspaper, outraged. In his comments to the A2Indy, Ypsilanti Twp. attorney Doug Winters was unequivocal in his condemnation of Sheriff Dyer’s hire of Lewis. Winters tried to use FOIA to obtain Lewis’s background check, but the FOIA was denied. Ardis Lewis, Jr.’s right to privacy was deemed more important than the public’s right to know how he passed the Sheriff’s background check. Magic, probably.

Before hiring Ardis Lewis, Jr., Sheriff Dyer appointed her former boyfriend to head her department’s HR and training. She didn’t hire him in a legal, open hiring process. The County Sheriff appointed her former boyfriend Jeremiah Richardson to a supervisory position. Then, in a move befitting the dictator of a Banana Republic, Sheriff Dyer said it was her right to appoint her former boyfriend to a job in the Sheriff’s Dept.

Michigan law gives a county sheriff the right to appoint an undersheriff and as many deputy sheriffs and special (honorary) deputies as they like. All other sheriff’s department employees must be hired. County records show that soon after Alyshia Dyer took office, she appointed County Administrator Greg Dill a special deputy.

HR employees in the Sheriff’s Dept. have said that Richardson has told them to ignore positive drug tests and other applicant red flags under pain of losing their jobs so the Sheriff can fill open positions. Not all candidates are unqualified, but Sheriff Dyer is perpetrating a fraud upon the County Commissioners and the public by reporting about her “successes” in recruitment without admitting that she has instructed her former boyfriend (whom the previous Sheriff was set to fire due to ineptitude, according to Richardson’s state policing records) to lower the hiring standards.

The County’s Racial Equity Officers

In March 2024, the A2Indy reported on the eyebrow-raising county credit card charges of former Washtenaw County Racial Equity Officer Alize Asberry Payne. The newspaper then used FOIA to obtain Asberry Payne’s job application for the position of Racial Equity Officer and went about fact-checking Asberry Payne’s educational and experiential claims. The newspaper’s reporting revealed Asberry Payne’s financial crimes documented in California Superior Court records, and that the Racial Equity Officer’s claims of degrees and honors could not be confirmed by Registrars of the multiple colleges which Asberry Payne’s job application stated she had attended.

Prior to her hire, Asberry Payne underwent a background check done by the County Sheriff’s “Special Investigations Unit.” That “investigation,” conducted by an independent contractor, missed the fact that while interviewing for the job, Asberry Payne was the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the California Superior Court in San Francisco. Asberry Payne had her lawyer send the newspaper a letter threatening a lawsuit and in the letter the lawyer, Robert Burton-Harris (husband of the County Chief Asst. Prosecutor Victoria Burton-Harris), alleged the A2Indy’s coverage was based on racial discrimination.

In Aug. 2024, Asberry Payne resigned her position, having been forced to sign a document in which she admitted to poor judgement. Her direct supervisor, County Administrator Greg Dill, updated the County’s outdated 2011 credit card usage policy, but escaped any accountability for his poor judgement in the hiring and employment of Asberry Payne. In three years, Dill never evaluated Asberry Payne, but raised her pay 40 percent.

When the former Sheriff’s Dir. of Engagement lost his well-financed 2024 bid to be County Sheriff, he was appointed to Asberry Payne’s job. County leaders threw DEI under the bus with Jackson’s hire.

In part, Derrick Jackson lost his bid to be the next Sheriff, because he spent a decade impersonating a social worker and the A2Indy and MLive exposed the fraud. In his resume and job application to teach at EMU, Jackson claimed awards he never received. Then, he complained in social media posts the newspapers’ articles about his fraud were the result of racial discrimination. This is Washtenaw County’s Racial Equity Officer. Can the County only hire grifters to that position? Probably.

County Commissioners

In Mar. 2024, public records examined by A2Indy revealed that County Commissioners Caroline Sanders and Crystal Lyte had overspent their $7,000 Flex Spending accounts by thousands of dollars. In essence, the two women had stolen public money. Worse still, the two women then waited months to repay taxpayers after their misuse of public funds was made public.

In 2023, Caroline Sanders and Crystal Lyte took an almost $3,000 Metrocar ride to Shepler’s dock and back again for the Mackinac Conference; Sanders and Lyte enjoyed over $3,700 worth of dinner, drinks and dancing paid for by taxpayers at the Black and Gold Gala Ball put on by a chapter of a fraternity to which County Administrator Dill belongs; Sanders spent thousands of dollars attending the National Association of Counties conference, in Austin, TX.

The truth is that a self-serving, greedy, crooked, dishonest “progressive” politician is little more than a wolf in progressive clothing. Unfortunately, a majority of county voters don’t appear to be as canny as Little Red Riding Hood, who through her powers of observation escaped being eaten by the wolf.