Boss Ogg Rides Again

As I've written many, many times before, Kim Ogg is no prosecutor.  

She's just another ambitious politician who currently holds a political office that happens to be that of the county's top prosecutor.  Long before her successful election in 2016, she had been a Republican and then a Democrat.  She shifts with the wind for whatever benefits her.  In her three and a half years as District Attorney, it is a wonder that she doesn't have whiplash as she has bounced back and forth between portraying herself as Ogg the Progressive and Ogg the Law & Order Prosecutor.

Kim Ogg has demonstrated time and again that she resembles Huey P. Long far more than Johnny Holmes when it comes to being a District Attorney.  

Ogg has unabashedly used asset forfeiture money acquired by the Office (that's the money the Office seizes from people charged with crimes under the theory that they were illegally gotten gains) to hire her political allies under the guise of them working in "community outreach" (see former Houston Police Department Chief and former HCDA Candidate Clarence Bradford, and former City Councilman Dwight Boykins, whose temporary tenure apparently only lasted through Ogg's contested Democratic primary this spring).  Then there was the hiring of former city councilman Mark Goldberg as a "baby" prosecutor who hung out in the misdemeanor trial bureau just long enough to do this before being promoted to the upper administration.

Speaking of Mark Goldberg, a quick check of the Harris County District Attorney's roster has him listed as belonging to the somewhat vague "Administrative Division."  However, Mark is signing off on his e-mails as "Community Outreach Committee Member" these days and that's where our latest story begins.

On Tuesday, an "All Prosecutor" e-mail went out to the Assistant District Attorneys employed by the citizens of Harris County, but under the supervision of D.A. Ogg.  The e-mail was from Boss Ogg herself.

The subject title had the all caps command to "VOLUNTEER" for an event arranged by The Ministers Coalition of Harris County.  As noted in the e-mail, the event was a "voter registration drive" coupled with a "food giveaway" where "DA Kim Ogg will be speaking."  According to Kim's e-mail, she was "looking for volunteers."

But here's the funny thing about the word "volunteer."  It's kinda-sorta a derivative from the word "voluntary," which means a free-will decision to do something.  Or at least, that's how I learned it, but then again, I am an Aggie.

But the next paragraph threw my entire understanding of the word into question by saying:  "Part of every employee's performance evaluation includes a grade for personal development.  This includes community activities and volunteering for projects like this."  She then encouraged people to "apply" (as if there was some sort of honor in being selected for this volunteer opportunity) with Mark Goldberg at his county-issued e-mail address.

Significantly, the e-mail was signed by Kim.

So what this e-mail was really saying was: "Hey, it's me.  Your boss, Kim.  I'm going to give some free stuff to people while registering them to vote so that they will have some real positive vibes toward me in November when it's time to vote.  I'm going to need some of my people to help me pull off this campaign stunt.  You are going to be graded on your performance evaluation by whether or not you help me.  Hugs and kisses, Kimbra."

Depending on how you look at it, that type of thing could be what we call "illegal."  Under some interpretations, it looks a little like Official Oppression.

At a minimum, it is insanely unethical.

It took a few seconds for someone to grab a screenshot and ultimately send to me.  I exercised my discretion for about three seconds before sharing that screenshot on Twitter.  It started popping up on Facebook pretty soon after that.  The condemnation of the e-mail was so strong that Kim did something she never does.

She walked it back.  

Well, I mean, she "walked it back" for her, by which I mean, she made somebody totally fall on the sword for the e-mail that she TOTALLY SIGNED WITH HER OWN NAME AND SENT FROM HER OWN E-MAIL ACCOUNT.  

That person was Misdemeanor Two, no wait, I mean Upper Administrator, no wait, I mean Community Outreach Committee Member Mark Goldberg, who wrote the most stunningly "Good God, how stupid do you think we are?" retraction e-mail in the history of retraction e-mails.

I mean, this e-mail has been out for a day and a half and I still can't read it without laughing.

"Late yesterday afternoon an email went out from DA Ogg that should have gone out under my name."  -- man, I wish I had a dollar for all of those e-mails that I've sent to people that inadvertently went out under somebody else's name.  It happens all the time.

"What you actually got was a draft form with some misinformation that was inadvertently distributed in that form."  -- You know what is worse than accidentally sending out an e-mail in the wrong person's name?  When you send out completely wrong stuff under that wrong person's name!

"Additionally, I would like to add that no one is ever required to volunteer."  -- please totally disregard that whole thingy we said early about volunteer or be punished.  You may now resume your original understanding of the word "volunteer."

To make matters even more interesting, the Houston Chronicle's Samantha Ketterer tweeted this about Goldberg's retraction:

I have to give Goldberg credit.  When he falls on the sword for his boss, he does it with gusto.  

His retraction basically reads like this:  "Hey Guys, Mark Goldberg here.  Yesterday, I went and got on Kim's e-mail and sent out a bunch of stuff that was completely made up,  I mean, all of it was totally fake.  I said there was this event.  I said Kim was going to be speaking.  I said you had to go volunteer for it or you'd get bad evaluations.  It was all bullshit.  Just kidding.  My bad.  Sorry for the misunderstanding.  Sincerely, Mark.  P.S.  Please believe me on this e-mail.  I really really need you to believe me."

I mean, damn, if what Mark said he did is really what he did, Kim Ogg should totally fire him, right?  I used to send practical joke e-mails from other people's computers back in the day, but I never had the guts to do that to the elected D.A!  Damn, dude.

Back in the old days, I used to call Pat Lykos' upper administration the Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight.  Kim Ogg's group makes them look like Seal Team Six.

The irony is that if what Mark said in his "retraction" is true, he's actually doing something worse than misinforming the assistant district attorneys.  He's acknowledging that he has the authorization to send campaign-style e-mails from Kim's e-mail account to all prosecutors.  Kind of calls into question what exactly the taxpayers are paying him for, doesn't it?  

It's just another day in the life at the Harris County District Attorney's Office under Boss Ogg.

Kim Ogg's Pandemic Witch Hunt

It started innocuously enough, a little over a month ago.  That seems like a lifetime ago, now, doesn't it?  The Coronavirus was just beginning to take a foothold on the western side of the country and maybe a case or two had been identified in Harris County.

As noted in an earlier post, the Office was already working around-the-clock to deal with the virus by relaxing the dress code.  They weren't sending their non-essential employees home back then, for some reason.  But Division Chief Tanisha Manning decided to get out ahead of the crisis by creating a worksheet to keep track of the Office's internal mortality rate.

Since the powers that be had no intention of issuing a blanket "stay-at-home" order at that time, the Office clearly needed to keep track of those less dedicated employees who weren't coming into work.  On its face, the chart is laughable.  So much so that I initially was curious as to whether or not it had been created facetiously.  

The beautifully color-coded chart for each day of the work week allowed for supervisors to document those employees within their respective divisions who were missing work for 1) non-COVID related reasons, 2) quarantining without symptoms, 3) being diagnosed with COVID or showing symptoms, or 4) something having to do with being in Court or at the Office's headquarters at 500 Jefferson.    The crown jewel of this ridiculous worksheet, however, was the top portion, which requested notification of those "Employees Seriously Ill or who have Passed Away due to COVID-19."  

As one employee noted:  "I'm supposed to call in dead?"

To be fair, Tanisha didn't come up with the questions being asked; those were apparently from the overarching Harris County government.  But, she did make it a very pretty worksheet that was sent out to other employees.  It wasn't really that big a deal, but it caused a couple of gallows-humor inspired chuckles amongst many of the employees at the Office.   Others took it to be an all-too-frightening warning.  That same morning was when news of an exposed prosecutor had resulted in a shutdown of the 8th floor of the CJC and people in HAZMAT suits were greeting visitors when they entered the building.

At some point, someone took a photograph of the worksheet while it was displayed on a computer monitor and sent it to a friend or two.  And that's where the trouble started.  

A troublemaking, bald-headed defense attorney (who strangely enough was not me) posted that photo on Facebook and lightly made fun of it.

It is important to keep the timeframe in context here, because it's very relevant.  

The day after this silly worksheet came out, everything got real serious over at the CJC.  Prosecutors were sent home and told to work from there.  The CJC began aggressively shutting down bond dockets and keeping people out of the building entirely.   In short, the crisis of the coronavirus was hitting home and we were all in full-fledged crisis mode.

But for Kim Ogg, the real crisis wasn't the coronavirus.  

It was finding out whoever leaked that photograph to a defense attorney.  It was time for a good old-fashioned witch hunt.

For what it's worth, I had no idea that any of this was going on at the time.  My first clue that something was afoot came when I e-mailed a senior Felony Chief prosecutor about a case and never heard back.  Having dealt with this Chief before on many occasions and knowing him to be an extremely responsible and diligent prosecutor, I found this to be unusual.  I made mention to someone else that I found this to be unusual.  That person then told me the story that I'm about to tell you (if you don't already know it).

Now, before going any further, I want to make a couple of things VERY clear.  By the time you get to the end of this blog post, you will understand why.  The first thing I want made clear is that I am 100% confident in the information I'm about to write.  The second thing is that I received this information from multiple, multiple sources and I'm not going to name them under any circumstances.  If Kim Ogg would like to know them, she can call me on my direct line at 713-BITE-MYASS.  And finally, I'm not going to name the prosecutors targeted in this witch hunt.  They were all treated unfairly and I have no intention of making it worse for them by naming them.  If you comment on this post and name any of them, I won't be publishing your comment.  

As I was saying . . .

While everyone else was pulling together to help keep the Criminal Justice System moving forward, Crazy Kim Ogg was ramping up her own version of the Spanish Inquisition.  She dispatched her Chief Investigator Steve Clappart and his team of investigators to locate the dastardly, disloyal person who had shared the photograph.  Prosecutors were interrogated and were asked whether or not they had received the picture, and if so, had they forwarded it on to anyone outside the Office.

A senior felony chief prosecutor acknowledged having received the photo and sending it to a handful of other prosecutors but told the investigator that it had not been sent to anyone outside the Office.  Stunningly, the prosecutor was immediately suspended and the prosecutor's county-issued computer was confiscated.  The investigator then asked for the prosecutor to turn over the prosecutor's personal cell phone for downloading, and the prosecutor declined.

So to satisfy Kim Ogg's paranoia, a prosecutor (who was not the source of the photo, nor the person who forwarded said photo to the above-mentioned bald defense attorney) was suspended for sharing the photo with a group of prosecutors. 

Let that sink in for just a moment.

With the coronavirus in full effect and everyone is involved in a group effort to help, Kim Ogg sidelines an experienced Felony District Court Chief for her arbitrary belief that the prosecutor was somehow "disloyal."

Seem stupid and paranoid?  Probably because it is.

But wait, there's more.  Kim Ogg and Chief Stormtrooper Clappart would do something similar to six more senior prosecutors -- four additional District Court Chiefs, and two senior Felony Twos.  Those six wouldn't actually be suspended, but they did have either Clappart or one of his investigators show up at their doors to confiscate their work computers for a good old-fashioned Disloyalty Download.  Again, the investigators were told to request the personal cell phones of all of those prosecutors for download, and again all were denied.

As a side note, I really want to give a huge shout out to Harris County District Attorney Chief Investigator Steve Clappart.  You have really come a long way from the olden days when you were a respected Homicide investigator with HPD.  From drafting a bullshit Capital Murder warrant to charge a teenager as an alternate suspect on behalf of David Temple's defense team to shaking down senior prosecutors for their personal cell phones.   You've got to be so proud.  I guess what your former colleagues think of you no longer matters.  Hey, I've got a mystery for an old Homicide guy:  figure out who murdered your reputation.  SPOILER ALERT:  It was you.

So, back to the Mad Queen.

Although not suspended, the additional six prosecutors no longer had their computers,  which drastically reduced their ability to do their jobs while the rest of us were trying to figure out Zoom conferences and other things that were desperately needed in the crisis.  Not just any prosecutors, but senior prosecutors who are all highly respected for the jobs that they do.  These were the exact people who needed to be working at full capacity through this crisis, not sidelined to satisfy Kim's paranoia.

The ultimate irony in this was that none of those seven sidelined prosecutors either a) took the photo; b) shared the photo with the defense attorney; nor c) shared it outside of the Office.  They all just got punished for refusing to turn over their private cell phones to the idiots running the witch hunt.  

Kim's ego-fueled paranoia couldn't have come at a worse time.  But it wasn't over yet.

All of the prosecutors were told to come into the Office or participate in a Zoom conference with the Empress herself.  All had refused to turn over their personal cell phones to Clappart and Company, but perhaps they would cave when asked by Ogg herself.  Ogg told them all that they could be fired for failing to turn over their personal phones for download.  They all stood their ground, refusing to turn over their personal, private data in an effort to extinguish Kim's lunacy.

In the middle of this, the actual prosecutor who had sent the picture to the defense came forward.  This prosecutor was also a respected Felony District Court Chief who didn't want anyone else having to suffer Kim's wrath for something that they hadn't done.  The prosecutor explained that the purpose of sharing the photo had been out of concern, not mockery.  The prosecutor offered up their personal cell phone.  Ironically, the investigator declined to take it.

That was a week or so ago.  Time kind of runs together these days.  Ultimately the Original Seven prosecutors all received letters of reprimand in their files for their alleged insubordination for failing to turn over their phones.   They have been told that they all are going to be transferred out of their current assignments immediately, on the off chance that any of them were happy where they were.

Today, the prosecutor who came forward was fired.  I'm not sure what exactly the rationale was behind firing somebody who a) didn't break the law; b) didn't break an actual rule in the Office's Operation manual; and c) was honest about the prosecutor's involvement in the "scandal." As with the Original Seven, this prosecutor had a stellar reputation for leadership and being reasonable.  Those things are desperately needed right now.

All to satisfy the ego-driven bully currently residing as the Harris County District Attorney.

Kim, you've jumped from being a terrible public servant to just being a terrible person, in general.  You possess none of the qualities of leadership that the prosecutors you punished all have.  You are petty and vindictive, and this ridiculous witch hunt has shown that Public Interest and Safety is far less important to you than your own ego and misguided definitions of loyalty.

I'm embarrassed of you and I'm embarrassed for you.

To the eight of you who got tangled up in this stupid witch hunt, I'm sure that you know your reputations for both integrity and talent far outshine anything that Kim Ogg has ever accomplished in her career.  

Supporting Other Candidates in a Kim Ogg World

Around 9 a.m. on December 24, 2008, Acting Harris County District Attorney Ken Magidson called me into his office and told me (for the second time in a month) that I was fired.

"I'm firing you for what you wrote on your blog.  It's too much."

He actually uttered those words.

Under the circumstances, I was caught off guard.  I was already planning on that day being my last at the Office and taking comp time for the remainder of 2008.  My contract wasn't going to be renewed so I was done effectively at midnight on December 31st, anyway.

But getting fired cost me some money.  There was no taking comp time if you didn't work there anymore.  I think all in all, Magidson's decision to pull the trigger as an early Christmas present cost me around $4,000.  Given the fact that I was going through a divorce and had child support looming, that was kind of a kick in the financial crotch.

Over the past eleven years since that fateful day, I've revisited the idea of whether or not I should have filed a lawsuit on many occasions.  I thought about it.  In the end I decided it really wasn't worth the effort.  My life was going through a reboot at the time, and adding the pet project of a lawsuit wasn't really all that appealing.

There is still a part of me that wishes I had, because when Magidson uttered those words, he was telling me that he was terminating my employment because of words I had written -- outside of work -- while expressing my opinion.   Sometimes I wish I had made a different decision at the time, just for the principle of defending my 1st Amendment rights. On occasion, I get really angry at 2008 Me for not doing that.

I bring this up now for a couple of reasons.

Campaign season is upon us, and as I have mentioned before, there are already six candidates lined up to challenge incumbent District Attorney Kim Ogg for her job.  Several of those candidates are immensely more popular with prosecutors at the Office than Ogg is.  Given their druthers, most prosecutors that I know (and I know a whole lot of prosecutors) would love nothing more than to support the candidate of their choice.

But unfortunately, they work for Kim Ogg.  And as Ogg demonstrated last month by firing Andrew Smith, she is not afraid to fire an employee for blatantly unethical (and quite possibly illegal) reasons.  Although the job of a prosecutor is to seek justice, in Ogg's paranoid world, the primary job is to be loyal to her.  As she demonstrated with Andrew, she ain't afraid to shank somebody for crossing her.

As a result of Kim's erratic and ruthless behavior, don't expect to see too many current prosecutors exercising their 1st Amendment right to support a candidate other than her Royal Oggness.  Ogg's level of paranoia and retaliatory nature make Pat Lykos seem like Mahatma Gandi.  And keep in mind that Lykos had some of her loyalists staking out fundraising events for Mike Anderson, and she also seriously jacked with Carvana Cloud to retaliate against Carvana's support of Clarence Bradford for D.A.

I would imagine that Kim Ogg will be far more retaliatory towards any employee that she finds supporting any other candidate.  I say this in advance because I hope that nobody thinks that a lack of current prosecutors showing up at fundraisers for other candidates means that they don't support those other candidates.  They just don't want to get fired for that support.

From the outside, looking in, it is easy for critics to say, "Well, if they hate working for Kim Ogg so much, why don't they just quit?"  I heard that line a lot in 2012 when Mike Anderson was running against Lykos.  I'm sure we'll hear it again over the next few months.  It was a stupid criticism then and it would be equally stupid now.  Losing a job is a devastating event -- especially when you have a family to support and need things such as money and insurance.

Not to mention being a prosecutor is a fantastic job.  One can be loyal to the job without being loyal to the paranoid despot who is the current District Attorney.

If you are a current employee of the Harris County District Attorney's Office and you don't want to risk your job by supporting another candidate, there are still many things that you can do to give support. 

First and foremost, tell your family, friends, and neighbors your thoughts in private conversations.  Let them know what you think of your current boss and tell them why you think somebody else would make a better choice.  Encourage those same family, friends, and neighbors to learn more about those candidates and attend those fundraisers and "meet and greets" that you can't safely attend.  Let them know why you can't speak out in public, but find a way to educate them.  Encourage THEM to make a donation since you can't.

Although I don't know if this is still the current law, back in 2012, a candidate only had to list a donor who gave $50.00 or more to a campaign.  There were a lot of folks who donated $49.99 to Mike Anderson's campaign back then.  You don't have to go out in a blaze of glory by starting a blog that bashes Ogg or anything stupid like that, but you can still help other candidates if you so choose.

Sometimes, those little gestures of support are far more sincere and powerful than any donation or attendance at a fundraiser.

The Belated Firing of John Denholm

So, after eight days of looking desperately for excuses not to have to fire careful deliberation about John Denholm, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg fired the former Intake Division Chief.  As I'm sure you know, Denholm was thrust into the spotlight earlier this week after rejecting charges on an attempted sexual assault case because the victim on the case might possibly be "an illegal."

Ogg had apparently hoped that the story of Denholm's absolutely inexcusable behavior would blow over with a little time.  Unfortunately for Ogg and Denholm, however, statements from the Houston Police Officer's Union (HPOU), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and Texas Congressman (and former Harris County Assistant District Attorney) Gene Wu have made it clear that the story was not going away.  The story broke on television a few nights ago and Keri Blakinger followed up with an article in the Houston Chronicle.  This morning, the Washington Post brought Denholm's stupidity to the level of national attention.

Why it took Ogg eight days to arrive at the seemingly obvious conclusion escapes me.

Ogg is far more well-known for her impetuous decision-making and general hotheaded responses when angered than she is for using cool rationale to respond to problems.  The fact that she waited eight days before firing Denholm is indicative that it was not a decision that she wanted to make.  That's not all that surprising, I suppose, given her history.  Let's not forget how long it took her to decide to recuse the Office from the David Temple case, despite extremely obvious conflicts of interests she had with the case.

But, alas, poor John Denholm's last day did come today.  It is my understanding that Denholm was given the option of resigning, but he refused.  Apparently, in his mind, he did nothing wrong.  He certainly wasn't willing to "take one for the team" and bow out gracefully.  So, Kim did what she had to do and finally sent a minion to take Fredo fishing.



Kim's belated firing of Denholm is not likely to placate anyone with any common sense, and the fact of the matter is that she wouldn't have found herself in this situation if she wasn't such a shameless politician.  Denholm was an unabashed political hire who was put in a position of leadership that he had neither the credentials nor the intellect to handle.

Before I go into Denholm's credentials (or lack thereof), I will, once again, point out that he and I have a personal grudge with each other that I will cover below.

I first met Denholm when he was a lieutenant with the Harris County Sheriff's Office Homicide Division.  He seemed alright to me back then, but I didn't know him particularly well.  His group of Homicide Investigators drank beer with the group of prosecutors that I hung out with back in the early 2000s.

Denholm went to law school and when Kelly Siegler was prepping for trial on David Temple, she asked Denholm to use his law school "expertise" to play defense attorney in a mock trial run-through.  John thought he did a wonderful job, but told Kelly that if he had been the lead homicide investigator on the case when it first happened, he'd have gotten a confession out of him.  Denholm was never short on confidence.

After Temple had been convicted and Denholm had gotten his law license, he started up with his talk about how David Temple was innocent.  One of the people he told about it was none other than Dick DeGuerin, Temple's trial lawyer.  It was a dramatic reversal of opinion coming from Denholm, and many of his former co-workers at HCSO looked at it as Denholm saying whatever he could to ingratiate himself with the famous defense attorney.  One HCSO Homicide Detective went so far as to tell me: "If Denholm dropped dead tomorrow, you couldn't find six guys around here who would carry his casket."

Although Lisa Falkenberg would later portray Denholm (and his cohort, Steve Clappart) as heroes who lost friends for making a stand for Justice in their defense of David Temple, that wasn't the reality.  The reality was that the two of them lost friends because none of those former friends believed that Denholm was doing anything other than trying to advance his defense attorney career with the help of Dick DeGuerin.  The fact that Denholm and Clappart were willing to file capital murder charges on a kid (that not even Temple's own defense team would accuse during the second trial) didn't go over very well with those former friends, either.

I can't help but wonder what Lisa thinks about Denholm in light of this week's events.

A few months after I had blogged about what Clappart and Denholm had tried to do with their secret warrant, I received notice from the State Bar of Texas that John Denholm had filed a grievance against me for trying to "subvert justice" by exposing their plan in my blog.  The State Bar dismissed Denholm's complaint as meritless, of course, but I won't lie -- it was infuriating to know that he had pulled such a pathetic ploy.

When Ogg took Office and hired Denholm as a Division Chief, I was shocked.  I knew that he was a campaign donor, but he had only been a lawyer for about eight years.  Eight pretty undistinguished years.   He had the credentials to maybe start as a junior Felony Two, at best.  The idea of making him a Division Chief was absurd.

Yet, thanks to political patronage, there he was.

Unsurprisingly, Denholm did about as well as one would expect in the Intake Division slot.  He considered himself to be an all-knowing combination of ex-cop and super prosecutor.  Multiple officers claimed he was condescending and rude when they called in for charges. He seemed to enjoy rejecting charges that didn't live up to his high standards.  Those charges that he did take were often baffling.  His reputation with the Defense Bar and his fellow prosecutors ultimately coined the term "Denholm Special" for describing charges that were inexplicable.

For those of us who know John Denholm, learning that he had refused charges on somebody because the victim "might be illegal" didn't really come as too much of a surprise.  Stupid is as stupid does, after all.  The only thing truly shocking about this was Kim Ogg's utter lack of appropriate reaction to Denholm's actions.

Upon learning of Denholm's actions, what Kim should have done was suspend him with pay pending an investigation. 

But, that's not what she did.  What she did was immediately announce that he had been promoted to a coveted spot in Special Crimes reassigned.  Make no mistake about this fact:  any attempts that Kim Ogg makes to pretend she was "investigating" Denholm for the past eight days are utter crap highly suspect.  They knew everything that had transpired immediately.  Another prosecutor had already filed the charges that Denholm had so flippantly rejected.  The decision to move him had already been made.

If it hadn't been for HPOU President Joe Gamaldi's press statement and demand that Denholm be fired, it is reasonable to believe that Kim thought the issue had been handled.  She had removed Denholm from Intake and she probably thought that would alleviate the problem.

The fact that she waited for eight days and a Washington Post article before firing him clearly illustrates that her decision was based more on politics than on outrage over what Denholm had done.  Kim has fired many other people for far less and she has done so far more quickly.  Hell, she's fired other people for less and more quickly today, according to some information I received this evening.

We'll talk more about that later.