DA Ogg’s memo to employees draws fire
Email reportedly threatened them to attend volunteer event
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg this week encouraged her prosecutors to attend a voter registration drive, where she would be present, in order for them to boost their standing in performance evaluations, according to an office-wide email circulating on Twitter.
Ogg, who is running for re-election as the Democratic candidate for district attorney, denied any ethical wrongdoing, and another prosecutor since said that the correspondence was a draft that contained incorrect information and was meant to be sent from his account. But the email has already contributed to one resignation from an assistant district attorney, who cited several examples of what she called Ogg’s “paranoia” and efforts to bolster her political status.
“Your repeated misuse of county resources and inaction in response to extraordinary worldwide crises demonstrates a lack of professionalism and leadership, and shows what is truly important to you,” Assistant District Attorney Cheryl Williamson Chapell wrote, according to a letter obtained by a reporter from the nonprofit news organization the Marshall Project. “Indeed, you seem to have emboldened dishonesty. I simply cannot work for you any longer.”
Ogg’s email, addressed on Tuesday to all assistant district attorneys, notified her prosecutors of a Ministers Coalition of Harris County voter registration drive and food giveaway on June 27. She would be speaking at the event and was looking for volunteers to help, the email read.
“Part of every employee’s performance evaluation includes a grade for personal development,” she continued. “This includes community activities and volunteering for projects like this.”
The prosecutors received a follow-up email Wednesday from Assistant District Attorney Mark
Goldberg — a former city councilman who has become one of Ogg’s trusted employees — who said that Ogg’s email should have been sent under his name.
“What you actually got was a draft form with some misinformation that was inadvertently distributed in that form, and I apologize for any confusion,” he wrote in the email, which was also obtained by the Marshall Project.
Dane Schiller, Ogg’s spokesman, denied that his boss ever made a threat against her employees. Ogg was never scheduled to speak at the event, and volunteering became a part of evaluations at the request of an employee-led committee, he said.
Even if Ogg had sent the email personally, Schiller said, “At the end of the day, all you have is her asking her employees to consider
volunteering in this poor, underserved neighborhood.”
Williamson Chapell then sent her email to Ogg and copied the staff on it, tendering her voluntary resignation.
In the letter, Williamson Chapell referenced an investigation Ogg initiated in March as to who might have leaked an internal document, actions that Texas Monthly reported. An investigator came to Williamson Chapell’s home to confiscate her work-issued laptop and cellphone, she said.
The prosecutor said she just received the email but denied distributing it, and declined to turn over her personal cell phone. When she did so, Ogg “all but threatened to terminate my employment,” she wrote.
She also accused Ogg of taking advantage of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis as a way to advance her political stature, and said her boss “implicitly threatened”
them into attending the voter registration drive.
Schiller declined to comment on that letter.
Defense attorney Murray Newman, who catalogues courthouse happenings on his blog and tweeted the original email sent from Ogg’s account, questioned why Ogg would be asking her prosecutors to come to a volunteer event when they are largely instructed not to come to the courthouse.
“Ethically, it’s kind of a nobrainer,” he said.
Ogg’s opponent for district attorney, Mary Nan Huffman, called the fallout “just another example of why Kim Ogg is unfit for office.” Huffman is a Houston Police Officer’s Union attorney and former Montgomery County prosecutor.
“The ultimate verdict will be rendered by the voters in November,” she said. “In a job where justice is paramount — integrity is everything.”