Rifts arise in review of Harding drug raid
Hired investigator clashes with DA over scope of role in case
Last year Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg went before Commissioners Court with a plea: give me more prosecutors to investigate the Harding Street raid.
Commissioners allocated money for new prosecutors and in October voted to spend up to $200,000 to hire Michael Bromwich, a widely respected internal investigator, to consult on the investigation of the narcotics raid that killed two homeowners, injured several Houston police officers and mired the department in scandal. Bromwich led an independent review of the Houston Police Department’s crime lab more than a decade ago, and served as the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General under the Clinton administration.
But internal emails and records show the DA’s Office appears to have sidelined the independent consultant. In the nine months
since commissioners voted to retain Bromwich, the only significant work he performed came from a two-day work trip to Houston totaling 17 hours of casework.
In February, a frustrated Bromwich sent an email to Ogg’s chief of staff, Vivian King, and Civil Rights Division Chief Natasha Sinclair, noting prosecutors had rebuffed his efforts to meet and had not shown “any meaningful interest” in allowing him to meet with them or work on the case.
“Because of the lack of communication from your office, I am unsure of the reasons why you have determined that my assistance is not needed,” he wrote, in an email to King on Feb. 21.
Commissioner Rodney Ellis said he recommended an outside set of eyes because of the scope of the alleged misconduct and to give the public confidence in the investigation.
“It’s not enough for those of us in public office to say ‘trust us,’” he said. “You have to trust but verify.”
Commissioner Adrian Garcia said he thought bringing Bromwich in to help “could have been very valuable, not just to investigation into the Harding Street raid, but I thought it could be very helpful in understanding the system that failed the department and failed the investigators.”
Dane Schiller, spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, said in a statement that the case is being investigated using grand juries, which are secret by law: “Commissioner Ellis, Commissioner Garcia and Mr. Bromwich have been notified of this repeatedly, and Mr. Bromwich agreed, that he could primarily be utilized for an after-action report and our work is far from over. This most recent push by Mr. Bromwich to obtain secret information for billable hours is wholly inappropriate and it is unimaginable that he is actually advocating that he be part of the investigation, knowing that is unlawful.”
Bromwich responded that his contract stipulated that he “provid[e] advice and guidance in connection with the Department’s review of more than 14,400 cases potentially tainted by the Houston Police Department narcotics officer(s) involved in the January 2019 Harding Street incident.”
He continued: “As this makes clear, much more was contemplated than an after-action report. … The DA’s Office has every right not to use me to provide the services agreed to under the contract. They don’t have the right to misrepresent what I was hired to do, nor make false claims about me.”
‘Pretty doggone thorough’
Bromwich began his career working as a federal prosecutor, then spent years alternating between private practice and government assignments handling internal investigations at the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and working as an “independent monitor” for the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, and the Virgin Islands Police Department.
Ellis said he first met Bromwich working with The Innocence Project.
More than a decade before the Harding Street Scandal, Bromwich investigated the Houston Police Department’s crime lab, which was then reeling from a series of scandals.
The lab was closed in late 2002 by then-acting Police Chief Timothy Oettmeier after being hit with problems ranging from water leaks that destroyed evidence to unqualified criminalists whose poor techniques destroyed evidence during testing.
“When you bring someone in like that, he’s going to find stuff, if it’s there,” Oettmeier said. “You’re baring your soul to someone who is pretty doggone thorough, and you need to be ready to address that when it comes up.”
Bromwich’s review took more than two years and cost roughly $5 million. City officials ultimately decided to separate the crime lab from the police department and turn it into an independent agency called the Houston Forensic Science Center.
Garcia — who dealt with Bromwich during his tenure on Houston City Council — described the consultant as “excrutiatingly, brutally honest.”
“He’s a hardass,” Garcia said. “He wasn’t pleasant to work with, but man did he get it done.”
‘Lack of communication’
The county’s contract with Bromwich came in nine months after a Houston police drug raid in January 2019 that devolved into gunfire. The officer who led the raid, Gerald Goines, was later accused of lying about buying drugs from the home, and Ogg subsequently announced prosecutors would be reviewing more than 14,000 cases Goines and his former squadmates had handled. In August, she charged him with murder. Goines’ partner, Steven Bryant, and four other former narcotics officers and supervisors have been charged with an array of other crimes, including tampering with government records, theft by a public servant and misapplication of fiduciary property.
Bromwich’s contract shows he agreed to work up to 20 hours a month advising Ogg’s civil rights prosecutors in their case review. Emails obtained by the Chronicle through records requests show Bromwich agreed to assist with “the development and preparation … of a final report by the DA’s Office on the investigation,” and an autopsy on the Harding Street raid, assuming the police department agreed to cooperate with the probe.
But the emails show that in the time since commissioners voted to retain Bromwich’s services, the only significant work he performed came from the two-day February work trip to Houston.
“This engagement is not what I envisioned, and I don’t see that it serves any continuing purpose. I am not accustomed to being ignored, nor am I comfortable serving as window dressing of any kind or for any purpose,” he wrote in the February 21 email. “I served Houston once before in my investigation of the Houston Police Department Crime Lab, and I had hoped that this assignment would, in a similar way, allow me to help the residents of Houston and Harris County by providing advice and guidance to your Office … I obviously cannot do so if I am not allowed to do so. But that’s where we are.”
Two days later, King responded, saying prosecutors were busy reviewing documents that did not require Bromwich’s consultation, asked him for an outline of how he could help, and noted that the DA’s Office was still operating under “disaster” conditions left over from Hurricane Harvey.
Bromwich responded that couldn’t do so because he wasn’t knowledgeable about the work prosecutors had performed — because of lack of communication from the DA’s Office in the first place.
“If the Civil Rights group is stretched as thin as you say, I would think that would make my potential assistance more rather than less welcome,” he wrote, in a followup email. “But that is your decision to make.”
County commissioners said they were disappointed that Ogg appeared to have sidelined Bromwich, and said it was one of the original reasons they had agreed to vote to give her money for more prosecutors.
“You had the opportunity to use one of the most respected experts in the country in one of the worst instances of civil rights violations in contemporary Houston policing,” Ellis said. “I’m disappointed that there was not a role for Bromwich, because I think it would have given tremendous credibility to what we do.”