City of Detroit employees were ordered to delete emails to conceal the extent of the city’s support for the Make Your Date program as the Free Press was preparing to publish its initial investigative report on the nonprofit, a former city official told the newspaper.

The city's top lawyer, Corporation Counsel Lawrence Garcia, confirmed on Thursday evening that emails related to Make Your Date were deleted. Garcia did not give the circumstances under which the emails were deleted or how many documents were involved. But he said Mayor Mike Duggan issued a new executive order last week to clarify the city's rules for preserving emails.

The former city official told the Free Press that two workers in the Detroit Office of Development and Grants who conducted fundraising for Make Your Date were instructed to delete their emails related to the prenatal care program and its director, Dr. Sonia Hassan. Deleted emails were later recovered once administration officials reversed the order, she said.

Both the Michigan Attorney General’s Office and Detroit Inspector General now are looking into the deleted emails.

Both offices previously launched inquiries into Make Your Date after a Free Press investigation in April revealed that the city provided the program with more than $350,000 in federal grants and that Duggan ordered a fundraising campaign for it in 2017. The city’s support for the program raised questions because Duggan was seen last year meeting Hassan after hours at a suburban home.

Attorney General Dana Nessel instructed her criminal division to look into the allegations of deleted emails after the issue was brought to her personal attention, her spokeswoman said this week. Nessel personally weighed in after her criminal division chief initially deferred the deleted email complaints to the Detroit Inspector General.

“The attorney general directed our criminal division to reopen the file,” spokeswoman Kelly Rossman-McKinney said. “She was adamant that we take a very active role in this.”

Kennedy Shannon, the former assistant director who initially made the allegations, said in an interview that one of the employees approached her in April to talk about the deleted emails, days after publication of the Free Press’ investigation into Make Your Date and Duggan’s ties to Hassan. As an assistant director in the Detroit Office of Development and Grants, Shannon worked alongside the employees told to delete their emails.

“I definitely think it’s a cover-up," Shannon said, "and I think it’s an attempt to hide the fact that more city resources were spent ... than what the mayor said they were.”

Duggan and Detroit Chief Financial Officer Dave Massaron in May learned about the possibility some emails related to Make Your Date had been deleted, according to Garcia.

"CFO Massaron promptly took the lead in the effort to recover the emails. To the best of our knowledge, the deleted emails were successfully retrieved," Garcia said in a written statement to the Free Press. "Approximately two months ago, the Office of Inspector General was informed of the circumstances and was provided the emails recovered."

Shannon described in written complaints to the Detroit Inspector General and the Attorney General’s office how her co-workers were told to delete their Make Your Date emails.

“I have personal knowledge that leadership of the Office of Development and Grants asked staff members to delete emails in an attempt by the Mayor’s office to hide facts regarding the (city's) true efforts regarding fundraising for this organization,” Shannon’s May 31 written complaint to the Attorney General’s office reads.

Nessel personally responds

The Attorney General’s Office responded to Kennedy on July 3 and said it would defer to the Detroit Inspector General.

“I reached out to that office, and was advised that they do in fact have an open file on this matter,” criminal division chief Richard Cunningham wrote to Shannon in a letter. “Since the Inspector General is already looking into your assertions, this office will defer to their actions.”

Rossman-McKinney said the Attorney General’s Office received two complaints from city employees related to Make Your Date. She confirmed new letters would be sent to the employees now that Nessel has reopened the inquiry.

“Once the issue was brought to the attorney general’s personal attention, she directed Cunningham to reopen the file,” Rossman-McKinney said. “We are definitely looking into their complaints.”

The Detroit Office of Inspector General would not comment on its investigation involving deleted emails.

"Any interviews conducted as part of an ongoing OIG investigation would be considered confidential and therefore we would not have a comment," Deputy Inspector General Kamau Marable said.

The inspector general’s inquiries into the deleted emails appear to be part of its broader probe into whether the city and Duggan gave preferential treatment to Make Your Date.

Viki Harrison, director of state operations for the nonpartisan grassroots organization Common Cause, said city employees being asked to delete emails is the “most basic, unethical thing” government officials could ask of subordinates. Common Cause is a national organization that advocates for open and clean government.

“That's just shocking,” Harrison said. “I mean deleting emails is just the absolute worst, I think, because there's no other reason to do it than to try to hide something. There is no reason to delete an email other than preventing them (the press or public) from finding out the truth. And if you haven't done anything wrong, why would you do that? I can imagine the city attorneys would just have a heart attack if they know employees are doing this.”

Harrison also questioned whether it raises any potential legal concerns for the city.

“They know that's wrong,” Harrison said. “There's a reason why places have retention records. I'm not a lawyer but I would definitely talk to lawyers, because that could absolutely be illegal. It's most certainly unethical. … Quite frankly, if they were told to do this in this instance, the first thought I had is, how widespread is this?”

The city has policies that set rules for how public records can be destroyed. Detroit’s policy prior to Duggan's new executive order incorporated records retention requirements established by the state.

General correspondence records — which city emails are often classified as — must be preserved for at least two years, according to the state policy followed by the City of Detroit. The policy states that “records cannot be destroyed unless their disposition is authorized by an approved retention and disposal schedule.”

Furthermore, records cannot be disposed of if they are part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, investigation or lawsuit.

The Attorney General’s Office also has an ongoing review of Make Your Date’s nonprofit status. Make Your Date has held fundraisers and raised more than $1.5 million since its inception in 2014, yet it has not registered with the state to solicit donations. Hassan, who runs Make Your Date, has said through a spokesman that the program is run through Wayne State University and is not a stand-alone nonprofit. Duggan has echoed those statements about Make Your Date's structure as a WSU program and not a stand-alone nonprofit.

But a Make Your Date fundraising pitch in July 2018 described the organization as an independent nonprofit that relies on WSU to act as a fiduciary that handles its money. "Currently, MYD, a separate 501c3, is housed at the Detroit Medical Center and Wayne State University is its fiduciary," the pitch reads.

What prompted order to delete?

Shannon said it was a FOIA request earlier this year, around February, that preceded the order to delete emails.

Once details of Duggan’s relationship with Hassan and the city’s support for Make Your Date were published by the Free Press in April, one of the city employees tasked with raising money for Make Your Date became upset about having followed orders months earlier to delete her emails.

The employee was the city’s main fundraiser for Make Your Date for about a year, according to Shannon. The employee reached out to about 50 organizations on behalf of Make Your Date, including the Carls Foundation, a Bloomfield Hills charity that gave Make Your Date a $51,285 grant last October.

The Free Press reached out to the employee through her attorney, but the attorney declined to comment.

The employee's extensive fundraising efforts conflict with the Duggan administration’s public statements about the city’s support of Make Your Date.

Duggan’s chief of staff, Alexis Wiley, vehemently denied that the city raised any money for Make Your Date when asked by the Free Press in March.

Wiley insisted the city’s efforts were unsuccessful after the Free Press obtained an email showing Duggan ordered the city’s chief development official, Ryan Friedrichs, to launch a fundraising campaign for Make Your Date.

Wiley said the city “made a number of preliminary inquiries” on behalf of Make Your Date, including sending concept papers to the Skillman Foundation and Children’s Hospital. Wayne State, however, decided it didn’t need the city’s help because its philanthropy staff could handle the fundraising, according to Wiley.

“As far as Make Your Date, neither Mr. Friedrichs nor (his office) raised any philanthropic money for Make Your Date,” Wiley wrote in an e-mail to the Free Press on March 29.

But the fundraising work by the employees who raised money for Make Your Date contradicts Wiley’s statements. So does a letter signed by Duggan last July seeking support for Make Your Date from the Carls Foundation. The Free Press obtained Duggan's letter through a public records request.

Elizabeth Stieg, executive director of the Carls Foundation, which gave Make Your Date the $51,285 grant, said the first call came from the Detroit mayor’s office in February 2018. Make Your Date initially sought $100,000 from the Carls Foundation, records obtained by the Free Press show.

“There was an inquiry from the mayor’s office by phone call, then Wayne State called us and said, ‘Let’s have a meeting on this,’ ” Stieg said.

Duggan wrote to Stieg in his letter: "On behalf of The City of Detroit, I would like to express my full support for Make Your Date's (MYD) proposal submission to The Carls Foundation to expand their services and preterm birth reduction strategy across the City of Detroit."

WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) first reported the city’s involvement in the Carls Foundation grant to Make Your Date.

Wiley’s initial denial that the city raised money for Make Your Date is part of a broader effort to minimize the magnitude of city resources directed to Make Your Date, Shannon said. That effort includes the orders to employees to delete their emails related to Make Your Date, she said.

It took several attempts by the Free Press to obtain emails during its initial investigation because city officials said emails showing that Duggan had ordered fundraising efforts for Make Your Date had been "corrupted."

Messages from city officials to Hassan were not included in the city’s initial 395-page response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which had been reviewed by the law department. Instead, the initial FOIA response included a single email between Wiley, Hassan and Friedrichs with a message body that read, “Attachment is corrupted.” After the Free Press questioned the "corrupted" notation on the attachment, the city provided the emails about the fundraising campaign and explained that “clean copies” were eventually discovered during a “manual search.”

“It appears this particular email thread was corrupted during (the city’s IT department) process of transferring the emails identified as part of its search parameters,” according to a March 18 letter from the city’s FOIA coordinator.

Shannon said the Inspector General’s Office interviewed her in May about the order to delete emails. Shannon said she gave the office names of the two employees who were told to delete their emails. Shannon then joined one of the employees when she was summoned a couple weeks later by the inspector general’s office to discuss the deleted Make Your Date emails.

Shannon filed her complaint with the inspector general at a time she felt that she was being unfairly punished at work.

As assistant director of grants, Shannon was in charge of approving expenditures for Motor City Match, an assistance program for small businesses. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a report in September that identified several elements of the program that are out of compliance with federal requirements. City officials said they updated Motor City Match's policies and procedures and have developed a strategy to address HUD's findings.

Shannon said she felt some of the Motor City Match expenditures were improper and refused to sign off on them. At the same time, she was gathering documents related to the small business program and working behind the scenes with a television reporter to expose problems with Motor City Match.

On May 1, Shannon was suspended for 30 days, she said, for allegedly getting paid while she wasn’t working. Shannon said the suspension was unfounded. She said she was getting paid while not at work because she was absent under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The real reason she was suspended, Shannon said she believes, is because her bosses suspected her of feeding information to the media about Motor City Match.

Before her suspension ended, on May 23, Shannon was told she would be fired as of June 1. Shannon said there were a hodgepodge of reasons given — including documents saved to her work computer related to her small business selling waist trainers and hair extensions. Shannon said she worked on the small business during her lunch hour. She believes she was fired because she was digging into the office’s work on Make Your Date and because she wouldn’t approve funding for the Motor City Match program.

The day after she was suspended, Shannon said she contacted the Office of Inspector General to discuss problems in the Motor City Match program. At a subsequent meeting with an OIG investigator on May 9 to discuss Motor City Match, Shannon also described how workers in her office were told to delete their emails related to Make Your Date.

As the OIG began looking into Shannon’s claims about the deleted emails, the Free Press put in a public records request for emails related to Make Your Date that were sent and received by the employees who were ordered to delete them.

The day after the FOIA request for the employees’ emails, Friedrichs called a meeting with those employees to discuss the prior directive to delete the messages, Shannon said. At the meeting, Friedrichs apologized and said the emails would be recovered.

The city would not grant an interview to discuss orders given to employees to delete emails.

Shannon said the administration was wrong to order subordinates to delete records. She said the order upset one of the employees.

"Right is right and wrong is wrong, right?," Shannon said. "And then what also pissed me off was that you went and asked subordinates to delete emails, which is just a messed up thing to do. ... To put somebody in a position like that to protect your girlfriend or whoever she is to you — just wasn't a good thing."

To read previous coverage about Make Your Date go to https://www.freep.com/news/investigations/