A recent investigation by the district attorney’s office revealed that Denver’s top two police officials were accused of being deceptive when dealing with another public safety official, an act that often leads to rank-and-file officers being suspended without pay or fired.

Documents in the case also reveal that police department employees, including a deputy chief, had expressed concerns that Deputy Chief Matt Murray ignored policy and had damaged a woman’s reputation through his direction of an internal investigation.

The DA’s case file, which The Denver Post obtained through an open-records request, sheds light on the inner workings and personality dynamics among the city’s top law enforcement officials. In interviews with the DA’s office, employees talk of mistrust of one another and paranoia over media reports.

This controversy within the upper ranks of the police department started in May 2016 when former District Attorney Mitch Morrissey wrote a scathing letter to Chief Robert White that criticized Murray’s handling of an internal investigation. Since then, the situation has splintered into two issues — Murray’s handling of the investigation, and the two chiefs’ response to an open-records request seeking Morrissey’s letter.

District Attorney Beth McCann investigated how Murray and White responded to the open-records request from the Denver Police Protective Association. Last month, she decided not to charge Murray and White with a misdemeanor violation of the state’s open-records law, which requires public officials to turn over documents upon request. However, McCann said the two chiefs were careless in their handling of the records and encouraged public safety leaders to examine how police respond to such requests.

The case file also shows that others who work with Murray and White doubted the men’s honesty in responding to the document request. And police union officials said they, too, question Murray’s and White’s truthfulness, adding that any other officer probably would be fired for lying or omitting parts of the truth.

Police officers are expected to value honesty and integrity above all else, said Nick Rogers, president of the Police Protective Association.

“Chief White and Chief Murray disregarded those two things and threw them in the trash to protect Murray’s reputation,” said Rogers, who believes Murray is being groomed to replace White as police chief.

White and Murray declined to respond to Denver Post questions about the documents, saying it would be inappropriate to comment while an independent internal investigation is pending.

The union in January had requested a copy of Morrissey’s letter and twice was denied. It eventually obtained a copy of the letter from the district attorney’s office and then requested an investigation into whether the chiefs had violated the Colorado Open Records Act by failing to provide the letter.

An assistant district attorney and an investigator interviewed Rogers; Deputy Chief David Quinones; Mary Dulacki, the lawyer who processes open-records requests for the city’s safety department; and the police chief’s secretary, Bee Ling Withers.

Murray and White declined to sit for interviews with DA investigators but sent their attorneys. Summaries of those interviews were not included in the case file.

Dulacki told the DA’s staff that Murray and White at first told her they did not have Morrissey’s letter and then tried to blame oversight on a secretary.

“That’s (B.S.),” Dulacki told investigators. “This is clearly deception.”

The case file shows that city law enforcement personnel follow a strict chain of command that requires all requests for police records and documents be funneled through Murray, who speaks on behalf of the chief and the department. In interviews, multiple people described how they do not deviate from protocol.

Emails between Dulacki and Murray show that Murray wrote “I have no records responsive to this request” when she forwarded the union’s request for a copy of Morrissey’s letter.

When Dulacki realized on a Friday night that a copy of the letter had been provided to the union by another agency, she called her supervisor and asked that Stephanie O’Malley, the safety department’s executive director, get involved.

But her boss “told Dulacki to not call Stephanie O’Malley because O’Malley hated to be bothered on weekends,” the case file said.

The following Monday, when Dulacki asked Murray and White why they had not produced the letter, she said White first pretended he did not know what she was talking about and then said he no longer had it, according to a summary of her interview with the DA’s office.

Murray shrugged his shoulders and said, “We can’t provide what we don’t have,” the case file said.

Dulacki said she forced the issue by calling in White’s secretary, who produced the letter in a matter of minutes.

Withers told the DA she feared she might be blamed for not releasing the letter — something Quinones told her he would not allow to happen.

Dulacki told the district attorney’s office that White and Murray had undermined her integrity and reputation by misleading her about the existence of the letter.

“Dulacki said her responses to CORA requests can only be ‘as good as the integrity and honesty of the people I deal with,’ ” according to the case file.

In a February interview with The Post, Murray denied he had been dishonest in replying to the open-records request.

“The answer is I did not have any records. I did not have that letter. I knew the letter existed. But I did not have that letter,” Murray said.

Murray also said he had to remove himself from any dealings with the letter because he was the officer in question.

But union representatives said Murray should have informed Dulacki that the letter existed and that she should ask White and Withers for a copy.

According to the police operations manual, an omission of fact is grounds for punishment.

“Officers shall not knowingly make a misleading or inaccurate statement relating to their official duties,” the operations manual states under a section titled “Misleading or Inaccurate Statements.” In a section titled “Commission of a Deceptive Act,” it states: “In connection with any investigation or any judicial or administrative proceeding, officers shall not knowingly commit a materially deceptive act, including but not limited to departing from the truth verbally, making a false report or intentionally omitting information.”

In his DA interview, Quinones, who oversees police operations, said White had shown the Morrissey letter to him shortly after it was received.

Quinones told the DA’s office that a sexual assault detective and the crime lab’s manager had called him to share concerns about how Murray was directing them in a sexual assault investigation against an officer and his accomplice — actions that later prompted Morrissey’s letter.

Morrissey had accused Murray of ignoring an on-call policy for consulting the DA’s office during investigations. Because of Murray’s direction, a woman’s reputation was tarnished. Murray also had a cavalier attitude when approached about the concerns, Morrissey wrote.

“When Chief White showed Quinones the letter and Quinones said there was some validity to the complaint, White was not happy with Quinones,” the DA’s case file said.

Daelene Mix, a safety department spokeswoman, said the internal investigation, which is being conducted by an outside law firm, remains ongoing. She declined to comment on the accusations that Murray and White had been deceptive.

“We’re looking at the totality of the circumstances of the case,” she said. “We don’t know what’s hearsay, we don’t know what’s factual and we don’t have complete information yet.”