Written by John Face
March 14, 2024
EDC President Actions Questioned – Again
On August 10, 2023, Virgie Ammerman was fired as the Albion Economic Development Corporation (EDC) president. Since that firing, a long-drawn-out series of events has alleged illegal actions of the EDC Board, Albion City Council, and Ammerman. In short, Ammerman was reinstated even though she was under investigation by the Michigan State Police (MSP).
City Watch NEWS wrote several stories about Ammerman and what happened. (CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO OUR STORIES REGARDING AMMERMAN) We reported an MSP investigation and missing emails from her email account. Ammerman eventually claimed that no charges were filed and that investigators told her that the entire issue brought to them was political and that she did nothing wrong.
City Watch then started executing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) against the MSP to have them supply copies of their investigation about Ammerman. City Watch sent our initial requests on November 3, 2023, and has received multiple responses from the MSP that caused delays in sending the information we needed. On March 6, 2024, we received our FOIA information.
All the information in this story came from the reports I received through my FOIA or computer technical experts I contacted since this is a problematic case far beyond my knowledge.
The Investigation of Virgie Ammerman
It may be nitpicking, but when I picked up the report and, at the top of page one, I saw the original date of this case as reported by the officer, August 4, 2023, I went, hmmmmmmm. Why is this significant? Ammerman was fired on August 10; there was no issue before that.
It would be a month after discovering Ammermans’ actions before City officials requested an investigation. Albion Department of Public Safety Deputy Chief Jason Kern would be the officer who contacted MSP Detective Sgt Suarez (DSS). It’s hard to pinpoint the exact day this occurred as there is no clarifying date of this contact in the report from DSS except for the above-mentioned incorrect date of August 4.
We do know that interviews began on September 13, 2023, the first with a redacted name EDC employee. This employee explained how, after Ammerman was fired, they needed to access Ammerman’s emails to search for required information. They would contact the IT service that Ammerman had hired to gain permission to do so.
Missing Emails
The EDC IT tech advised the employee that after they, IT, were inside Ammermans’ email account, they found that around 38,000 emails had been deleted from her EDC email box. IT restored all the deleted emails; this would be on August 10, 2023, after Ammerman was fired. The EDC employee was then allowed access to the EDC Ammerman email account to access other emails moving forward.
The following Monday, August 14, the EDC employee again entered the former employee Ammerman’s email, and all emails had been deleted since their restoration on the 10th. The employee contacted IT for the EDC, and once again, they went into Ammerman’s account and were able to recover and restore all the deleted emails.
This time, the EDC board instructed the employee to have IT lockout Ammerman’s access to the account. It’s significant to note that according to an email sent by the IT tech, which was part of my FOIA and is where all my information regarding the emails and other items discussed later comes from, all deleted emails stay in the system for only 14 days.
Ammerman Interviewed by Michigan State Police
DSS would interview Ammerman on September 13, 2023, at the Marshall Regional Law Enforcement Center. The interview was audio and video recorded. Ammerman told DSS that she wanted to speak to him.
He allowed her to speak, and she admitted that she was terminated on August 10, 2023. However, after admitting to being terminated, later in the interview she claimed there was no indication when her employment was terminated. This writer would like to clarify her statement where she said, “no indication of when her employment was terminated.” Ammerman knew she was terminated when she left the Board meeting on August 10, as she never returned to work after it plus her admission in the interview that she was terminated. I spoke to her moments after that meeting about her being terminated. Everyone present at the EDC Board meeting knew she was terminated. This statement is the first of a few potential falsehoods Ammerman made to DSS.
Ammerman would discuss how the EDC works and its relationship to the City of Albion. She took special care in telling DSS that the email account in question belonged to the EDC, not the City of Albion.
She explained that on August 10, after being fired, she entered her email account using her phone. She created a .pst file, which she claims transferred and archived the emails in her EDC email. She told DSS that when that happens, the emails are automatically deleted and go to the deleted file in her email. She claimed she did this to make the transition easier for whoever would replace her at the EDC. She then stated that she rechecked her email on Sunday, August 13, and noticed the emails were back in her account. She said she again created a .pst and followed the same steps where she claims emails are automatically deleted.
Regarding forwarding emails to her private email account, she said she was trying to create a link to personal emails she claims were in her EDC email account but sent the entire inbox instead. Though she admitted to forwarding EDC emails to her personal email account, she claims not to have them. She stated that she again tried to access her account on August 14 and, at that time, could not get into her email account. Understand that all these actions were done after she was fired. She stated that she did NOT delete emails from her EDC account, but that was an automatic function of what she was doing.
Calhoun County Prosecutor’s Decision
Prosecutor David Gilbert’s Office
11/7/2023 (DGILBERT) Detective Suarez Decision: DENIED Defendent Ammerman, Virgie The Calhoun County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office declined to authorize criminal charges against this suspect for the following reason(s): Insufficient facts presented to prove case beyond a reasonable doubt. Cannot show a criminal intent; it was her email, she had access to it, and her explanation does not show a criminal intent in deleting her emails, which were recovered twice. There is no indication the deletion was to hide a crime or evidence of a crime, there is no evidence her access to the emails were restricted on her termination, and she was reinstated to her position.
City Watch & Our IT Professionals Discover Holes in Ammermans Interview – Prosecutor Quick Rush to Judgement.
City Watch reached out to individuals with experience in IT work. Our first is responsible for several corporations’ IT and employee training. These meetings were in person as this was a very technical case that required expert analysis. I showed them the FOIA, allowing them to read all aspects of this case and the EDC IT Tech email about what they did.
I questioned what a .pst file was. They explained it as I stated above, noting that creating the file was unnecessary. All she should have done was archive the emails in her email account; that way, anyone who used the account could easily access those emails. I asked about deleting the emails. My IT expert said these emails are not deleted while creating a .pst, which is the function she claims to have done. This is important to note. To prove this, our IT performed the same function that Ammerman claimed she did and that the emails remained in the email account. This point is critical; the emails were not deleted automatically; they were deleted intentionally, by Ammerman, twice, according to my expert. The fact that the EDC IT had to perform a “Recover Deleted Items” function twice meant that in four days, someone intentionally deleted the emails from the Ammerman EDC email, they said, and my IT agreed with that.
This was an intent to delete the emails, the “intent” that the prosecutor blew off and disregarded. The prosecutor also stated that the email account belonged to Ammerman. That statement is nothing short of a lie. Ammerman was legally fired and had no right to access anything, confidential or not, that belonged to the EDC. He claims that this doesn’t show criminal intent. It doesn’t? She deleted these emails twice in what appears to be an attempt to hide something.
Prosecutor Gilbert then points out that Ammerman was reinstated to her job, implying that it’s OK for her to break into EDC’s confidential information after being fired. Gilbert says this despite passing along an email to DSS on October 19, 2023, from a local citizen who filed a complaint with his office on August 15, 2023. The email details how the City of Albion Council appears to have conspired and broken several laws. This leads us to our next section about Ammerman creating secret links to access EDC records.
SharePoint Microsoft 365 – the Missed Crime?
During this investigation, DSS received an email from EDC IT explaining their actions after Ammerman was fired. In this, they discussed how they recovered her deleted emails twice, and that deleted emails are retained for 14 days. According to IT, it’s obvious these emails were deleted recently.
According to EDC IT, they stated, “During the recovery of the emails the second time, I also observed emails in her sent Mail Folder which were hyperlinks to Albion EDC’s SharePoint documents hosted in Microsoft 365. These emailed hyperlinks were sent from her AEDC emails address to her personal email address. It appears that at the time she sent those links, she would still have had access to the Microsoft 365 platform.” Understand this is significant as the EDC IT tech felt compelled to share this in their email.
Now, Ammerman will claim she was emailing links to her personal emails but sent her entire EDC email file. Here is the problem: Sharepoint is a storage area. Someone can upload anything. EDC files, emails, calendars, and anything on the web, and then access these files at any time, anywhere. Ammerman sent her personal email hyperlinks to this storage area. A hyperlink is needed to gain entry to this storage; a hyperlink is a key for all intents and purposes to open this storage area. What that means is, according to our IT professional, even with no access to her EDC email, Ammerman could access whatever documents she had uploaded to this storage. For all we know, she had this access for a while.
Unfortunately, EDC IT was unable to determine what documents had been uploaded to the storage area Ammerman had access to. But it is safe to say there were items in those files uploaded, and our investigation is far from over.
More to come soon.
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