To catch a glimpse of the rancor and paranoia now washing over the Brandon Scott administration as Isabel Mercedes Cumming, the city’s waste and fraud watchdog, proceeds with her lawsuit in Baltimore Circuit Court for records access, consider this:

Following an interview with the OIG, a senior Scott employee complained to another city leader:

“You know Isabel reads all my shit because she thinks its legal for her to have unfettered access.”

The city leader replied, “My Lord! You really need to talk to Ebony [Thompson, the city solicitor]. That is ILLEGAL!”

The senior employee responded, “I have talked to Ebony. I said I was going to sue her [Cumming] in my personal capacity because I’m not scared of her ass. AT ALL.”

The exchange was disclosed today in a public report by Cumming, which describes how the unnamed employee directed the city’s technology office to block the inspector general’s access to their emails and other documents.

Objections by a “Senior Employee”

Cumming said her office was examining various complaints that the senior employee had threatened physical harm to subordinates and cursed out employees and agencies in violation of the “Technology Acceptable Use Policy” that bars employees from creating fraudulent, harassing or sexually explicit content.

Staff using the city’s email system must consent to those terms as well as agree that their electronic communications are subject to review by the inspector general as well as from the law department, BCIT (Baltimore City Information Technology) and human resources.

Messages sent earlier by the senior employee included such threats as “I’m about to fucking kill [name redacted],” “I want to shake the shit out of BCHD” and “this brawd about to make me throw hands.”

Cumming reported these infractions to the mayor last December. But in a letter leaked last month to The Baltimore Banner, Scott’s Chief of Staff J.D. Merrill and Deputy City Solicitor Stephen Salsbury claimed that Cumming is “retaliating” against a “protected whistleblower” who has expressed alarm at the IG’s “unfettered” access to their emails.

The mayor himself jumped into the fray last Wednesday when he said that Cumming “misused” her “unfettered access to surveil people’s emails” and “secretly look through draft budget documents” held by Chief Administrative Officer Faith Leach.

“No public official should be afraid of oversight, but no public official, including the inspector general, should be beyond it,” the mayor told reporters at a press conference.

Cumming Fires Back

Today Cumming rejected those complaints as serious misunderstandings of how the city’s IT system works or outright falsities.

“The OIG does not normally share investigative methods publicly, as they are confidential investigative tools,” Cumming wrote. “However, the OIG is sharing its previous data retrieval process in response to the [administration’s] assertions.”

She said her office has never conducted live or daily monitoring of employees’ devices. Instead, data retrievals are copied to a secure server and contain historical data to be viewed by the assigned special agent, who is trained and a Certified Inspector General Investigator.

Cumming said she was unaware until recently of a January 15, 2026 law department memo – titled “Clandestine Access to Employee Emails” (see below) – apparently prepared in anticipation of cutting off the OIG’s access to employee emails and other city records.

Records Dispute

The city’s denial of records that Cumming says is essential for the inspector general to do their job is at the crux of the lawsuit that Cumming and two members of the OIG Advisory Board filed in circuit court.

The lawsuit asks Judge Pamela J. White to enforce the watchdog’s subpoena powers to retrieve records, which were established in a charter amendment approved by city voters in 2018.

City Solicitor Ebony Thompson says such direct access is limited by the Maryland Public Information Act, attorney-client privilege and a host of other restrictions to protect the privacy of city employees.

Expressed in less lawyer-like terms, Scott told reporters that “pursuing these overly broad requests just so she can complain in the media that the city isn’t fulfilling them fast enough is a waste of our time, her time and everyone else’s time.”

Today Cumming produced a February 6, 2026 email by Patrick Hughes, chief of the Opinions and Advice Division of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, that disputed Thompson’s insistence that an “AG opinion”  had justified her decision to redact financial documents and restrict record searches of MONSE (the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement).

“It’s not an opinion, it’s an advice letter from our counsel to the General Assembly,” Hughes wrote. Attorney General Anthony Brown reiterated the same position in a February 12 interview with The Brew.

“It could have been written by a second-year law student,” Brown said, referring to the 2½-page advice letter. “It is really just a summary of the Maryland Public Information Act in response to a legislator’s question. Nothing more.”

Last month, Judge White ordered the city to respond to 63 record requests sought by Cumming, which the city says is overly burdensome and is appealing to the Maryland Appellate Court.

The judge will hear the next round of arguments at a September 16 hearing.

IT Glitch, not “Snooping”

In regard to the claim by Merrill and Salsbury, echoed by the mayor, that the IG office is “snooping” on employee emails, Cumming offered a detailed explanation today of why the initials of the office’s IT specialist were listed on Leach’s Microsoft OneDrive documents.

In short, the city cloud-based Microsoft 365 system, installed in 2020, had a known deficiency for data retrievals that required the initials of the IT specialist as part of an audit trail.

Leach believed that a privileged budget document was being live-accessed by the inspector general. Instead, permissions for past access remained on data retrievals and could be visible to employees, Cumming wrote today.

In July 2025, this Microsoft 365 deficiency was fixed through a system update, and the IT specialist no longer had to leave his permissions to create an audit trail.

While Merrill and Salsbury contended last month that the OIG was “caught” accessing Leach’s budget documents, Cumming said she contacted the Chief Administrative Officer last summer to confirm that the permission initials had been removed.

“The CAO replied and thanked the IG,” Cumming wrote today.