Mayor Mike Duggan and state Sen. Coleman A. Young II
Mayoral candidate, state Sen. Coleman A. Young II, turning to a playbook out of Washington, said Monday that he wants the U.S. Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to take over a federal criminal investigation into the city's aggressive demolition program.
The prosecutor would take over the probe from the Detroit U.S. Attorney's Office.
"My demand for a special prosecutor is due to the unfair advantage and prior relationship that Mike Duggan, as a former county prosecutor has with the local U.S. attorney’s office," Young said at a press conference at his campaign headquarters on Livernois, according to Allie Gross of the Detroit Free Press.
Young said the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit has shown bias by contacting members of press to say that Mayor Mike Duggan was not a target of its investigation, even though information in a federal grand jury is confidential, the Freep reports.
"We have all seen these investigations before. The target is never the target in the beginning," said Young, whose father, Mayor Coleman A. Young, was a target of a federal grand jury probing a sludge hauling investigation in the early 1980s. He was never charged.
The announcement is obviously meant to draw suspicion about Duggan and the demolition program he's aggressively pushed.
Duggan's office has confirmed that a federal grand jury issued a subpoena to obtain more information on the city's demolition process, but insisted that no one from his office has been questioned or subpoenaed.
Alexis Wiley, Mayor Duggan’s chief of staff, responded:
"Senator Young is once again bashing and smearing the mayor. That's pretty standard for him. If he actually presented a plan for the future of the city that would have been big news. But as we saw today that didn’t happen so I expect this is what we're going to see moving forward."
