On February 21, 2025, the Kent County Prosecutor’s Office took its entire staff to BattleGR Tactical Games for a two-hour office event during standard work hours. The outing included fowling, cornhole, food service, and a bartender, and was funded through a combination of taxpayer dollars and Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker’s campaign finance funds. A Freedom of Information Act request produced dozens of internal emails documenting the coordination. Clutch Justice has filed a formal Michigan Campaign Finance complaint. The same office publicly states it is understaffed and underfunded.
How This Came to Light
The BattleGR event did not surface through any voluntary disclosure by the Kent County Prosecutor’s Office. It surfaced because an unusual expenditure appeared on Becker’s campaign finance disclosure form. A review of that form by Clutch Justice, consistent with prior Clutch reporting on Becker’s campaign finance practices, raised enough questions to justify a FOIA request to the office itself. The request produced dozens of internal emails.
Those emails show a well-organized event with near-total participation. Prosecutors, victim witness advocates, legal clerks, and administrators all responded to the invite. The coordination included waiver links sent to staff, RSVP tracking, and a specific note on alcohol consumption.
“If you wish to consume adult beverages, please use PTO or vacation time.”
This disclaimer is significant for what it implies: staff were expected to attend and participate during work hours, with personal time required only if they chose to drink. The event was not positioned as optional personal time. It was positioned as an office event — held during the standard work day, with the office as the organizing entity.
The Funding Problem
The event was funded dually: through Becker’s campaign finance account and through taxpayer resources in the form of compensated staff time during working hours. The prior Clutch Justice investigation documented the campaign finance angle directly. Michigan Campaign Finance Law addresses permissible incidental office expenses through a specific definition: ordinary and necessary expenditures paid or incurred in carrying out the business of an office, with training and travel cited as the operative examples.
The Michigan Secretary of State’s Candidate Manual defines incidental office expenses as ordinary and necessary expenditures for carrying out office business, citing training and travel. Recreational team-building activities at commercial tactical entertainment venues are not cited, and the definition’s scope does not naturally extend to them. This is the basis of the campaign finance complaint Clutch Justice has filed with the Bureau of Elections.
Multiple staff members who attended or participated in the event have also made personal campaign contributions to Becker, including his office manager. That connection does not establish any independent violation, but it is part of the documented picture of how the office operates internally.
The Context the Office Created
Becker’s office has been publicly vocal about resource constraints. Coverage by Bridge Michigan documented the office’s complaints about staffing shortages and inadequate funding alongside similar complaints from other county prosecutors across the state. That is the public posture the office has taken consistently.
An office that publicly complains of being understaffed and underfunded, then takes its entire staff offline for two hours of recreational combat simulation on a Friday afternoon using campaign funds and compensated work time, has a public credibility problem. The problem is not that public employees deserve no downtime. The problem is that the same office demands maximum consequences for defendants who can’t afford a mistake while shielding its own resource claims from scrutiny — and expected that scrutiny would never arrive because no one would check the campaign finance forms.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
The structure of the internal emails — the references to this type of event, the established coordination process, the familiarity of the staff with the format — suggests the BattleGR event was not the first such outing. Clutch Justice’s prior investigation into Becker’s campaign finance practices had already flagged a separate anomalous expenditure. The BattleGR documentation adds a second data point to what appears to be a recurring practice of using campaign funds for office activities that fall outside the definition of permissible incidental expenses under Michigan law.
Clutch Justice has filed the Michigan Campaign Finance complaint with the Bureau of Elections and will publish updates as the complaint proceeds. If the office has tips on prosecutorial conduct or campaign finance practices in Kent County, contact Clutch Justice at hello@clutchjustice.com.
The optics are not the problem here. The optics are just what makes the problem visible. The problem is an office that believed its internal coordination would remain internal — and didn’t account for the receipts being public.
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