One County, One Employer: How the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office Sits at the Center of Every Accountability Mechanism in the Tanha Matter

The Perjury Problem Nobody Is Authorized to Touch

When a Michigan attorney lies under oath in a civil proceeding, two accountability mechanisms are theoretically available. The Attorney Grievance Commission can investigate whether the conduct violated the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct. And the county prosecutor can charge perjury under MCL 750.423, a felony carrying potential exposure of up to 15 years.

In the Tanha matter, the first mechanism has already run its course. The AGC closed File 25-2248 on April 15, 2026, with a letter that runs four paragraphs and does not identify a single exhibit by name.

The second mechanism cannot neutrally engage. Marieh Tanha is employed by the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office as a Domestic Violence Prosecutor. Charging her with perjury would require her employer to authorize prosecution of its own staff member for conduct that occurred in a civil family court proceeding. There is no automatic referral statute that routes the matter to a neutral jurisdiction when the subject is an employee of the charging authority. A request for the Michigan Attorney General’s office to take the case, or for appointment of a special prosecutor, would have to originate from the court or from Mathieu’s counsel. Neither appears to have occurred.

The documented record of the alleged perjury is specific. In her March 2022 deposition (page 21, line 24), Tanha denied owning overseas property. Her February 2022 verified financial statement and April 2022 interrogatory answers did not disclose three Swedish properties, rental income she was receiving from at least one of them, or two PNC bank accounts held jointly with family members — accounts discovered only after a subpoena. The Swedish Tax Agency confirmed her ownership status in writing. A Stockholm attorney provided independent verification of her land registry status. Swedish real estate tax assessments in her name ran continuously from 2017 through at least 2020.

Her own counsel acknowledged the Swedish properties in the January 2023 Judgment of Divorce — properties she had denied owning through the entirety of discovery. That admission came at the final decree stage, after the discovery period had closed, after the sworn statements had been made, and after the motion for asset forfeiture and sanctions had been filed by the plaintiff’s legal team at Cordell Cordell.

The AGC’s Line — and What It Left Unsaid

The Attorney Grievance Commission’s closure letter does not explain its reasoning. It states that the facts as presented do not constitute professional misconduct, that Tanha answered the allegations adequately, and that the matter is closed under MCR 9.114(A)(1). Four paragraphs. No exhibit engagement. No identification of which allegations were reviewed or which standard was applied.

The most defensible reading of that outcome, reading between the lines the Commission did not write, is a conduct-in-representation distinction. The Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct are not a general ethics code for attorneys in all aspects of their lives. MRPC 3.3 (candor toward the tribunal) and MRPC 3.4 (fairness to opposing party) attach to conduct in the context of legal representation. Tanha was a party in her own divorce, not acting as counsel for a client. The AGC may have concluded that however serious the alleged conduct, it did not occur in the exercise of her professional duties and therefore did not trigger the professional conduct rules.

That distinction is not unreasonable on its face. But it has limits. MRPC 8.4(b) covers criminal acts that reflect adversely on fitness to practice law. MRPC 8.4(c) covers conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation — and critically, neither provision is limited to in-representation conduct. A licensed attorney who commits perjury in her own civil proceeding is still a licensed attorney whose fitness to practice is at least arguably implicated. The closure letter never engaged this framework. It did not say the distinction applied. It said nothing at all about the reasoning.

The CPS Conflict Runs the Same Direction

The AGC matter is not the only accountability mechanism with a structural problem. An active CPS investigation, Washtenaw County Case No. 212244564, involves allegations of neglect and abuse concerning Tanha and the children’s grandmother. A physician filed at least one report that was not investigated. A second report from the same physician was reportedly never received by CPS or went missing. The alleged injuries to the children include a re-fracture of the same arm, now requiring a brace.

A request to assign an investigator from outside Washtenaw County — given Tanha’s position as a Domestic Violence Prosecutor within the county — was denied. A request for a more senior supervisory investigator was also denied. The case is currently assigned to an investigator described as relatively new.

This is not a procedural footnote. CPS investigations that surface evidence of criminal conduct — abuse, neglect at a level meeting the criminal threshold — are referred to the county prosecutor for charging decisions. In Washtenaw County, that referral goes to Tanha’s employer. The same office that cannot neutrally assess a perjury charge against her would also be the office receiving any criminal referral arising from a child welfare investigation involving her.

Michigan’s child protective services framework does not require transfer to a separate county when the subject of an investigation has an institutional relationship with the receiving prosecutor’s office. That gap is not unique to this case. But this case makes it visible in a way that is difficult to look past: a sitting DV prosecutor, a CPS investigation in the county where she is employed, a denied transfer request, and a criminal referral pathway that routes back to her employer.

The ethical argument for mandatory transfer is not complicated. It does not require any finding of actual bias. It requires only recognition that the appearance of impartiality is itself a condition of legitimate institutional function — and that the current arrangement cannot produce that appearance regardless of what any individual investigator or prosecutor intends.

The Kerry Case and What It Tells You About Charging Judgment

Institutional credibility is not built case by case in isolation. It accumulates across decisions, and it erodes the same way. The Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office is also the office that pursued felony computer crime charges against Jillian Kerry, a Scio Township official, under MCL 752.797 and MCL 750.540.

As Clutch Justice documented in April 2026, the conduct underlying those charges appears to be this: on November 15, 2023, Kerry attempted to log in to a shared computer for a Zoom meeting. Former Supervisor William Hathaway had left himself logged into Office365, with emails in his outbox. Those emails sent — because that is what outbox emails do when a new session is authenticated on the same device. Kerry was charged with felony computer crime and interference with electronic communications for a sequence initiated by another official’s failure to log out.

The statutes charged in the Kerry case are written for system disruption, unauthorized access, and infrastructure interference. A motion to quash the bindover argued — correctly, based on the publicly available record — that the conduct does not clearly satisfy the statutory elements. The case generated over $103,000 in township legal fees. Washtenaw County Prosecuting Attorney Eli Savit, whose office authorized those charges, is a candidate in the Michigan Attorney General race.

The point here is not that the Kerry prosecution was politically motivated, though the question of proportionality and judgment is legitimate. The point is simpler: the same institutional actor that pursued a legally strained felony theory against a township official for a shared-computer incident has structural authority over two separate accountability mechanisms involving one of its own employees — and in neither case is there a process that compels recusal, transfer, or neutral review.

What Accountability Requires That This System Cannot Provide

The Tanha matter is not primarily a story about one attorney’s conduct in a divorce proceeding. It is a story about what institutional accountability requires when a subject occupies a position inside the institutions that accountability depends on.

Three things need to be true for accountability to function here. The perjury question needs to be evaluated by a charging authority with no institutional relationship to the subject. The CPS investigation needs to be conducted by investigators whose findings will be reviewed by a prosecutor’s office with no employment relationship to the named subject. And the AGC’s disciplinary review needs to produce reasoning sufficient to verify that the evidence submitted was actually engaged.

None of those three conditions currently exists. The first is structurally precluded by the absence of an automatic recusal mechanism. The second was rejected when the out-of-county investigator request was denied. The third is precluded by MCR 9.114(A)(1), which requires no written findings on administrative closure.

That is not a collection of bad outcomes. It is a design problem. Michigan’s attorney discipline framework, its CPS referral architecture, and its prosecutorial self-recusal norms were not built with this configuration in mind: a licensed attorney who is simultaneously a county prosecutor, a CPS investigation subject, a civil litigation party, and an AGC respondent, in the same county, with the same employer sitting at the downstream end of every accountability pathway.

The result is a case where the evidentiary record is unusually strong, the institutional pathways are all technically intact, and accountability is structurally unavailable anyway.