The Confidential File That Wasn’t: Jalal Abdallah, George Hunter, and Michigan’s Selective Bar Discipline Secrecy

What the Record Shows

Jalal Abdallah, a Dearborn family law and personal injury attorney, won the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open 15th House District on August 4, defeating former Wayne County Commissioner Gary Woronchak and former Dearborn City Councilwoman Leslie Herrick by a wide margin. He advances to a heavily favored general election against Republican Hassan Nehme.

Reached by phone, Abdallah referred questions to his attorney, Phil Thomas, who declined to comment. In an email exchange with the Grievance Administrator quoted in the reporting, Abdallah wrote that “no one explained anything before” raising questions about the trust account transfers the investigation flagged.

Confidential Until It Isn’t

Michigan’s attorney discipline system is built around a specific bargain: investigations stay confidential to protect attorneys from reputational damage over unproven allegations, and the process becomes public only once the Attorney Grievance Commission authorizes a formal complaint with the Attorney Discipline Board. That is why a search of the ADB’s public docket turns up nothing on Abdallah. There is no formal complaint yet, only an internal recommendation.

The Michigan Court Rules are direct about who is bound by that confidentiality. If a matter is resolved without a formal complaint, the Commissioners, the Grievance Administrator, and the Grievance Administrator’s staff are barred from discussing it with anyone but the complainant or the respondent. The Michigan State Bar’s own guidance on the subject describes the rule’s purpose as protecting attorneys facing what may turn out to be groundless accusations, since the mere existence of an investigation can function as a reputational injury on its own regardless of outcome.

Why George Hunter

The story ran under the byline of George Hunter, who has covered the Detroit crime beat for roughly three decades. His recent work is sourced almost entirely to law enforcement contacts, homicide investigations, and police department statements. He is not a courts reporter, a legal-affairs reporter, or a politics reporter, the beats that would ordinarily carry an Attorney Grievance Commission story.

That mismatch matters. Confidential bar discipline files do not have an obvious pipeline into a crime reporter’s sourcing network. Two explanations are available, and Clutch Justice has not confirmed either.

The second explanation is the more parsimonious one, and it does not require assuming anyone broke a confidentiality rule. It does, however, raise a separate question worth tracking on its own terms: whether a parallel criminal referral exists, and if so, what agency is handling it. Clutch Justice has filed public records requests with the Dearborn and Dearborn Heights police departments to check for any larceny or embezzlement complaint naming Abdallah or his firm, independent of the AGC’s civil disciplinary file.

The Timeline, In Order

The DePerno Comparison

Selective confidentiality is easier to see with a second data point. Matthew DePerno ran twice as the Republican nominee for Michigan Attorney General, the office that oversees the state’s prosecutorial apparatus. A grievance investigation into DePerno dating to 2016 did not become public through any AGC disclosure. It surfaced only because a former judge who had requested the investigation spoke to reporters years later. CNN’s 2022 reporting on the matter noted plainly that the grievance commission did not make its findings public.

That caveat matters. Clutch Justice cannot confirm that DePerno’s 2016 grievance involved allegations comparable in scope to what Goetz’s memo describes for Abdallah. The comparison is structural, not an equivalence claim. What it demonstrates is that the AGC’s confidentiality rule does not function as a fixed wall. It bends in at least one direction for at least one attorney seeking one of the most powerful legal offices in the state, and it did not bend the same way for a first-time candidate running for a state house seat.

What Can’t Be Audited

The hardest question in this piece is also the one Michigan’s system is not built to answer. How many other attorneys currently running for office, including sitting or aspiring county prosecutors who are themselves subject to the exact same AGC jurisdiction, have open grievance files that simply have not leaked and have not reached the formal complaint stage. There is no public census of that. Confidentiality under MCR 9.126 means the only files voters ever see before an election are the ones somebody, for whatever reason, decided to make visible.

What Comes Next

Abdallah’s matter remains at the pre-complaint stage. If the Commission authorizes a formal complaint, the case moves to a public hearing before a three-member Attorney Discipline Board panel, and everything from that point forward becomes a matter of public record. Clutch Justice will track that filing when and if it happens.

Two threads remain open and unconfirmed. Whether a parallel criminal complaint exists with Dearborn or Dearborn Heights police, which would explain the sourcing pattern without implicating anyone’s confidentiality obligations. And whether any campaign, including Woronchak’s or Herrick’s, made undisclosed expenditures connected to obtaining or placing this story, which would be a Michigan Campaign Finance Act question entirely separate from the leak question itself. Neither thread has evidence behind it yet beyond the questions the timeline raises.

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