On August 30, 2024, two things happened in Whatcom County.
At one address, attorney AJ Bredberg — an independent wetland consultant who had spent months tracing the documentary trail of regulatory misconduct at the Planning and Development Services department — finalized and submitted a detailed package of additional evidence to the investigation Whatcom County had been conducting into one of its own employees.
At a different address, Eric Richey, the Whatcom County Prosecuting Attorney, sat down and wrote a letter to attorney James Grifo, who represents the Dierdorff family and other affected parties. The letter declared, in substance, that "any appearance of inappropriate action was just an appearance." Case closed. Move along.
Both documents bear the same date.
That timing is not incidental. It is the entire story.
The letter — known among the affected parties as "the all-clear letter" — did several specific things and avoided several others. We invite anyone to read the full text in our Statement of Investigative Findings. For the brief version:
What it said. That the appearance of misconduct by Natural Resources Planner Matthew Mahaffie was "just an appearance." That the Haggard investigation — conducted by the law firm Haggard & Ganson LLP at the request of County Executive Satpal Sidhu — had reviewed the matter and found insufficient evidence to support the allegations. That the Prosecuting Attorney's office considered the matter closed.
What it did not say. That the Haggard investigation had never interviewed Tom Brissenden, the PDS staffer who was simultaneously on Whatcom County's payroll and on Mahaffie's payroll at his private wetland-consulting company. That the investigation had never interviewed Miguelina Beckwith, the elderly widow who sold the Blaine Road properties to Mahaffie's nominees in transactions that left her financially worse off than if she had given them away. That the investigation had never asked who authored the April 22, 2022 "Magic Memo" — the document that established the county's "no further mitigation" position on properties Mahaffie had a financial interest in — because no author was identified, and Haggard never went looking. That the Bulanov building-permit determination of June 2023, which adopted the exact opposite position Mahaffie had imposed on the Dierdorffs six years earlier, was acknowledged in Haggard's own report (pages 8–9) as "legally questionable."
The all-clear letter cited the Haggard investigation as the basis for its conclusion. It did not cite the actual evidence.
The timing matters because of what Richey received that same day.
AJ Bredberg's August 30 submission was a detailed evidentiary package — drawing on county permit files, MLS records, settlement statements, and the corporate filings of Dead Goat Properties LLC — laying out the specific factual gaps in the Haggard report and the specific transactions the investigation had failed to examine. It documented the dates, the parties, the addresses, the dollar amounts, and the contemporaneous county records that contradicted the conclusion Haggard had reached.
A prosecutor receiving that submission has a choice. The professional response is to read it, to consider whether the new evidence affects the prior analysis, and — if appropriate — to reopen the matter or to refer it for further investigation. The unprofessional response is to issue a letter that day declaring the matter closed.
There is no documentary evidence that Richey read Bredberg's submission before signing his letter. There is documentary evidence that both arrived in the same day's mail.
A reader of the public record is entitled to ask: how exactly did the Prosecuting Attorney's office evaluate Bredberg's evidence between the moment it arrived and the moment Richey's letter went out the door? The answer, so far as the public record reveals, is that they did not.
There is a second piece of context the all-clear letter did not mention.
The Whatcom County Prosecuting Attorney's office had previously been retained — at taxpayer expense, with County Council authorization — to defend Whatcom County employees, including Matthew Mahaffie, in earlier RICO litigation arising from substantially similar allegations. That prior representation establishes an institutional relationship between the office that issued the all-clear letter and the individual whose conduct that letter exonerated.
In conventional legal practice, an office that has represented an individual in litigation arising from a particular set of facts does not then assume the role of neutral evaluator of those same facts. The Washington Rules of Professional Conduct take this seriously enough that even the appearance of conflict requires disclosure and, frequently, recusal.
Richey's letter does not disclose that prior representation. It does not address whether the Prosecuting Attorney's office considered itself a conflicted party. It does not address whether any other reviewing office — for example, a neighboring county prosecutor or the Washington State Attorney General — was offered the opportunity to review the matter independently.
It simply declares the matter closed.
A genuinely independent review of the allegations against Mahaffie would have addressed at minimum the following:
None of this appears in Richey's letter. None of it appears in the Haggard report. The "appearance of inappropriate action" was not appearance. It was documentary record.
The all-clear letter is not an isolated document. It fits a pattern that is now visible across Whatcom County's institutional response to the Mahaffie investigation.
In April 2022, the "Magic Memo" appeared on Director Personius's letterhead with no identified author.
In May 2024, attorney James Grifo submitted a 120-page complaint to County Executive Sidhu.
In July 2024, the Haggard report concluded "a preponderance of the evidence does not support" the allegations — without interviewing the key witnesses.
In August 2024, on the same day Bredberg submitted detailed additional evidence, Richey issued the all-clear letter.
In October 2024, Director Personius authored a letter on PDS letterhead threatening legal action against developer Dwayne Engelsman for sharing factual information about the Blaine Road mitigation arrangement with the owner of Royal Emerald Motors. The threat letter was copied to the Prosecuting Attorney's office. The PA office took no action to advise the Director that threatening someone for sharing factual information raises First Amendment concerns.
In each instance, the institutional response was the same: dismiss, deflect, declare the matter closed, and — where citizens persisted in raising it — threaten them.
The all-clear letter is the document that made the dismissal official. The County employee whose conduct it exonerated remained on the county payroll. The plaintiffs whose evidence it ignored eventually filed Dierdorff v. Mahaffie, Whatcom County et al. in Whatcom County Superior Court on June 12, 2026. The lawsuit is the consequence of the door the all-clear letter closed.
A prosecuting attorney's office is the principal institutional safeguard against the abuse of regulatory authority by public employees. When that office has a documented prior representation of the individual under review, when it has the County Council's approval to expend taxpayer funds defending that individual, and when it issues a dismissal letter on the same day substantial additional evidence arrives — the safeguard has failed.
The failure is documentable. The dates are documentable. The receipts are documentable. The letter is on letterhead.
What Whatcom County voters and the County Council do with that record is a separate question — one that will be answered, in part, by the August 2026 primary election for Prosecuting Attorney, by the upcoming proceedings in Dierdorff v. Mahaffie, and by whether the next Council session takes up the question of an independent ombudsman function that we have been requesting for more than a year.
The full evidentiary record — including the Magic Memo, the Brissenden dual-employment timeline, the Beckwith transactions, and the institutional response — is documented in our Statement of Investigative Findings.
The active lawsuit and ongoing court filings are documented at The Lawsuit: Dierdorff v. Mahaffie.