Is Baltimore’s inspector general too online?

When Baltimore Solicitor Andre Davis was searching for the city’s next inspector general, he was taken by the impeccable credentials of Isabel Mercedes Cumming.

Being the city’s top watchdog requires a specific skillset. The inspector general is part accountant, part prosecutor. Cumming had both.

“I checked her references. They were all sterling to a T,” Davis said.

In the eight years since, Davis has found Cumming to be “phenomenally effective” in her endeavor to root out waste, fraud and abuse in city government. She has issued dozens of reports, laid the groundwork for prosecutions and increased the independence of her office.

Nonetheless, she sits at a crossroads, engaged in a legal fight over the ability of her office to do its job and, possibly, an existential fight over her leadership after controversial social media posts.

The flash point came early this year, when the mayor’s office discovered Cumming’s staff had access to files maintained by a city attorney — a violation, they said, of attorney-client privilege — and Scott’s team cut off Cumming’s direct access to a wide swath of records.

Cumming took the issue to court, where a judge signaled in April that she sympathizes with the inspector general and called the city’s position “concerning.”

But just days later, Cumming found herself in a crisis of her own making. On her Facebook account, she shared an AI-generated image of the mayor holding a glass of liquor, chomping on a cigar and sitting before a suitcase of money.

The backlash was swift. Scott and his team condemned the post as “racist” and “deeply inappropriate.” They asked for an investigation by the city’s board of ethics, citing what they called Cumming’s pattern of “elevating racially charged content.” The inspector general, who had already deleted the post, issued a public apology.

Cumming says the controversy is a “distraction.”

“That entire thing has been behind us,” she said Wednesday. “We are moving forward. I apologized, quickly.”

For some, that apology was enough. Cumming’s numerous allies applauded, calling it a sign of humility.

Others want blood.

“I don’t see how she can continue on in her position expecting to be seen as an impartial body,” said Robert Turner, senior pastor of Empowerment Temple AME Church in Baltimore. “She singlehandedly destroyed the credibility of her office.”

Embracing the spotlight

This is not Cumming’s reputation among those who knew her as a prosecutor. After beginning her career as an auditor, Cumming, 63, shifted to law in the 1990s and specialized in prosecuting economic crimes.

That’s how she first encountered Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, then an assistant state’s attorney in the homicide division. From an adjacent office, Bates learned Cumming was “intense” and said she channeled her energy into tending to crime victims, particularly the elderly.

“She was going to call them 10 times. She took calls at home,” Bates said. “We’d say, ‘Wow, you act like it’s your personal money.’”

Cumming and Bates have continued to work closely together, a fact that Cumming touts on social media. Last year, the pair both requested documents related to the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement that are at issue in Cumming’s lawsuit.

Cumming bolstered her résumé with stops in the D.C. region before returning to Baltimore, starting a mortgage fraud unit during a seven-year stint with Prince George’s County. She spent another six years in her first inspector general role with the agency that runs Washington, D.C.’s Metro.

As Baltimore inspector general, Cumming, the first Latina to hold the post, made her mark early with reports that highlighted failures in City Hall’s organizational culture. She revealed a “culture of fear” in the city’s human resources department. Her investigation into the city’s risk management office led to the head’s departure. In 2020, she joined forces with then-Baltimore County Inspector General Kelly Madigan in a withering report that revealed the city and county had jointly lost millions of dollars in water and sewer revenue.

Cumming emerged as a polarizing figure with her investigation of former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. The probe, requested by Mosby herself, found Mosby was absent from Baltimore for 144 workdays in 2018 and 2019, but had disclosed just 85 on her state ethics forms.

Cumming referred parts of the investigation to federal investigators. Mosby was later indicted on charges of perjury and making false mortgage applications.

The state’s attorney and her allies replied with force. Her attorneys demanded a correction to “misstatements and inaccuracies” in Cumming’s report. The Baltimore chapter of the NAACP questioned Cumming’s impartiality, publicly suggesting that she had unfairly targeted Black officials and contractors.

Even after federal investigators took up the case, Cumming remained involved. Surveillance video from Baltimore City Hall showed her leading federal officials into the building to confront Mosby’s husband, Council President Nick Mosby, in 2021.

When Mosby’s attorneys argued the investigation was politically and racially motivated, Cumming responded on social media — with a more aggressive approach than she had taken publicly in the past.

“FACT CHECK — The person that requested the investigation that resulted in guilty verdicts by two federal jury trials is Marilyn Mosby,” she wrote.

The clash made Cumming a target for some — Mosby’s former spokeswoman accused Cumming of “self-serving grandstanding” — but fortified her support with others. A flock of Cumming loyalists, some of whom aren’t even city residents, packed a hearing this week at Baltimore City Hall on legislation meant to strengthen her office.

Cumming further embraced the spotlight with a series of reports on conditions for employees of the Department of Public Works. Her investigation highlighted broken water fountains, bathrooms with toilet paper under lock and key and garbage trucks with no working air conditioning. The report coincided with the death of two public works employees on the job.

The probe also spotlighted Cumming herself. The inspector general testified before the City Council alongside public works staff, arguing for reform. And she once again took to social media, promoting videos of their testimony. She also sent repeated tweets urging city employees to vote in an upcoming union election.

Some felt the advocacy constituted interference. A panel overseeing the union found that Cumming’s social media posts amounted to undue influence in the election. The results were overturned.

Appalling or just politics?

Cumming’s presence on social media has been a constant during her tenure as inspector general, although it has taken a more serious turn of late. For years, her account on X, formerly Twitter, was largely lighthearted, best known for her participation in the Baltimore Sunrise Club — an informal trio of local notables who posted daily photos at dawn.

She remains a frequent booster of her son, professional skateboarder Joey Jett. A former alpaca farmer, she sometimes still posts photos of the animals on her social media.

As Cumming’s dispute with Scott has intensified, her posts have grown more pointed. In a black-and-white photo posted in March, Cumming stares at the camera across a pile of heavily redacted documents.

Scott and his team argue that Cumming’s posts are political, raising questions about her objectivity. In a letter to the city board of ethics and the advisory board that oversees Cumming, JD Merrill, Scott’s chief of staff, cited Cumming’s sharing of content quoting conservative influencer Nick Shirley as evidence of a pattern.

“We are now confronted with the reality that IG Cumming has not remained independent from other political interference — nor prevented personal motivation — to influence her oversight work,” Merrill wrote.

While Cumming has apologized for posting the AI-generated image of Scott, she has stood by the attached video, telling her oversight board this week that her intent was to share only the video content. But the video includes misleading and, at times, inaccurate information about the city budget and the legal dispute between Scott and Cumming.

Critics like Turner, who leads an influential Baltimore congregation, said he found the AI image Cumming posted of the mayor to be “appalling.” The image calls into question the validity of Cumming’s past work, he said.

“I think all of her former investigations should be reviewed now, especially those involving Black people,” he said. “It confirms assumptions many of us had that had the Mosbys not been Black, they wouldn’t be going through half the scrutiny.”

Several of Cumming’s defenders concede they would prefer to see her cut back on her social media usage. But they also didn’t view the post as disqualifying.

Like Cumming, Bates called the altercation a distraction. It’s time to “move on and forgive,” he said.

“What you see is politics,” he said. “You see a segment of a group who have been subject to her investigations, and here they come to circle the wagons and attack.”

Whatever the outcome for Cumming, the totality of the situation has broader implications for her office.

A judge will determine whether an inspector general can enforce subpoenas, and lawmakers will decide whether the office should be subject to the Maryland Public Information Act, which has been cited to restrict Cumming’s access to records.

So far, legislators have declined to act on a proposal to exempt inspectors general from the act. And last month, Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson issued a statement using Cumming’s social media post to make the case for guardrails on her office.

“Too often personal vendettas cause people to make bad choices,” Ferguson said.