Baltimore Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming is fighting back against Mayor Brandon Scott’s decision to cut her access to city legal records, arguing the move hamstrings her office’s ability to investigate.

Cumming, the city’s independent investigator for eight years, said she has always had unfettered access to all city documents, including those within the city’s Law Department, which have recently become the center of controversy.

After publication, Cumming clarified her description to say she had long had “direct” access to city records.

On Saturday, Scott’s office announced it was terminating access to such records for Cumming’s team. In a brief news release delivered amid snowstorm preparations, the administration argued that “unfettered” access by Cumming and her staff was a violation of attorney-client and work product privileges.

Cumming called the decision “unprecedented.” Her office, which is responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse within city government, has been accessing files in the same manner for her entire tenure, she said. Cumming pointed to a section of the city’s administrative manual that states that city messages, files and content may be disclosed to several key city offices, including the inspector general.

The dispute follows Cumming expressing dissatisfaction with the city’s response to documents her office requested in a separate investigation.

Cumming said broad access to records was not unique to her office, an assertion backed by Mark Peters, former commissioner to New York City’s Department of Investigation. Peters, who oversaw investigations in New York for four years, told The Banner it is “pretty standard” for inspectors general to have access to documents without first needing to issue subpoenas or requests.

Peters, who now works in private practice, also challenged the assertion that Cumming would not have access to privileged information. As a city employee, Cumming is part of the city, he argued, which is the client Baltimore’s solicitor would be seeking to protect.

Publicizing privileged information would be a different matter, however, Peters argued. As inspector general, he said, Cumming is not authorized to waive attorney-client privilege.

Others outside the inspector general community viewed the situation differently. William Brennan, a Greenbelt attorney who has done both criminal and civil work, said attorney-client privilege is one of several key privileges protected by the law.

When an attorney sees someone trying to “invade” the privilege, they have an obligation to assert the privilege on behalf of their client, he said.

Whether Cumming is herself a client of the city lawyers, Brennan said, would need a court to decide.

“It’s a complex issue, but the lawyers in the first instance have to assiduously protect the attorney-client privilege and let a court decide whether it’s appropriate,” he said.

Brennan said he was troubled by the idea that Cumming could access city documents without issuing a subpoena or requesting them.

“With subpoena power there’s a mechanism in place for the person who receives the subpoena to challenge the validity,” he said. “If you bypass that, then the inspector general has become the investigator as well as the judge in making all of the decisions without appropriate judicial oversight.”

While Cumming’s access to documents has been broad in the past, she said a document must be related to an investigation for her office to take a look. When a document is accessed, she said, her office fills out a form which becomes part of the case file.

Documents accessed by the inspector general can be shared with “law enforcement partners,” Cumming said.

At the heart of the dispute between Cumming and the Scott administration are documents related to the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, which spearheads Scott’s holistic crime fighting program. Cumming has made several requests for records maintained by the office, including one for participants in the Sidestep program that duplicated a request made by State’s Attorney Ivan Bates in June.

Cumming, who filed her request in October and got the results this month, said she did not request the records on Bates’ behalf.

Before Scott’s weekend decision and in the days since, Cumming has expressed frustration in social media posts about significant redactions that city attorneys have made to records she subpoenaed. The records include invoices, but the payee is blacked out.

Peters said it is unusual for subpoenaed records to be redacted at all. During his tenure in New York, it only happened when there was a specific public safety concern, such as a record containing details about a confidential informant.

Cumming said the records she requested did not contain equally sensitive information.

“No, absolutely not,“ she said. ”Some of the things they redacted are in Workday,“ she added, referring to the city’s widely accessible payroll and contract management software.

Officials with Scott’s office have said they would not comment beyond the four paragraph statement they released Saturday, however they did respond briefly to Cumming’s Tuesday social media post, which included a picture of numerous documents that were redacted.

“The removal of the Office of the Inspector General’s unauthorized and unfettered access to the Law Department’s legally protected work product files did not pertain to any current investigation and removal of that access will not impede the lawful work of the Office of the Inspector General,” said Tracy King, Scott’s director of communication. “The OIG is choosing to conflate two independent issues in an intentional effort to mislead the public about this situation.”

The next steps to resolving the dispute remain in question. Cumming said she’s exploring whether the board that oversees her can sue the city, but as inspector general, Cumming said she has no jurisdiction.

She noted that residents of Baltimore would also have standing to dispute the mayor’s decision in court.

“The public voted for an independent office of the inspector general,” Cumming said. “The public can fight.”