There was a story in the NYT the other day that I thought was interesting, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.
Yujin Choi was a rising young prosecutor in the Denver district attorney’s office.
In 2021, Ms. Choi made her first allegation against Dan Hines, a criminal investigator in the district attorney’s office. She told supervisors that he had made an inappropriate comment to her.
Mr. Hines, who joined the office in 2019 after spending 10 years in the military and 20 years with the Pennsylvania State Police, retiring as a troop commander, denied the allegation.
“The investigation was closed as unsubstantiated,” according to the ruling, but Mr. Hines was transferred within the office and was ordered not to contact Ms. Choi.
…
In October 2022, Ms. Choi said that Mr. Hines sent her four inappropriate text messages.
So what makes this story interesting? Turns out…
While she provided screenshots of the messages, questions about their authenticity quickly surfaced.
The first text had a time stamp that was about 40 minutes after Ms. Choi had already reported it to her superiors, according to the ruling.
She said that she did not want a formal investigation and did not cooperate with it, the ruling said, but the prosecutor’s office felt obligated to move forward with an inquiry.
When confronted with the new allegations, Mr. Hines immediately demanded a polygraph test and offered his phone for inspection. A forensic search of his phone did not show any communication between his number and Ms. Choi’s, according to the ruling.
The investigation further revealed that Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself. In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them.
The investigation found that Ms. Choi downloaded and altered a spreadsheet containing her Verizon message logs before she provided those records to investigators.
Yes, it is the all-time, but not often seen, classic “B—h set me up!” story. And it seems like she was singularly inept at the “setting up” part. But wait, there’s more.
The weekend before her phone and laptop were to be examined for evidence of the alleged misconduct by Mr. Hines, Ms. Choi told investigators that her phone had fallen into her bathtub after she had drawn herself a bath and put her phone on a tray.
She said that she dried it right away but found that it was not working. She then went to her desk to make a video call to a colleague, according to the ruling. After the call, still in a panic over her phone, she knocked over a bottle, spilling water on her laptop, and leaving that disabled as well.
…
Ms. Choi has been disbarred.
…
Ms. Choi told the disciplinary office that she did not intentionally harm Mr. Hines because she did not make any formal statement against him until the office forced her to participate in its investigation.
In asking for leniency, she said that she was under financial stress and that she had been a lawyer only for a short time. The court office noted in its ruling that Ms. Choi’s repeated deception and lack of remorse persuaded it to go beyond suspending her law license and to seek disbarment.
Mr. Hines said he was livid about the way the internal investigations were handled, and the damage done to his reputation and mental and physical health. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the district attorney, Beth McCann, the city and county of Denver and the prosecutor’s office.
In case you’re wondering, the DA’s office says that “Ms. Choi’s casework was later found to be in ‘excellent order,’ with no evidence of fabrications.”