Investigate
You Can Do This
Everything documented on this site was built from public records, court filings, FOIA responses, campaign finance data, and published reporting. None of it required a law license, a press badge, or a government position. It required attention, persistence, and a willingness to read more than one file at a time.
This section gives you the tools to do the same.
What’s Here
| Guide | What It Does |
|---|---|
| ⚠ Do Not Use FOIAworks | FOIAworks charges up to $69.95/month, has no privacy policy, and is run by a sanctioned attorney. Use the free Clutch Justice FOIA Generator instead — no account, no data stored. |
| FOIA Toolkit | How to file an effective Michigan FOIA request. Templates, deadlines, appeal paths, and the specific language that prevents delay. |
| Oversight Filing Guide | How to file complaints with Michigan’s AGC, JTC, SCAO, MCOLES, and other oversight bodies. What each one does and what they can’t do. |
| Court Records Guide | How to read a Michigan docket, find appellate opinions, search PACER for federal cases, and use case numbers to pull the actual documents. |
| Campaign Finance | How to use TransparencyUSA, Michigan CFRS, and FEC filings to trace who funds whom. The dark money indicators. |
| Evidence Documentation | How to build a contemporaneous record that attorneys and oversight bodies can actually use. Incident logs, document indexes, escalation trackers. |
| Entity Search | How to search Michigan LARA for business registrations, registered agents, corporate connections, and formation dates. |
| Hemlock FOIA Toolkit | Ready-to-use FOIA templates targeting Saginaw ISD, Hemlock PS, LakeNet vendor agreements, and Roscommon County property records. Copy, fill in your name, send. |
The Process
This is the process used to build detroit.primals.eco and this site:
- Find a thread — a name, a case number, a campaign contribution, a court filing that doesn’t match what was said publicly
- Pull the records — FOIA the agency, search the docket, check LARA, run the campaign finance
- Read them against each other — a single record tells one story; three records from three systems tell the real one
- Document what you find — contemporaneous notes, screenshots with timestamps, original documents preserved
- Publish the sourced version — every claim tied to a specific document, docket entry, or filing
- File the complaints — AGC for attorneys, JTC for judges, SCAO for systemic court issues, MCOLES for law enforcement, IC3 for federal crimes
- Follow through — track responses, appeal denials, escalate when ignored
Why This Works
Michigan’s oversight system dismisses 94% of complaints. Not because the complaints are unfounded — because the system is built to process them one at a time, in isolation, without pattern recognition.
A single FOIA denial is an inconvenience. Documented FOIA denials across three cases from the same prosecutor’s office is a pattern. A pattern sourced to primary records is evidence. Evidence published where investigators can find it is pressure.
That is what this section is for.