During a caucus meeting on Tuesday, two key state representatives admitted they don’t see a path forward in their effort to impeach Franklin County Sheriff John Grismore, barring significant new revelations in their ongoing investigation.
This is despite a series of allegations against Grismore, the severity of which were only candidly presented to the public at Tuesday’s caucus meeting.
“The testimony and the evidence we saw on Dec. 11 points to some financial mismanagement, like tens of thousands of dollars in retirement funds that should have gone into state pensions being paid by then-Captain Grismore to himself,” Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans, told Democratic senators on Tuesday, referring to a prior hearing held by the House Special Committee on Impeachment.
McCarthy later told VTDigger that Grismore continued allegedly embezzling retirement funds even after then-Franklin County Sheriff Roger Langevin and the state treasurer’s office raised concerns.
There is also evidence, McCarthy told VTDigger, that Grismore vastly overpaid himself using dubious overtime calculations during his years working in the sheriff’s department. Vermont State Police and the Attorney General’s Office are both investigating Grismore for financial crimes, McCarthy said.
“He used a calculation that boggles the mind a bit about how to get himself into an overtime payment that was much larger than even what the sheriff would have gotten paid on an hourly overtime basis,” McCarthy said.
In an interview with VTDigger Tuesday evening, Grismore refuted all of McCarthy’s allegations, referring to them as “bullshit.” But hearing that the special committee has thus far come up short of impeachable charges, Grismore celebrated.
“If they’re throwing in the towel, awesome,” he said. “Finally, one ounce of justice in the last 18 months of crap that’s happened.”
McCarthy serves as vice-chair to the House’s special impeachment committee, and Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, its chair. The committee has been pursuing Grismore’s impeachment since last May.
In addition to the allegations against Grismore of financial malfeasance, Vermont’s Criminal Justice Council in December voted to revoke the embattled sheriff’s police certification, concluding that he violated Vermont’s use-of-force policy when he repeatedly kicked a handcuffed and shackled man in the groin in August 2022.
Grismore is also facing an assault charge stemming from that incident, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
On the phone with VTDigger Thursday evening, Grismore maintained that he has done nothing wrong.
“I know that the legislators, I know that members of the media, want to make it look like I’m some horrible guy and this demon, that… I’m this bad person, you know, I assaulted a guy in handcuffs — oh my god, let’s show that video some more,” Grismore said. “Now I’m stealing money. It’s all bullshit.”
The Franklin County sheriff, whose current term ends in January 2027, has refused to step down, and under Vermont law, impeachment is the only way to forcibly remove a sheriff from office. But unless new evidence emerges in the impeachment committee’s final weeks of investigation, successfully impeaching Grismore appears near-impossible, House inquiry leaders told their Senate colleagues.
LaLonde and McCarthy told Democratic senators Tuesday afternoon that Grismore’s actions have been “egregious” — but likely make an inadequate case for impeachment, because the conduct took place before he won his election for sheriff in November 2022. At the time, Grismore was serving as a captain, the self-described No. 2 in the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office.
According to LaLonde, the impeachment committee — which has largely conducted its business in secretive closed-door hearings — and its legal counsel have combed through case precedent from similar impeachment processes conducted in other states. What they have found is, “You can’t impeach somebody solely on behavior before they took office,” LaLonde said.
“I just want to make it really clear: It is very difficult to imagine us advancing articles of impeachment when the behavior happened prior to somebody taking the oath of office,” McCarthy reiterated shortly after LaLonde spoke to Democratic senators.
LaLonde told VTDigger Tuesday afternoon that he expects the impeachment committee to hold at least one more hearing before the end of the 2024 legislation session during which members could weigh additional evidence against Grismore. That evidence could come, LaLonde said, in a report that the committee has been anticipating for months from a law firm investigating the sheriff’s conduct both before and after he took office.
Still, LaLonde characterized advancing articles of impeachment as “an uphill path.” In order to clinch a strong case for impeachment, the committee must prove that Grismore has continued his alleged bad behavior after taking his oath of office.
If the committee uncovers such evidence, McCarthy told VTDigger that it could use Grismore’s pre-oath of office actions in their case to establish a pattern of impeachable behavior. “It’s not impossible. A decision hasn’t been made yet… There’s also more investigating to be done,” McCarthy said.
But, he added, “To date, no, the Special Committee on Impeachment has not found that we have what we need to advance an Article of Impeachment.”
McCarthy and LaLonde did not take the unusual step of appearing in the upper chamber’s caucus on Tuesday merely to offer an update on their committee’s work. Their larger purpose was to impress upon the senators the importance of moving forward with Proposal 1, a proposed constitutional amendment that is slated for a vote in the Senate.
Prop 1, as it’s called, would allow the Legislature to set qualifications for county elected officials, including sheriffs, and would create a mechanism for removing them from their positions if they fail to meet those requirements. Grismore, who no longer holds his police certification, and is thus unable to complete many of a sheriff’s typical duties, has become the poster child for Prop 1.
But in order to move forward in Vermont’s arduous, yearslong process for constitutional amendments, Prop 1 needs to overcome a steep two-thirds majority vote in the Senate. The chamber has continually postponed its floor vote on the matter. Senate staffer Ashley Moore told VTDigger Tuesday evening that the vote likely will not be for “at least a week if not more.”
What McCarthy and LaLonde were really doing on Tuesday was making the case for senators to greenlight Prop 1, so that going forward, legislators have some sort of enforcement mechanism for county officers like Grismore.
“In order to provide the Senate caucus with some context for why we need (Proposal) 1, Rep. LaLonde and I decided today that we would show some of our cards,” McCarthy told VTDigger. The message they tried to get across to senators was, “We’re not done (with) our work yet, but this is a really hard thing to do. Impeaching somebody is darn near impossible.”
An earlier version of this story contained the wrong date of an incident in which Franklin County Sheriff John Grismore repeatedly kicked a handcuffed and shackled man in the groin.
