Mayor Johnston's Team Tried to Get DIA's Top Lawyer to Break the Law. He Said No. Now He's Suing.

Denver International Airport's General Counsel, Everett Martinez, just filed a federal lawsuit against the city, City Attorney Miko Brown, CFO Nicole Doheny, and mayoral strategist Jeff Dolan.

Martinez claims he kept telling Mayor Johnston's people they were about to do something illegal, they kept ignoring him, and when he wouldn't play ball, they pushed him out of his job.

The biggest issue is the Park Hill Golf Course land swap, where the city traded airport land to a private developer. Federal law is pretty clear that airport land can't be given away below market value, and the city's own appraisal came in at about half what the airport told the FAA the land was worth back in 2020. Martinez says he flagged this repeatedly and nobody listened.

According to the lawsuit, Martinez alleges the city told him to hide the developer's involvement from the FAA entirely. The complaint also claims the Acting City Attorney called him at home one evening to tell him not to keep records of the deal, saying keeping records would "scream treble damages to the FAA." Martinez says his response was to immediately call his team and tell them to document absolutely everything.

After he filed an internal HR complaint and hired a lawyer, the city put him on administrative leave two days later and told him he was out as General Counsel. Their stated reasoning was that by hiring an attorney, he created a "conflict of interest." Martinez argues nobody mentioned any such conflict in his nine years at DIA.

Martinez also alleges that Brown told him, a Hispanic man, to "get a noose and hang yourself with it" when pressuring him to help push out airport CEO Phil Washington, who is Black. The lawsuit argues the Mayor's appointees exclusively targeted the two most senior people of color at the airport. The Mayor's office called the lawsuit "40 pages of horses*** from a disgruntled employee." Brown emailed her staff calling the claims "untrue." Martinez says his team kept records of everything.

The Mayor's office should have taken Martinez's legal advice seriously from the start rather than treating him as an obstacle. Bringing in the Airport's own legal team early and genuinely engaging with their FAA compliance concerns, rather than pressuring them to sign off on a deal they flagged as problematic, would have either resulted in a legally sound transaction or a decision not to pursue it. The same goes for the record-keeping and concealment issues, those are the kinds of directives that tend to create massive legal exposure.