When Massachusetts cops showed up at Bob Burch’s door in November 2021, he suspected the visit had something to do with COVID-19 rules.
The Westfield-based web designer had ruffled feathers in the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) by creating a website where MSP employees criticized the agency’s COVID vaccine mandate, according to internal records obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Nearly 30 of them have since battled the MSP in federal court after the agency responded to their exemption claims with investigations, suspensions and firings.
An archived webpage shows the now-defunct “MSP Medical Freedom” website created for Massachusetts police officers resisting the state’s 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandates. (Screenshot/MSP Medical Freedom/Wayback Machine)
That crackdown was so extensive that it brought two MSP officers with badges around their necks to Bright Cloud Studio, Burch’s company, to investigate the now-defunct Massachusetts State Protectors of Medical Freedom website, he recalled in a DCNF interview. “They asked who the website came from, who paid for the website, and I was just like, ‘Well, I can’t just give my clients up like that,’” Burch said.
“They weren’t just going through the motions. They were trying to get something,” Burch told the DCNF.
Burch was not their target, however. Former state troopers Josh Ulrich, Chris Dolan and Thomas Mace and former sergeants Dan Clemens and Michael Murphy faced disciplinary charges for their involvement in the group before leaving the MSP over the vaccine requirements, according to records and interviews. The website probe — which has not been previously reported — shows how far some officials went to pressure critics of former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s August 2021 vaccine mandate for state workers.
The MSP declined to comment to the DCNF due to pending litigation with the former cops.
Bringing The Hammer Down
MSP leaders complained the “MSP Medical Freedom” website might make a viewer think it referred to Massachusetts State Police and violate a rule against officers criticizing the agency, documents show. The vaccine mandate critics argued in a November 2021 letter that their group was criticizing the governor’s vaccine policy, not the MSP, and that the agency has no ownership over the “MSP” acronym. But the higher-ups did not relent.
“As a layman or as a sworn member of the state police, the term MSP to me means Mass State Police,” a senior officer told Clemens in a November 2021 transcribed interview lasting two and a half hours. “I guess I’ll just leave that as a statement. Obviously, that term is subject to interpretation. Is that a fair statement?”
“Yes,” said Clemens, then a seasoned drug investigator. He explained that the group consisted of MSP employees claiming religious or other exemptions to the vaccine mandate.
The MSP policy in question says employees cannot “create an identity, website, page, fan group or other application of social media using the Massachusetts State Police as the basis of such a creation without prior approval … (e.g., creating a website or fan group dedicated to Massachusetts State Police, using ‘Massachusetts State Police’ or ‘MSP’ in a username).”
Those forming the medical freedom group agreed not to use “Massachusetts State Police” in their title to comply with that policy, Clemens told his interviewer.
“Without going down too deep a rabbit hole, I guess, if you don’t mind explaining a bit of that conversation, because to me MSP means very clearly Mass State Police,” the official stressed.
MSP employees like Clemens already had to submit to interviews to prove the sincerity of their religious beliefs, and if denied an exemption, endure internal charges and trials for refusing to vaccinate, the DCNF previously reported. Clemens and the four other MSP Medical Freedom leaders were under investigation or suspension at the time of the website dispute, a case document shows.
“It was extremely stressful because you were not supposed to retire with an open case on the docket,” Dolan told the DCNF.
Clemens was raised Catholic and did not want to take a vaccine partially made from aborted fetal cell lines, he told the DCNF. “The website issue was really minimal to me,” he said. “It didn’t really mean anything to me because we were going to get fired over the vaccine.”
MSPCase Report, 3.23.23 by Hudson Crozier
‘A Political Powerhouse’
The five men’s journeys led to a dishonorable discharge for Mace, a general discharge for Murphy, and voluntary retirement for Ulrich, Dolan and Clemens, according to records and former officers’ comments.
“They call it a resignation. I say they forced me out of my job three years short of my retirement,” Ulrich, the group’s former president, told the DCNF. Officers who were suspended without pay, like Ulrich, were not allowed to accept other work in the meantime.
“It’s a political powerhouse in the state,” Ulrich said. “We’re just lowly employees trying to feed our families.”
Public disciplinary records show findings of “misconduct” for Mace and Ulrich related to the website investigation. The reprimands came despite the group dropping the “s” in its acronym at the advice of an attorney, according to Dolan and Ulrich. Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey rescinded Baker’s vaccine mandate in March 2023.
“A lot of honorable people got destroyed by this,” Clemens told the DCNF.
“There were guys, young guys that changed their whole life to become a trooper and were doing the right thing, got on the state police — which is no easy task — and just got brushed aside,” he said.
Mace, Dolan and Ulrich are part of a lawsuit from 29 former uniformed and civilian MSP employees demanding damages or reinstatement over the mandate, the DCNF previously reported. Obama-appointed U.S. Judge Leo Sorokin ruled against the three men and all other uniformed officers in March and April while letting the civilian claims move forward. Those left behind are weighing their options for an appeal, Dolan told the DCNF.
Dolan finds the MSP’s aggressive treatment of them ironic, given that the agency has seen more than a decade of misconduct-related scandals. The MSP made headlines between 2018 and 2024 for state troopers allegedly claiming fraudulent overtime hours, a trooper failing to disclose her drug-dealing record, another trooper tied to a fatal vehicle accident and a leading investigator’s offensive text messages about a murder suspect.
“They just did everything that they could do to focus on us to get us off the job,” Dolan said. “Why? Because we’re actually the cops that care about people’s constitutional freedoms. We’re actually cops that care about things like that.”
A longtime friend of Dolan’s, Burch said he made the medical freedom website because workers have a right to refuse a new vaccine that was not extensively tested.
“Pretty early on, I kind of got a hunch that COVID was not really the deal that everyone was making it out to be, and that it seemed to start to be like a trial for governments and authorities to see what they could get away with with the general public,” he said.
Dolan and others leading the lawsuit received law enforcement awards or recognition on the MSP’s social media profiles before the vaccine battles started. Dolan, then a homicide investigator, gained special notoriety for solving cold case murders.
“You’d kind of think a person like Chris, they would want to keep around,” Burch said.
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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
