A deeper look into CSG impeachment proceedings for Alifa Chowdhury and Elias Atkinson

Editor’s note: Alifa Chowdhury and Eman Naga are former Michigan Daily staffers. Chowdhury and Naga did not contribute to the writing or editing of this article.

Two months after the University of Michigan’s Central Student Judiciary impeached former Central Student Government President Alifa Chowdhury and Vice President Elias Atkinson, and one month after they were officially removed from office, the campus community is adjusting to the shifts made within the CSG administration. The Daily took a deeper look at the impeachment proceedings and sat down with Chowdhury and Atkinson to reflect on their removal from office. 

During the Fall 2024 hearing, Chowdhury and Atkinson received five allegations from the CSG Student Assembly. The impeachment motion, which was proposed during a CSG meeting Nov. 14, passed, and both Chowdhury and Atkinson were charged. Both Chowdhury and Atkinson were found guilty of dereliction of duty, and were found not guilty of incitement of violence. Chowdhury was also found not guilty of cyber hacking and defamation. 

LSA senior Mario Thaqi, former speaker of the Assembly, along with LSA junior Jake Frederick, former deputy communications director of the 13th Assembly, assumed the roles of president and vice president for the rest of the 2024-2025 school year.

The first article of the motion read that an Instagram post made by Chowdhury on the SHUT IT DOWN account allegedly incited violence during the Oct. 8 CSG meeting. 

In an interview with The Michigan Daily prior to the hearing, Thaqi said the Assembly voted in favor of impeachment due to disrespectful treatment from the president and vice president during the Oct. 8 meeting.

“I honestly think the Assembly was just tired of the way the president and the vice president were treating them, treating other members of the student body and were treating their role,” Thaqi said. “If you would have asked me, ‘Do you think the Assembly would be in support of an impeachment?’ a month or two ago, my opinion would be no. But I think in the meeting on the 8th, a lot of the Assembly was disrespected, harassed and intimidated, and a lot of people felt very attacked by that meeting.”

Chowdhury was also charged with one count of cybertheft for changing the password to the CSG Instagram account, but was found not guilty.

Thaqi said he felt Chowdhury and Atkinson’s answers to questions and lack of responses in CSG meetings after Oct. 8 did not reflect the professionalism required of their roles.

“If you’re the student body president and just rejecting questions altogether when interacting with another branch of the government, that’s something that I think a lot of Assembly members saw as unbecoming of office,” Thaqi said.

LSA sophomore Margaret Peterman, CSG first-year internship program director, proposed the impeachment motion. In an interview with The Daily prior to the hearing, Peterman said she decided to write the proposal after the Oct. 8 CSG meeting.

“The articles came about after the October meeting,” Peterman said. “Before that, there was really no reason for anyone to consider impeachment. I don’t think that was on anybody’s mind. It surely wasn’t on my mind. But after the Oct. 8 meeting, in which the president was in the back of the room engaging in chants against CSG members, after which she posted on the Instagram and basically defamed members of the government, it began to cross my mind that this was a possibility.”

All parties involved in the complaint were present Nov. 22 at 6 p.m. for the first session of the hearing. Both Chowdhury and Atkinson entered a plea of not guilty. Law School student Caitlin Doolittle, counsel for the defense, claimed the prosecution would not be able to prove that Chowdhury and Atkinson incited violence during the Oct. 8 meeting.

“(Chowdhury and Atkinson’s) ability to participate in the politics of CSG and to communicate with their constituents must be protected by this court,” Doolittle said. “(The prosecutor) will fail to prove that anything that they said amounts to violence, and they will try to make it seem like merely encouraging democratic participation on our campus is tantamount to incitement to violence. It is not. This is fundamentally a First Amendment issue.”

Before witnesses were called to the stand, Doolittle moved for witness sequestration, which would prevent witnesses from hearing testimony from other witnesses until the trial concluded. CSJ granted this request. Doolittle also claimed that Chowdhury and Atkinson could not testify against each other as witnesses.

“This is something that is protected within the CSG Constitution, as well as under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, particularly since there are criminal allegations at play here,” Doolittle said. “This is obviously not a legal tribunal in the true sense of the term, but if the complainant’s intention is to call one of my clients and ask them questions about alleged criminal conduct, I simply can’t allow that to happen.”

The CSJ justices provisionally ruled that Chowdhury and Atkinson cannot be compelled to testify. However, they requested more information from both parties to review later and reassess their decision. Because this deliberation went past the allotted time for the hearing, all parties scheduled for the hearing to continue Monday, Nov. 25, at 6:30 p.m.

Over the course of four weeks, six other sessions of the hearing were conducted, totalling about 20 hours. By Dec. 23, CSJ reached and published their decision.

In an interview with The Daily after the hearing, Liam Reaser, CSG student general counsel, said he was disappointed that the situation got to the point where a hearing was necessary.

“It genuinely is unfortunate that it came to this, because the president and vice president had multiple opportunities to correct several of the the issues that they were ultimately impeached for,” Reaser said. “I’m glad that the court convicted the president and vice president, but it was disappointing that that situation even occurred to begin with.”

In an interview with The Daily after the hearing, Atkinson said it was important to remember that he and Chowdhury were not found guilty of incitement of violence, despite the media focus on these charges. 

“It’s a waste that we spent so much time debating whether or not that actually happened,” Atkinson said. “And it’s also unfortunate that a lot of the media covering this is glossing over that fact. When the articles of impeachment came out, the headlines and the focus was about how we were violent and thieves and weren’t doing our job. Now that we’ve been removed, it seems like people forgot about that, and the most important thing to them now is that we got removed.”

In an interview with The Daily after the hearing, Thaqi said an important part of his administration will be amplifying various perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“No matter where you fall on the predominant campus climate issue of Palestine and Israel, we need to make sure students are heard,” Thaqi said. “We need to make sure that students are not just kind of being pushed to the side when the administration is making decisions on investments and neutrality and that kind of stuff. I think the predominant issue is how the administration has responded to protests on campus. It’s been a gross misuse of the police resources that we have on campus.”

Chowdhury said University leadership impeded the success of Chowdhury and Atkinson as president and vice president. 

“I think this is a lesson for any student leader that wants to make change that the University doesn’t necessarily support,” Chowdhury said. “The University aided so many people in CSG that weren’t us because it fell in line with their policies and positions. That made our job as student leaders so much harder — the institution was helping them. Even after we were removed, Sarah Hubbard, a University regent, reposted the tweet that got us doxxed. I think that’s such a vivid example of how closely these students were working with the University, if not literally, then ideologically.”

Chowdhury said even though her time in CSG might be over, the impeachment won’t stop pro-Palestine activism on campus.

“What we are trying to accomplish through the pro-Palestine movement is a free Palestine,” Chowdhury said. “Until that is accomplished, nothing we do is ever going to be a success. But in terms of materially halting and making people pay attention to the genocide and the University’s involvement in it, I’d like to say SHUT IT DOWN and our CSG run was consequential in shifting a culture on this campus.”

Daily Staff Reporter Thomas Gala-Garza can be reached at tmgala@umich.edu.

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