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According to city records, Hearne City Manager Pee Wee Drake’s government-issued credit card was used to buy hundreds of dollars worth of football tickets, while thousands of dollars worth of city funds were spent on Christmas gifts, including several flat-screen televisions and a tablet computer. I am also informed that city employees purchased supplies for Mayor Ruben Gomez’s home using city funds.

I suspect the credit card purchases are only the tip of the iceberg. In a letter sent this afternoon, I asked Robertson County DA Coty Siegert, Major Jeffrey Collins of the Texas Rangers, and Robertson County grand jurors to investigate city hall finances and determine, among other things, whether city officials are tampering with electricity bills in order to reward their friends and punish their political enemies.

Rodrick Jackson, a Baptist minister and former city council candidate, originally obtained records of Mr. Drake’s credit card purchases via the Texas Public Information Act, and I drafted a new public information request that focused on utility records. Mr. Jackson submitted the new request on July 21, 2015, and the electricity service to his home was disconnected the same day, allegedly due to a mistake. However, city officials did not reconnect his electricity until the following day, and only after he threatened to call a lawyer. That looks and smells a lot like retaliation, which would be a crime under the circumstances.

Below are some of the suspicious purchases and transactions that appear in the records obtained by Mr. Jackson: … Read more

Since the East Texas oil boom in the 1930s, Kilgore has always been a brass-knuckle town, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally. Last year, the Longview News-Journal reported accusations that Kilgore College administrators directed employees to illegally dispose of asbestos, and college trustee Brian Nutt was quoted as demanding an investigation. Less than 24 hours later, he had a bullet through his front door.

The Kilgore establishment – on and off campus – has never been receptive to criticism, and it doesn’t want reformers like Mr. Nutt asking too many questions or challenging the status quo. So I was not particularly surprised when the Kilgore News Herald reported last Wednesday, under the heading “KC attorney wards off watchdogs,” that college attorney Rick Faulkner had sent a cease-and-desist letter to Dean Kinney, Tommy Konczak, and Phil Patterson. Why? Because Mr. Kinney had dared to request a copy of a report about asbestos on the college campus.

This afternoon I sent a letter to Mr. Faulkner in response. As the letter indicates, Kilgore College is about to get sued. In fact, the college – and most of the trustees – will soon be facing multiple lawsuits from multiple plaintiffs, and those plaintiffs may include some former employees who were exposed to asbestos and now suffer from lung diseases.

In the coming months, I also plan to post evidence of serious financial mismanagement at both Kilgore College and the Kilgore Independent School District. Yes, I’m referring to the Kilgore Heights Elementary School property. Stay tuned.

During my second year at Stanford Law School, I jokingly warned friends about a possible gunfight on campus between the U.S. Marshals Service and the Secret Service. In 1999, we were already accustomed to Chelsea Clinton’s Secret Service escort, but Carolyn Starr was an incoming freshman, and she was bringing her own entourage of deputy U.S. Marshals.

Carolyn was (and is) the daughter of Baylor University President Kenneth W. Starr, who at that time was the special prosecutor investigating President Bill Clinton. The most remarkable thing about her armed escort was the very idea that she needed one. I have never heard of any other federal prosecutors whose college-aged daughters were guarded by federal officers, but then you have to remember the extraordinary animosity that President Clinton and his supporters had directed toward Mr. Starr.

Never mind whether Slick Willie had raped women, suborned perjury, or lied under oath, his supporters always diverted attention to Mr. Starr, portraying him as some sex-obsessed prude who was leading a partisan witch hunt. Left-wing feminists were among the loudest hypocrites, openly acknowledging that, because of Slick Willie’s favorable positions on issues such as abortion, they really didn’t care what he had done to actual women. And besides, Slick Willie had been granted a certificate of absolution from his wife, Hillary Rodham “Stand By Your Man” Clinton, who had pronounced him the victim of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.”

I was reminded of all that a couple of weeks ago when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton unleashed his asp-tongued political consultant, Anthony Holm, against against Brian Wice and Kent Shaffer, the two special prosecutors assigned to investigate Mr. Paxton. Never mind the fact that Mr. Paxton admitted violating state securities laws that he voted for as a legislator, never mind the fact that he was sued for violating those laws and then violated them again,and never mind the fact that he voted to make his own actions a third-degree felony, Mr. Holm would have us believe that poor Mr. Paxton is just the victim of a vast, left-wing conspiracy. As a Republican, conservative Christian, and active member of the aforesaid “conspiracy,” I find that amusing. … Read more

I overlooked a couple of facts in my blog post yesterday, and those facts make it all the more evident that Collin County officials are trying to prevent grand jurors from investigating the suspicious purchase and sale of the Collin Central Appraisal District property.

I reported that District Judge John Roach, Jr. signed an order sealing the names of the grand jurors in his court on July 8, 2015, the same day that I sent a letter to District Clerk Andrea Stroh Thompson requesting the names of those grand jurors. And although I knew that Judge Chris Oldner had signed an identical order on June 25, 2015, I did not realize the significance of the date.

As it happens, I had sent an email on June 25 to Gayle Leyko, the assistant DA in charge of grand jury matters, asking whether she had presented the grand jury with the Lone Star Project’s May 12, 2015 letter about the appraisal district transaction. She ignored the email, but I later learned from another source that she had not delivered it to the Tuesday grand jury, i.e., the grand jury that had already received my March 21, 2015 letter about the same transaction.

The Tuesday grand jury also had been investigating Attorney General Ken Paxton, and my May 21 letter revealed that Mr. Paxton and District Attorney Greg Willis both were partners in that transaction. Hence all the efforts from Mr. Willis’s office to block the investigation of Mr. Paxton.

But I digress. Here’s what I think happened: Ms. Leyko received my June 25 email and immediately knew that I was going to ask the new grand jurors to investigate the appraisal district transaction (which involved her boss), so she asked Judge Oldner to sign an order sealing the names of those grand jurors. Unaware of that order, I sent a letter on July 8 to Ms. Thompson, the district clerk, asking for the names of both the Tuesday grand jurors and the Thursday grand jurors. I suspect Ms. Thompson immediately notified Ms. Leyko, who then asked Judge Roach to sign an identical order sealing the names of the Thursday grand jurors. We will know for sure when (or “if”) the judges and the DA’s office comply with the public information requests that I sent to them yesterday. … Read more

This afternoon I sent a letter to Collin County district judges Chris Oldner and John Roach, Jr. about their orders sealing the names of all county grand jurors, because it appears that those orders are designed to protect the rear ends of Collin County’s political class rather than the privacy of the grand jurors.

Both orders apparently are directed at me, albeit not by name. In identical language, the orders claim that previous grand jurors were contacted at their homes and places of employment, “information was received outside the grand jury process and in violation of the laws of the [S]tate of Texas,” and that the “matter regarding which the prior grand jury was improperly contacted remains under investigation.” As my readers already know, I first sent a letter to the Collin County grand jury on March 6, 2015 about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s shady business dealings, followed by another letter on March 21, 2015. And yes, I delivered some of those letters personally.

As I explained in my letter to the judges (and in the latter half of my June 1, 2015 post), there would have been no grand jury investigation of Mr. Paxton if a nosy citizen (i.e., me) had not directly notified the grand jurors of the evidence of Mr. Paxton’s lawbreaking, as well as the evidence that Collin County DA Greg Willis was trying to cover it all up. You may recall that the grand jury went rogue after I sent the March 21, 2015 letter revealing the undisclosed business relationships between Mr. Willis and Mr. Paxton. I am not aware of any complaints from the grand jurors, and neither I nor anyone else posted their names publicly, so perhaps we should stop pretending that the orders were designed to protect grand juror privacy.

And let’s get the law straight while we’re at it: yes, it is illegal to solicit confidential information from grand jurors, but nothing prohibits the public from sending information to grand jurors, and nothing restricts grand juries to the information that they are spoon-fed by prosecutors. Grand juries are supposed to be “independent of the control of judges and prosecutors,” Whittington v. State, 680 S.W.2d 505, 512 (Tex.App. – Tyler 1984, pet. denied), and free to “act on their own knowledge and … free to make their presentments or indictments on such information as they deem satisfactory,” Costello v. U.S., 350 U.S. 359, 361 (1956) (cited with approval in Whittington, 680 S.W.2d at 511). So how can grand juries be “independent of the control of judges and prosecutors” if judges and prosecutors are controlling the flow of information? … Read more

The Tenth Court of Appeals in Waco will now decide whether College Station attorney Gaines West gets booted from a Brazos County lawsuit, and that decision could create a conundrum for the State Bar of Texas. An average lawyer could get in serious trouble for doing what Mr. West is accused of doing, but Mr. West is no average lawyer: he previously served as chairman of both the Texas Supreme Court’s Grievance Oversight Committee and its Board of Disciplinary Appeals.

Yesterday evening, the Court of Appeals asked Mr. West to respond to a petition for mandamus seeking his disqualification from Clayton Williams Energy, Inc. v. Williamson (full disclosure: I’m one of the attorneys representing Mr. West’s former clients).  As explained in the petition, Mr. West switched sides in the trial court, representing a new party against former clients whom he had already represented in that same case. That’s a big no-no according to the professional rules governing lawyers, never mind the rules of common sense, and it is particularly ironic since Mr. West advertises himself as an expert on attorney disciplinary matters.

On December 30, 2014, another attorney sent a letter to Mr. West demanding that he stop representing the new party against his former clients. In a January 6, 2015 response, Mr. West refused to withdraw from the case. That was not particularly surprising, as Mr. West is not known for his humility. But I suspect there is another underlying reason for his stubbornness: he knows that where the state bar is concerned, lawyers with political connections (i.e., like him) typically do not have to play by the same rules as other lawyers. In other words, Mr. West may have thought that he would be immune from professional misconduct charges because of his political connections. … Read more

As best I can determine, the limitations deadline for charging Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton with state securities violations is June 14, 2015.  If so, that means the grand jury must indict Mr. Paxton at its meeting tomorrow or at its next meeting on Tuesday, June 9, 2015, or he cannot be prosecuted for those alleged violations.

Mr. Paxton is accused of soliciting clients for investment advisor Frederick “Fritz” Mowery without disclosing the fact that Mr. Mowery was paying him a 30 percent “commission” for the referrals.  Mr. Paxton was not registered as a solicitor with the State Securities Board, and thanks to legislation that he supported as a state legislator in 2003 and 2011, someone who solicits investments without being registered commits a third-degree felony.

According to transcripts of administrative hearings that were conducted during the week of March 9, 2015, Mr. Mowery asked his clients to backdate numerous documents, including one that was backdated to June 14, 2012. (I’m probably not supposed to have the transcript, but here it is anyway; and here are the state’s closing brief and Mowery’s closing brief).  According to pages 285 and 287 of that transcript, the document was backdated to make it appear that Mr. Mowery informed Henry Allen and his wife (whose first name is not listed) about the referral fee arrangement with Mr. Paxton. … Read more

If I had any doubts about whether Texas Department of Safety Director Steven McCraw is thin-skinned, he managed to alleviate those doubts over the weekend.  According to an email that was forwarded to me this afternoon, Col. McCraw is quite annoyed that reporters won’t write stories the way he wants them written.

Last Thursday, Jeremy Schwartz and Eric Dexheimer of the Austin American-Statesman blogged about how Col. McCraw and DPS leaders complained to legislators about negative media coverage and tried to head off critical coverage with their own alternate versions of reality.  According to the email that was forwarded to me this afternoon, Col. McCraw responded to that blog the following day with a blast email to all DPS employees:

Some news organizations recently published stories about the Department that included inaccurate information, and information taken out of context, completely omitted, or significantly mischaracterized. Our media and communications team worked ahead of time to educate the reporters who were writing these stories by providing a significant amount of information about the issues they were questioning.  Unfortunately, the resulting articles did not reflect all of the facts that they were provided, and consequently, the articles grossly misrepresented these issues to their readers. … Read more

According to documents released today by the Texas Department of Public Safety, DPS director Steven McCraw personally initiated the reprimand of Trooper Billy Spears after Spears was photographed with rapper Snoop Dogg, whom McCraw described as a “dope smoking cop hater.” Meanwhile, other documents raise more questions than answers about DPS’s use of facial recognition software (more on that below).

In a March 21, 2015 email, Spears’s immediate supervisor, Sgt. Michael Sparks, explained that Spears allowed himself to be photographed with Snoop at the request of the Doggfather’s assistant, and that Spears and other troopers had previously been photographed with “Robert Duvall, Cee Lo Green, Fred Armistead, Rob Zombie, Shaquille O’Neal and others” while working backstage at the SXSW concert in Austin.

Sgt. Sparks’s email was forwarded up the chain of command to Col. McCraw, who responded as follows at 11:37 a.m. on a Sunday morning:

Apparently he would rather work the convention while on a week’s vacation to earn additional money rather than take an additional tour on the border.  He must not understand that he was being lampooned by a dope smoking cop hater which reflects very poorly upon the Department.

Wow. So this is the kind of emergency issue that keeps our top cop awake on nights and weekends. I’m glad to know we have our priorities straight. … Read more

This morning Trooper Billy L. Spears sued the Texas Department of Public Safety and its director, Col. Steve McCraw, because the agency refused to withdraw a reprimand that faulted Billy for allowing himself to be photographed with Snoop Dogg at the SXSW concert in Austin.*  The reprimand was part of a retaliation campaign that began when Billy filed a misconduct complaint against a sergeant with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, and the lawsuit names the sergeant and nine DPS supervisors as defendants.

You may recall the March 24, 2015 DPS “Counseling Record,” which made the following allegations under the heading “DEFICIENCIES INDICATING NEED FOR COUNSELING”:

While working a secondary employment job, Trooper Spears took a photo with a public figure who has a well-known criminal background including numerous drug charges. The public figure posted the photo on social media and it reflects poorly on the Agency.

After I blogged about DPS’s retaliation against Billy on April 1, the Dallas Morning News picked up the story and it soon spread to publications as far away as Australia, India, and Africa. … Read more