UNITED WE VOTE
Menu

UNITED WE VOTE

Billionaires Keep Benefiting From a Tax Break to Help the Poor. Now, Congress Wants to Investigate.

11/10/2019

0 Comments

 

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Congress is calling for investigations of and changes to a Trump tax break aimed at helping poor areas of the country in response to reporting by ProPublica and The New York Times showing the program has been exploited by the wealthy and politically connected.

The opportunity zone program, which was part of the 2017 tax law overhaul, was supposed to drive investment toward specially designated low-income neighborhoods. But numerousreportshave highlighted ways in which politically connected individuals have landed opportunity zone designations for areas in which they have a financial stake, sometimes at the expense of poorer areas.

ProPublica’s reporting uncovered instances in Baltimore and Detroit in which billionaires stand to benefit from the break in areas that shouldn’t have qualified for the program in the first place. The Times reported that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had intervened to get a tract added to the program that included land owned by a billionaire investor.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced a bill this week that would significantly narrow the scope of the program. It would remove hundreds of areas that the original legislation allowed to benefit from the break even though they were not poor, including the two areas of Detroit and Baltimore that ProPublica identified. It would also vastly increase the reporting requirements for those taking advantage of the break and narrow the kinds of investments that would be eligible to receive it.

“The Opportunity Zone program has been troubled from the start,” Wyden said in a statement. “The Treasury Department has been steering potentially billions in tax breaks to Donald Trump’s friends, and there are no safeguards to ensure taxpayers are not simply subsidizing handouts for billionaires with no benefit to the low-income communities this program was supposed to help.”

In recent days, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker, a vocal backer of the program since its inception, and Reps. Emanuel Cleaver and Ron Kind also called on the Treasury’s inspector general toreview the program, citing the ProPublica and New York Times stories. Their letter requests a review of all opportunity zones to ensure they comply with the eligibility requirements of the program.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., recently announced that, if elected president, he would seek to scrap the opportunity zone program altogether. “This is corruption and corporate greed, and it is unacceptable,” he said, citing ProPublica’s Detroit story and other reporting.

Other lawmakers, including House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, requested the Government Accountability Office review the program and “identify any Opportunity Zones that do not meet the statutory criteria and explain how and why they were designated.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But this year at an event in Washington, President Donald Trump praised the program. “Across the country, our tax cuts have kicked off a race to invest in Opportunity Zones beyond anything that anybody in this room even thought,” he said.

In June, ProPublica and WNYC reported on an opportunity zone in Baltimore largely owned by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank’s private development company. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan picked the area for the program after a meeting with Plank’s lobbyists, despite a member of his own staff noting that it was too wealthy to qualify for the program. Both Hogan and Plank’s team have said the development will benefit a neglected part of the city and help the surrounding communities.

Last month, ProPublica published a report showing that Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert stands to benefit from the program in wealthy areas of downtown Detroit, including one area that shouldn’t have qualified for the program. Internal emails showed that Gilbert’s representatives communicated with officials at the local, state and federal levels about the program prior to the areas being designated as opportunity zones. Quicken denies that the company lobbied the Treasury Department to make any particular areas eligible for the program.

The New York Times reported last month on how Mnuchin personally intervened in the Treasury’s implementation of the law to include the Nevada tract where billionaire Michael Milken owns land. The Times published an internal IRS memo objecting to the move. Mnuchin has said he didn’t know about Milken’s investments when he got involved in the case.

Experts have raised significant issues with the program since it was included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. The program offers a break to investors on their capital gains taxes if they plow that money into poor neighborhoods.

Some public policy experts argue that tax breaks that target geographic areas, rather than the people living in them, are fundamentally flawed. Money can too easily flow into investments with no tangible benefit for existing residents, such as luxury housing, they say.

“What we are seeing is big high-end investment in real estate, and that is not going to benefit poor people in poor places,” said Timothy Weaver, a professor of political science at SUNY Albany who has studied past place-based tax incentives. Instead, Weaver said, the foregone revenue would be better spent on things like parks, libraries and schools that improve the lives of current residents.

In addition, the program currently lacks transparency or a mechanism for determining its effectiveness. Opportunity zone funds self-certify on their private tax forms that they are in compliance with the program. There is no mechanism for informing the public in any detail about who is using the tax break or for what purpose. The Treasury Department is working on final regulations, but there is no clear sign it will include sufficient transparency and reporting requirements.

The Wyden bill takes aim at many of these issues, though it leaves the overall tax break intact. It seeks to eliminate the break for overly wealthy areas and to exclude certain kinds of investments — such as residential projects that don’t include affordable housing — from the program. It also would amp up the reporting process by requiring opportunity zone funds to post information about their investments publicly, and it directs the Government Accountability Office to evaluate the program’s effects after a period of time.

The proposal stops short of empowering a government agency to direct investments to projects that fit the objectives of the program, as is the case with some other place-based initiatives. It also doesn’t ensure the community must benefit from opportunity zone investments by imposing any requirements that projects employ or house local residents.

0 Comments

What's Up With The Double Standard, Tarrant County?

9/22/2019

0 Comments

 

Judge who handed down a 5 year prison sentence to a woman who cast an improper provisional ballot once made a similar election related mistake himself--and that's just the start of the hypocrisy in the Crystal Mason case.


In the case of Texas vs. Crystal Mason, Tarrant County, Texas prosecutors and Judges are coming dangerously close to violating the federal law which is designed to protect ordinary citizens from voter intimidation. According to the Cornell Law School Web site, 18 U.S. Code § 594 specifically states:

Whoever intimidates, threatens, coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose, or of causing such other person to vote for, or not to vote for, any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner, at any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing such candidate, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.​

Judge Ruben Ruben Gonzalez, who sentenced Crystal Mason, a Rendon, TX resident, to 5 years in prison for casting a provisional ballot while she was under court supervision has first hand knowledge of how easy it can be to make an election related mistake. He did so himself on a campaign finance report that he filed with the Texas Ethics Commission  in 2013 (Report number 581493). In the amended report, Judge Gonzalez states that the reason for the correction is that:

.......The oversight is lack of understanding of how the reporting program operates. The balance of the account is $16,416.30.

Well, if a "lack of understanding" is enough to keep Judge Gonzalez from going to jail for voter fraud, what gives him the right to sentence Crystal Mason to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot that was never counted?

 According to the Huffington Post and various other news accounts of her ordeal, nobody --not even the poll workers-- specifically told Mason that her status as a convicted felon who was still under court supervision made it illegal for her to vote. 

Although Judge Gonzalez reportedly offered no explanation for the harsh 5 year sentence for Mason, one possible explanation is Sharen Wilson, the District Attorney of Tarrant County, who according to various news accounts, had been pushing for harsh sentences for convictions of voter fraud.

It seems, however, that Ms. Wilson made a rather serious election related boo-boo of her own. Apparently, nobody ever told the Tarrant County District attorney that it might not be legal to shake down the employees of the District Attorney's office for campaign donations.

According to The Fort Worth Star Telegram, District Attorney Wilson obtained the personal email addresses of the employees of the DA's office under the pretext of "updating the personnel files" then sent an email out to all of her subordinates inviting them to a "fundraiser" which would set them back anywhere from $100 to $1000.

Maureen Shelton, the Wichita County district attorney who was assigned to conduct an inquiry into the case, concluded that there was "insufficient evidence" to charge Wilson with criminal wrongdoing. She must not have looked very hard. 

Publicly available campaign finance reports show that in 2016 alone, there were an unusually high number of campaign contributions from employees of the Tarrant County DA's office to the Sharen Wilson campaign. Further, Maureen Shelton never even bothered to type her campaign finance reports -- she submitted them in handwritten form -- a very unusual format.

Another very troubling aspect of this case is the wavering testimony of J. Warren St. John, Crystal Mason's FIRST Attorney. According to the Fort Worth Star Telegram,  at the time of the original trial St. John, had told the court:

                         "I find it amazing that the government feels she made this up," ..... "She was never told that she couldn't vote, and she voted in good faith. Why would she risk going back to prison for something that is not going to change her life?"

Further St. John then told NPR in a March 31, 2018 interview

"She didn't understand!"....."She was never told she couldn't vote. Not by a district judge. Not by anyone at the half-way house where she lived after she got out. Not by the probation officer."

But then, again according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram, when Mason appeared in the same Fort Worth Court in front of the same judge (Ruben Gonzalez) in a hearing for a retrial on May 25, 

[St. John] testified Friday that he told her she would lose certain rights if she were convicted.
One of those rights was her right to vote.


But flip-flopping testimony by her original attorney is only one reason why Crystal Mason's rights to effective counsel have been violated in this case. According to publicly available campaign finance reports, St. John has contributed at least 5 times to the political campaign of Sharen Wilson, the District Attorney charged with prosecuting Mason with voter fraud and reportedly pushing for as harsh of sentence as possible.

Click on the images below to view the full reports
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Sources:
Tarrant County Election Filings dated on or before 07/17/2017

Tarrant County Election Filings dated after 07/17/2017
​Page 3 / 5th entry down
​(Looks like a report dated 07/14/2019 was filed here in error)

Another troubling aspect of Sharen Wilson's campaign finance filings is that she accepted campaign donations from bail bondsman (see "Just Bail Bonds" 11/12/2013 for example). While that may or may not be a violation of Texas law, since it is part of most criminal district attorney's responsibilities to recommend the amount of bail, it at the very least, gives the appearance of a conflict of interest .

The real question here is why should there be two sets of rules when it comes to elections -- one for the connected and another set of rules for the rest of us? If Tarrant County's intent in the Crystal Mason case is to "protect the sanctity of elections," they should clean up their own act first.


Crystal has set up a gofundme page so that Tarrant County's violation of the federal voter intimidation law does not totally destroy her life. Any help that you can give would be greatly appreciated.
​
0 Comments

Crystal Mason's ballot was never counted. Will she still serve five years in prison for illegally voting?

9/18/2019

0 Comments

 

By Emma Platoff and Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune Sept. 17, 2019

"Crystal Mason's ballot was never counted. Will she still serve five years in prison for illegally voting?" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

FORT WORTH — When Crystal Mason got out of federal prison, she said, she “got out running.”

By Nov. 8, 2016, when she’d been out for months but was still on supervised release, she was working full-time at Santander Bank in downtown Dallas and enrolled in night classes at Ogle Beauty School, trying, she said, to show her children that a “bump in the road doesn’t determine your future.”

On Election Day, there was yet another thing to do: After work, she drove through the rain to her polling place in the southern end of Tarrant County, expecting to vote for the first female president.

When she got there, she was surprised to learn that her name wasn’t on the roll. On the advice of a poll worker, she cast a provisional ballot instead. She didn’t make it to her night class.

A month later, she learned that her ballot had been rejected, and a few months after that, she was arrested. Because she was on supervised release, prosecutors argued, she had knowingly violated a law preventing felons from voting before completing their sentences. Mason insisted she had no idea officials considered her ineligible — and would never have risked her freedom if she had.

For “illegally voting,” she was sentenced to five years in prison. Now, as her lawyers attempt to persuade a Fort Worth appeals court to overturn that sentence, the question is whether she voted at all.

Created in 2002, provisional ballots were intended to serve as an electoral safe harbor, allowing a person to record her vote even amid questions about her eligibility. In 2016, more than 66,000 provisional ballots were cast in Texas, and the vast majority of those were rejected, most of them because they were cast by individuals who weren’t registered to vote, according to data compiled by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. In Tarrant County, where Mason lives, nearly 4,500 provisional ballots were cast that year, and 3,990 were rejected — but she was the only one who faced criminal prosecution.

In fact, Mason’s lawyer told a three-judge panel in North Texas last Tuesday, hers is the first known instance of an individual facing criminal charges for casting a ballot that ultimately didn’t count.

Her case, now pending before an all-Republican appeals panel, is about not just her freedom, but about the role and risks of the provisional ballot itself.

Prosecutors insist that they are not criminalizing individuals who merely vote by mistake. Despite those assurances, voting rights advocates fear the case could foster enough doubt among low-information voters that they’ll be discouraged from heading to the polls — or even clear a path for prosecutors to criminally pursue other provisional ballot-casters.

“There are a lot of people who have questions about whether they can vote or where they can vote,” said Andre Segura, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “You want all of those people to feel comfortable going in and submitting a provisional ballot.”

Mason, a highly private person who has been forced into the position of public example, has become a Rorschach test in the state’s fight over voting rights.

To her advocates, Mason is a victim of voter suppression in a state where, federal judges have ruled, GOP officials have a long history of infringing on the voting rights of people of color. To hawks intent on preserving the integrity of the ballot, Mason is a criminal who was caught before her crime could have an impact. To Mason, her story is one of countless missed opportunities, of a system she feels could have educated her at several critical points but instead has opted to make an example out of her.

“I feel like God has a purpose for everyone. Right now, I’m walking my purpose,” she said calmly in an interview the night before the hearing.

What is that purpose?

She smiled.

“I’m still trying to figure it out. Activist, I think — maybe educating on voting rights, your do’s and your don’ts,” she said.

“An untested application of the illegal voting statute”

When Congress created provisional ballots through the Help America Vote Act of 2002, it envisioned that prospective voters facing questions about their eligibility — either because of mistakes by local election officials or confusion about whether they are registered to vote — would not be turned away from the polls.

Federal law laid out a simple safeguard through provisional voting: If you’re not sure, cast a provisional ballot; if you’re not eligible, it won’t count in the election.

That was the procedure Mason followed in 2016, her lawyers argue, and that’s where her story should’ve ended.

In a courthouse in downtown Fort Worth, Thomas Buser-Clancy, a Texas attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued last week that Mason had made an honest mistake that ultimately had no impact on the election. How could it be, then, that she had “illegally voted”?

Arguing for the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, prosecutor Helena Faulkner countered that “nothing in the Texas Election Code indicates that the verb ‘to vote’ has to include or only includes a vote that was tallied in the final election.”

The law, she argued, should not protect those who intentionally vote illegally. But prosecutors would not use it to penalize those who make honest mistakes.

“People can make mistakes,” said Sam Jordan, a communications officer for the district attorney’s office. “The difference is in the intent.”

But who decides whether a ballot was an honest mistake?

Mason’s conviction hinged on an affidavit she had signed before casting her provisional ballot. At her trial, the judge convicted her of voting illegally after he heard testimony from a poll worker who said he had watched Mason read and run her finger along each line of an affidavit that required individuals to swear that “if a felon, I have completed all my punishment including any term of incarceration, parole, supervision, period of probation, or I have been pardoned.” Mason said she did not read that side of the paper.

Mason was still under supervised release for a federal conviction. She was indicted in 2011 for helping clients at her tax preparation business falsify expenses and claim exemptions they were not entitled to in order to lower their tax bills.

Her lawyers argue that the law is murky. Texas law allows convicted felons to vote once they’ve completed their “sentence,” including any “parole or supervision.” But it’s not clear that federal “supervised release” lines up with “supervision” under that law, Mason’s lawyers say.

Since Mason’s case arose, she and her lawyers say, parole officers in North Texas have begun distributing a form to their charges clarifying that they are ineligible to vote while on supervised release. (Questions about the form to the Northern District of Texas, which oversees that system, went unanswered.)

The irony is not lost on Mason, who received that form after she was released this year. If it’s so unclear, she wondered, why wasn’t that notice being issued three years ago, when it might have helped her? And if it’s so ambiguous that clarification is required, why is she being prosecuted?

Mason and her attorneys say officials in North Texas have begun distributing a form clarifying that felons on supervised release are not eligible to vote.
Mason and her attorneys say officials in North Texas have begun distributing a form clarifying that felons on supervised release are not eligible to vote.

Mason likely could have secured a shorter sentence if she had pleaded guilty. But she didn’t want to admit to a crime she did not commit, she said. Still, the consequences were steep: The illegal voting conviction landed her back in federal prison for months, and she was released into a halfway house in May of this year. Last week, in addition to her high-stakes hearing, she was navigating her first week at a new job.

Her appeal turns instead on narrow legal questions — did a person vote (illegally or otherwise) if her vote didn’t count? — but the decision, expected in the coming months, will mark an important milestone in the state’s battle over the ballot.

Most provisional ballots are rejected for ineligibility; even those that are accepted are not usually counted unless an election is particularly close. But Mason’s advocates fear that her case could imperil the tens of thousands of other Texans who submit provisional ballots every election year.

“What we’re faced with here is criminalizing that behavior,” said Beth Stevens, voting rights program director at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “And the state’s interpretation of the illegal voting statute would necessarily make all of those people — thousands of people across the state of Texas — vulnerable to prosecution.”

As a mother and grandmother who raised her brother’s children as well as her own, Mason said she wouldn’t punish someone who did something wrong without intending to.

Instead, she’d educate: “You educate her on what to do, what not to do,” she said.

It was Mason’s mother who encouraged her to vote that day in 2016 — a message she has pushed since Mason was a little girl, and has spread, too, to Mason’s children.

“Ancestors fought for this right, marched and died for this right — now that it’s available for us, we should utilize it,” Mason recalled. “You can’t complain about anything if we don’t try to exercise that right.”

Before the hearing began, Mason’s pastor led her attorneys and a group of her family members, too many of them to fit in one elevator, in prayer outside the courtroom.

The case is “not just for Crystal, but mostly for justice,” said the Rev. Frederick Haynes of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas as the others stood, eyes closed, holding hands, in a circle.

“This is a form of voter suppression,” Haynes said.

“Safeguarding the integrity of our elections”

To those fighting on Mason’s behalf in court, the prosecution is “part and parcel” of a voter intimidation playbook that’s guided the state for more than a decade.

Gone are the days of “white primaries,” poll taxes and annual reregistration requirements enacted in the name of protecting the election process from voter fraud. The modern-day crackdown — fueled by unsubstantiated concerns over rampant illegal voting — led with a strict 2011 voter ID law that was softened after a federal judge expressed concerns that it disenfranchised voters of color.

Amid failed efforts to impose tighter voting restrictions and to scour the voter rolls for supposed noncitizens, attention has more recently turned to a handful of high-profile prosecutions of people of color.

Before Mason, who is black, there was Rosa Maria Ortega, a legal permanent resident also living in Tarrant County who was convicted of voter fraud after attempting to register to vote despite not being a citizen. Ortega — who did not realize her immigration status meant she was ineligible — cast ballots that counted in several elections.

When Ortega was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2017, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — whose office did not respond to questions for this story — hailed it as an outcome that “sends a message that violators of the state’s election law will be prosecuted to the fullest.”

“Safeguarding the integrity of our elections is essential to preserving our democracy,” Paxton said in a statement at the time.

Tarrant County prosecutors have brushed off concerns the Mason case could lead to voter suppression. “The fact that this case is so unique should emphasize why this case should in no way have a ‘chilling effect’ on anyone except people who knowingly vote illegally,” Jordan said.

But during the 2019 legislative session, some Republican lawmakers pushed to erase Mason’s legal defense for future defendants by making it easier to prosecute people who cast ballots without realizing they’re ineligible.

Currently, to commit a crime, voters must know they are ineligible; under the proposed law, they would commit a crime just by voting while knowing about the circumstances that made them ineligible. In other words, Mason would have been illegally voting because she was aware of her past felony conviction — even if she was not aware her “supervised release” status made her ineligible.

The fact that Mason’s provisional ballot wasn’t actually counted would have also been ruled out as a legal defense under the proposed changes to state law. That legislation ultimately failed in the House amid major opposition from Democrats.

Mason’s appeal also comes in the wake of a bungled review of the voter rolls that did more harm than good to Republicans’ voter fraud crusade.

Texas leaders set out to scour the state’s massive voter registration database for supposed noncitizens, setting up nearly 100,000 registered voters to have to prove their citizenship to remain on the rolls. When the secretary of state’s office announced the review, Paxton used the development to boast about the numerous prosecutions his office’s Election Voter Fraud Unit was working on. (At the time, he was seeking additional dollars from state appropriators to expand the unit.)

But the review efforts were marred by shoddy data. Within days, it was revealed that the state had mistakenly marked tens of thousands of naturalized citizens as suspect voters.

When the Legislature wrapped up in late May, it did so without passing any of the major legislation that Texas Republicans, backed by the attorney general, had put forth as part of their voter fraud crackdown.

That leaves criminal prosecution as one of the most powerful tools state officials have for targeting what they have characterized as an epidemic of voter fraud.

Still, one high-profile criminal prosecution may be enough, advocates said.

“Crystal is the face of, ‘You should have been scared about going to vote, black people,’” said Jasmine Crockett, president of the Dallas Black Criminal Bar Association. “I don’t think there are more people that are going to end up being prosecuted unless there are too many black and brown people voting. I really believe that.”

Read related Tribune coverage

  • What problems have you encountered while trying to vote in Texas? Share your story with us.
  • Texas ditched its botched voter roll review but has signaled it hasn't closed its criminal inquiry
  • Federal lawsuit claims Texas' mail-in ballot procedures are unconstitutional

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2019/09/17/crystal-mason-five-year-illegal-voting-provisional-ballot/.

Texas Tribune mission statement

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

0 Comments

Yet Another Reason Why Crystal Mason's Conviction Should Be Overturned

9/14/2019

0 Comments

 
Crystal Mason is a Tarrant County, TX resident who was convicted last year for casting an ineligible provisional ballot in the 2016 election. According to the Fort Worth Star Telegram, Mason's attorney at the time of the original conviction, J. Warren St. John, originally told the court:

                         "I find it amazing that the government feels she made this up," ..... "She was never told that she couldn't vote, and she voted in good faith. Why would she risk going back to prison for something that is not going to change her life?"

Further St. John then told NPR in a March 31, 2018 interview

"She didn't understand!"....."She was never told she couldn't vote. Not by a district judge. Not by anyone at the half-way house where she lived after she got out. Not by the probation officer."

But then, again according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram, when Mason appeared in the same Fort Worth Court in front of the same judge (Ruben Gonzalez) in a hearing for a retrial, St John 

testified Friday that he told her she would lose certain rights if she were convicted.
One of those rights was her right to vote.


But flip-flopping testimony by her original attorney is only one reason why Crystal Mason's rights to effective counsel have been violated in this case.

​According to campaign finance reports obtained by The Weekly Gavel and United We Vote, it appears that her attorney at the time of her original conviction,  J. Warren St. John, has made several campaign contributions to Sharen Wilson, the Tarrant County District Attorney who pushed for her conviction and harsh prison sentence.

For a lawyer to accept a client who is being prosecuted by a District Attorney's office that has accepted campaign contributions from his or her law firm is a clear conflict of interest. His campaign donations to Distict Attorney Wilson's campaign should have been disclosed at the time of trial.  It therefore follows that Ms. Mason's rights to effective counsel which is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution of The United States have been violated. On those grounds, Ms. Mason's conviction should be overturned and any criminal record stemming from these charges that have been imposed on her should be expunged.

Click on the image links below to see copies of the actual campaign finance reports that were filed by the Sharen Wilson campaign with the Texas Ethics Commission on The Tarrant County Web site.

Sources:
Tarrant County Election Filings dated on or before 07/17/2017

Tarrant County Election Filings dated after 07/17/2017
​Page 3 / 5th entry down
​(Looks like a report dated 07/14/2019 was filed here in error)

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Sources:
Tarrant County Election Filings dated on or before 07/17/2017

Tarrant County Election Filings dated after 07/17/2017
​Page 3 / 5th entry down
​(Looks like a report dated 07/14/2019 was filed here in error)
​
​
0 Comments

Odessa shooter failed gun background check, Gov. Greg Abbott says

9/8/2019

0 Comments

 

By Acacia Coronado, The Texas Tribune Sept. 2, 2019

"Odessa shooter failed gun background check, Gov. Greg Abbott says" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

*Correction appended

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted Monday that the gunman in Saturday's mass shooting in Midland and Odessa had previously failed a gun purchase background check and did not go through a background check to buy the gun used in Saturday's incident.

Abbott's tweet did not say why the 36-year-old Odessa man didn't pass the background check or how he obtained the rifle he used to kill seven people and injure 22 others — including a state trooper and two police officers. The gunman died after a shootout with police outside a Midland movie theater.

Abbott also cited the shooter's criminal history.

"We must keep guns out of criminals' hands," he said.

The Austin American-Statesman reported that the gunman was arrested for evading arrest and criminal trespass in McLennan County in 2001, when he was 18, and received deferred adjudication — a form of probation — after pleading guilty to both misdemeanor charges. In Texas, only convictions for felonies or domestic violence misdemeanors block people from legally buying a gun.

Abbott could not be immediately reached for comment.

In Texas, licensed dealers must conduct background checks through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. However, there are exceptions to this rule, such as if the buyer already has a Texas license to carry a handgun. Private sales between individuals also do not require a criminal background check, which includes some gun sales at gun shows.

Also on Monday, Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke said the gunman had been fired from his job just before the shooting. Gerke said the gunman and his boss at an oilfield services company got into a verbal altercation and both the gunman and the company called 911 to report the incident. The gunman also called the FBI's tip line, Gerke said.

FBI Special Agent Christopher Collins said the gunman was "rambling" but not threatening when he called the tip line.

The shooting spree began 15 minutes after that call when two Texas Department of Public Safety troopers pulled over the man for a traffic violation and he shot and wounded one of the troopers with a rifle. He then began driving around Midland and Odessa, randomly shooting at people. At some point he ditched his car, fatally shot a 29-year-old U.S. Postal Service letter carrier and continued shooting people from the postal van.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated one of the exceptions to the NICS background check requirement. Holding a state license to carry a handgun is an exception to the requirement.

Read related Tribune coverage

  • After West Texas shooting, Texas House Rep. says "NO" to gun restrictions
  • Death toll in Midland-Odessa mass shooting climbs to eight, including the shooter
  • Gov. Greg Abbott says “mistakes were made” in his fundraising letter before the El Paso shooting

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2019/09/02/odessa-shooter-failed-gun-background-check-texas-gov-greg-abbott-says/.

Texas Tribune mission statement

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

0 Comments

Judge Who Handed Down Five Year Jail Sentence For Improper Voting Filed Inaccurate Data in 2013 Campaign Finance Report

8/29/2019

0 Comments

 


In his excellent book, A Colony in a Nation, author Chris Hayes chronicles the disparities in law enforcement within two population cohorts within America. There is the Colony which is mostly poor, and then there is the Nation, which is mostly affluent. Although the citizens of the Colony pay a much higher percentage of their income in taxes than do the citizens of the Nation, it is the Nation that derives most of the benefits of the law enforcement apparatus while the colony is mostly forced to bear its ire. This is so because in the electoral process that determines which candidates will ultimately govern our society, the citizens of the Nation are encouraged to vote; while the opposite is true of the citizens of the Colony.
 
In March of 2018, Judge Ruben Gonzalez of the 432nd District Court in Fort Worth, TX  sentenced Crystal Mason, --a mother of four-- to five years in prison for allegedly voting illegally in the 2016 Presidential election . The irony in this case is that Judge Gonzalez has himself had at least one very similar misunderstanding of Texas election law.Within the July 15th, 2013 campaign finance report that Judge Gonzalez filed with the Texas Ethics Commission, he filed a correction affidavit which states the following:
The reported total regarding the balance on hand was incorrect. However, the underlying information regarding the contributions and expense during the reporting period are correct and unchanged. The oversight is lack of understanding of how the reporting program operates. The balance of the account is $16,416.30.

Source :
Texas Ethics Commission  
Report 581493
Filer ID 00065909

If Ms. Mason had not waived her right to a jury trial, one of the questions that prospective jurors would have surely been asked would go something like:

         "Have you ever committed an election related crime?"

If Judge Gonzalez had been one of those perspective jurors, he would have been obliged to answer "Yes." and most likely would have been disqualified for further consideration from the jury selection process. Why then, is Crystal Mason still sitting in jail serving a draconian sentence for a so-called "crime"  an act that was not much different than Judge Gonzalez had once committed?

We originally published this story in the Weekly Gavel at:
​https://www.theweeklygavel.com/2018/05/judge-who-handed-down-five-year-jail.html

0 Comments

Putin's Apprentice

8/17/2019

0 Comments

 
In The Apprentice, two time Pulitzer Prize winning author Greg Miller methodically unravels the imbroglio that came to be known as the 2016 election and offers a very plausible explanation of Trump's steadfast allegiance to Putin.
​
Based on interviews with hundreds of people in Trump’s inner circle, current and former government officials, individuals with close ties to the White House, members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities, foreign officials, and confidential documents, The Apprentice offers detailed proof of the illegitimacy of the Trump presidency including how the government of Norway intercepted Russian hacking into the 2016 U.S election and alerted the U.S. government. Moscow Mitch's response? Nothing! And he still refuses to allow the U.S. Senate to vote on any bill that would assist the states efforts to defend their voting apparatus from Russian hackers.

0 Comments

      Subscribe to United We Vote!

    Subscribe to UWV

    Related Links


    Judge Gonzalez Campaign Finance Mistake

    Tarrant County employee campaign contributions to the Wilson for DA Campaign for the year 2016

    Maureen Shelton Handwritten Campaign Finance Reports

    Archives

    September 2019
    August 2019

    Categories

    All
    Crystal Mason
    Voter Intimidation
    Voter Suppression

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
Photo used under Creative Commons from joncutrer
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Donate
  • Bookstore
  • May It Please the Court
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Donate
  • Bookstore
  • May It Please the Court