Must Reed
January 30th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
A dust-up following our recent story on the race for Travis County district attorney has led one of the candidates, a prosecutor in Ronnie Earle’s office, to quit his job. The Austin American-Statesman followed our reporting with a story in today’s paper about the race to replace the retiring Earle as DA. You can read our story from last week here. In it we revealed publicly for the first time the dissension within Earle’s office prior to the 2005 indictment of Tom DeLay, then the House Majority Leader.
The controversy caused by our story led Rick Reed, one of four Democrats running to replace Earle, to resign from the Travis County DA’s office, the Statesman reports. Reed had told the Observer that he was the only prosecutor who pushed to present the DeLay case to the grand jury. He said others in Earle’s staff, including DA candidate Rosemary Lehmberg, wilted at the prospect of indicting a powerful political figure like DeLay. (Lehmberg and Earle denied this, but refused to comment on the specifics of internal office discussions.)
After our story appeared, Earle sent memos to the staff instructing them not to discuss pending cases (the DeLay case has yet to reach trial) and reminding them not to use government space for campaign activities. Reed resigned rather than restrict his campaign rhetoric.
The Travis County DA is perhaps the most important prosecutor’s office in the state, and the race has drawn statewide attention. Texas law grants the prosecutor in Austin, as the seat of state government, the jurisdiction to criminally investigate state politicians, making it the watchdog of Texas politics.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Seems to me that Reed is the only one so far putting something on the line for this race. He’s been the only candidate, so far, to take a decisive stance on the moratorium issue, and the only one who seems to have put a significant part of his livelyhood on the line for what he believes in. It’s unfortunate that he had to resign to keep from being restricted by Earle. If his version of the DeLay story is innacurate, as Mr. Earle and his candidate purport, why is Earle so concerned with what went on behind those closed doors? In case it was missed by others, Rosemary Lehmberg made comments about the inside happenings long before Reed did: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/01/AR2005100101471_pf.html
(In “The Big Buy,” an assistant district attorney in Earle’s office, Rosemary Lehmberg, says that Earle has pursued the DeLay case despite objections within the office. “Ronnie was the only person in maybe a group of six or seven lawyers in a room who thought we ought to go ahead and investigate,” she says.)
So we can pin Rick Reed as a badguy for speaking out about dissention in the office, but when it’s said and done, maybe Mr. Earle is just looking to protect his “strong” image. Who’s got a vested interest in making Ronnie Earle look good? Maybe it’s me, but I sense some underhanding taking place.
January 31st, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I appreciate Marcus pointing out that it was Rosemary Lehmberg, not I, who first publicly discussed the internal discussions that led up to the presentation of the DeLay case to the grand jury.
I have no idea whether Mr. Earle was the only person who originally thought the District Attorney’s Office should go ahead and investigate the complaint against Mr. DeLay, as Ms. Lehmberg told the producers of “The Big Buy,” because I was not brought into the DeLay investigation until after the decision had been made to investigate the complaint.
However, as Dave Mann reported last week in “Replacing Ronnie Earle: The Race to Become the Most Important Prosecutor in Texas,” as the statute of limitations’ clock was about to toll on the DeLay case, I was the only person, including Ms. Lehmberg, who pushed Mr. Earle to present the case to the grand jury.