El Defenzor on the Watts Law Firm

El Defenzor, a Corpus Christi paper of questionable credibility, claims to have uncovered e-mails among the plaintiffs’ bar in that town hand-picking judges for the bench at election time. Unfortunately, this germ of an interesting story is buried in bad punctuation and a deranged-sounding ungrammatical writing style that is consistent with what a commenter here calls “tinfoil hat-wearing.” But the quoted e-mails themselves have indicia of genuineness (including accurate e-mail addresses and corrections of typos in the title line in later iterations), and some of the other allegations in the story are consistent with stories that we have reported from the San Antonio Express-News and a newspaper-destruction scheme we documented in another Watts case. It’s also consistent with the reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission; witness the disclosures by the front group “Good Government PAC,” which has the same address and office number as the Watts Law Firm.

Imagine what a credible journalist could do with this story! Sixty Minutes? Houston Press? Dallas Observer? Corpus Christi Caller-Times? Texas Monthly? Anyone out there?

Comments are closed.