July 2, 2015      6:24 PM
Special Prosecutors respond forcefully to Ken Paxton spokesman
“Our investigation will continue to be informed by what our oaths as special prosecutors commands: to do justice. And sound bites and personal attacks won’t change that.”
Following
this statement from Attorney General Ken Paxton’s spokesman Anthony Holm, special prosecutors Brian Wice and
Kent Schaffer had this to say
Thursday evening:
“The
statement made by Mr. Paxton's spokesman recycles the usual sound bites, culled
from the play book of any public official whose conduct places them in the
cross-hairs of a grand jury investigation.
Neither
the TSSB, nor the Dallas
and Travis County District Attorney's Offices, have looked at the
matters which we have been tasked with investigating through the same prism as
we have, or with the benefit of the evidence being assembled by the Texas Rangers, that none of these
agencies had before them.
Indeed,
both the Dallas and Travis County District Attorney’s Offices declined to
“pursue a criminal action” precisely because they concluded that neither office
had jurisdiction over the conduct giving rise to this investigation.
While
Mr. Paxton implies that being from Houston is a reason why our investigation is
politically-motivated, his silence as to why our hometown comes within a time
zone of relevance speaks volumes.
We
were brought in from Houston to ensure that an investigation that could have
easily been driven by partisan politics and political agendas would not. While
Mr. Paxton would seem to prefer that this investigation be conducted by
experienced prosecutors from North Texas, no one who is the subject of a grand
jury investigation, least of all one of the top public officials in Texas, gets
to make that call. Tellingly, Mr. Paxton feels that a Dallas address or a
career spent as a prosecutor somehow trumps our over seven decades of trial and
appellate experience as two of Texas’s most respected criminal lawyers.
The
facts, which Mr. Paxton would rather ignore than acknowledge, are, as Churchill
said, stubborn things. And that’s exactly what we will provide the grand jury
with: the facts. Our investigation will continue to be informed by what our
oaths as special prosecutors commands: to do justice.
And sound bites and personal attacks won’t change that.”
Hat
tip to the Houston Chronicle’s Lauren
McGaughy, who tweeted out the statement from Wice and Schaffer this evening.
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