The last week of campaigning for Harris County Judge before tomorrow’s primary has seen a flurry of proclamations emanating from one of the campaigns, and surprisingly enough, a bit of effort from the local media to do some fact-checking.
First, the Chronicle‘s Lisa Falkenberg reported the following:
“In a Bold Move, Key Harris County Republican Party Committee Endorses Conservative Leader Charles Bacarisse,” read a headline on a press release earlier this month.
Impressive — except that it didn’t really happen.
Bacarisse’s campaign circulated a list of “recommended” candidates that had been rejected days earlier by the local party’s executive committee. The party person who distributed the “recommendations” was fired and party Chairman Jared Woodfill had to send out a press release informing everyone the party had made no endorsement.
Bacarisse spokesman Begala maintains that he was completely unaware that the so-called endorsement was rejected — an odd claim seeing as how Begala was present when the executive committee was rejecting it.
In a blog post, the Chronicle‘s Bill Murphy took apart another campaign proclamation:
On Thursday, Charles Bacarisse, candidate for county judge in the GOP primary, was given a letter from the Port of Houston Authority’s general counsel saying that County Judge Ed Emmett’s consulting company does not have a contract with the port.
Bacarisse has been criticizing Emmett this week, saying the county judge may be violating a state conflict-of-interest law because of the relationship that Bacarisse’s campaign alleges his company has with the port.
The letter from the port counsel has done nothing to deter Bacarisse’s campaign from continuing to make the same allegation. In a press release e-mailed today, Jim McGrath, one of Bacarisse’s campaign spokesmen, repeats it: “In the Emmett mail piece, the appointed county judge, who is currently under investigation for a potentially improper relationship with the Port of Houston, focuses on the subject of ethics.”
During a phone interview today, McGrath said of the port allegation, “The county attorney’s office is investigating this.”
It is true that in a letter dated Wednesday, Bacarisse asked County Attorney Mike Stafford to investigate whether Emmett has violated state conflict-of-interest statutes.
But here’s what Stafford said today about whether there is a probe: “We’re not investigating Emmett for anything. I explained this to Bacarisse. The conflict-of-interest statute doesn’t apply to Emmett in connection to the port. Emmett doesn’t have a vote on the port about whether it gives contracts to anybody.”
When Murphy pressed the campaign on the lack of substance behind its assertions, the campaign dismissed the concern as “semantics.”
And then there was a bizarre Bacarisse campaign proclamation that County Judge Ed Emmett directly confronted his opponent with at a campaign event, with Bacarisse apparently unable to provide any substance about the charge but instead promising to have someone from his campaign do his talking for him at some later point:
Emmett demanded Bacarisse explain why he had said on a radio show Thursday morning that the county judge had “filed an assault charge” against an opponent’s campaign during a previous election — a claim Emmett said was baseless.
A woman attending the lunchtime forum, held at the Spaghetti Warehouse by the Downtown Pachyderm Club, asked Bacarisse to provide evidence to back up the allegation.
Bacarisse, who has made ethics a central part of his campaign, said, “I will get the details and e-mail them to you.” He gave a Chronicle reporter a similar answer after the debate.
“To go on radio and make an allegation that I filed a personal assault charge and have nothing to back it up is not the kind of judgment we want in a county judge,” Emmett said.
Afterward, Bacarisse campaign spokesman Jim McGrath e-mailed a 1988 Chronicle article that he said supported Bacarisse’s claim. The story related an instance in which Emmett, who was running for the Texas Railroad Commission at the time, demanded an apology from Democratic incumbent Jim Nugent for what Emmett described as a “veiled threat” meant to intimidate him by one of Nugent’s consultants.
McGrath said Bacarisse, in making his remark on the radio, had not meant that Emmett had filed a criminal assault charge, but “alleged the man threatened him verbally.” He said Emmett and a reporter raising questions about Bacarisse’s remarks were engaged in “semantics.”
Strangely, my dictionary does not define semantics as “the act of debunking half-truths and/or misinformation.”
To follow up on the Port Authority matter, a Bacarisse press release also contained the following assertion:
Within the last 24 hours, Emmett has also directed a county employee — presumably on county time — to call and harass the management of a local news organization, seeking the termination of a reporter.
That is a pretty serious charge that immediately got my attention, so I emailed the Bacarisse campaign to ask what employee had allegedly made this call, and what news organization and reporter were involved. Campaign spokesman Jim McGrath declined to name the news organization or reporter, but told me that Joe Stinebaker had made the call.
I followed up with Stinebaker, who is the Director of Communications for the Harris County Judge’s Office (and a former journalist). Stinebaker told me that as he was driving to work, he heard a news report on KTRH-740 basically reporting as fact the allegations about Emmett and potential ethical concerns with the Port Authority. Stinebaker says he called KTRH’s news director Roger Hudson, explained that the allegations had no merit, and faxed a copy of the letter from the Port Authority debunking the accusations. Stinebaker says that Hudson called him back after receiving it, said he had pulled the story from the air, and offered to let Judge Emmett go on the air to discuss the charges (which he apparently did). Stinebaker emphatically denies making any threats: “At no time did I demand, recommend, request or even discuss the termination of any reporter,” he told me. Stinebaker further adds that he was not directed by Judge Emmett to make the call, but that he took the initiative to make the call in his capacity as the office’s director of media relations and public information.
Stinebaker encouraged me to verify all of these details with Hudson, who has not answered the email I sent him Sunday on this topic.
Incidentally, Stinebaker concedes that he did make the call on county time, and defends it as doing his job. As for the other charges — we suppose some people might accuse us of semantics for concluding that they seem pretty flimsy.
