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State raids office of Celis

Saturday, January 5, 2008

CORPUS CHRISTI — Mauricio Celis is linked to the Mexican drug trade in a search warrant the state used Friday to raid his law offices and gather computer files, according to financial documents and other business records. The warrant includes a sworn statement by a Texas Attorney General’s official accusing Celis of money laundering.

http://www.caller.com/news/2008/jan/05/state-raids-office-of-celis/

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I was going to post this story, but when I got to my computer I found this ping in my browser. Looks like other (out of state) news agencies are following it now. Even the Caller-Times felt obligated to put Celis name in the headline and on the front page even if it was below the fold near the bottom of the page.

In the past the Caller-Times avoided giving prominence to this story and the names of people connected to Celis. In the 2006 election cycle he donated over $30,000 to the winning campaign of a DemocRAT challenger, Juan Garcia to a long term incumbent in the Texas legislature. This challenger had the complete backing of the Caller-Times editorial staff and news reporting staff. Local Republican activists complained about about irregularities in this campaign's expenditures. In particular there was a letter sent out by the candidate's wife on her personal stationary to at least 10,000 recipients with no mention of who paid for that letter. The postage alone was over $4,000, and it apparently didn't come out of her personal funds. The Caller-Times editorial page dismissed the complaints about the letter as "sour grapes". Now that the Celis case has broken, local Republican leaders have Rep. Juan Garcia return all contributions from Celis, but he only has donated a few thousand dollars in unspent funds to a charity.

Not long after the Celis story broke, a local very wealthy trial lawyer, Mikal Watts, who was self funding a campaign for the the DemocRAT nomination for the US Senate seat held by John Cornyn, dropped out of the senate race. There's lots of speculation that the Watts Law Firm was getting lots of referrals from Celis.

The Caller-Times doesn't seem very eager to cover this story and the stories connected to it. It has been papers in San Antonio, the San Antonio Express, and Houston, the Houston Chronicle, that have take the lead in following it. The Caller-Times just runs me too stories to prevent loss of all credibility. They seem to be eager not to connect the dots between Celis and lawyers and politicians and the money going between them. Who do the editors at the Caller-Times want to protect, and why. Do they have a conflict of interest?