One of the tangential issues to come up repeatedly during the 2016 Presidential Campaign was the fight over the 63-year-old Johnson amendment, which bans religious organizations from contributing to or endorsing political campaigns. During the campaign, Donald Trump and Dallas mega-church pastor Robert Jeffress called for killing the law during numerous public…
This week was perhaps the most eventful of John Wiley Price’s federal corruption trial. It was also the shortest, featuring just one full day of testimony thanks to a scheduled break to allow jurors to take off for personal business. But before they got their break, jurors heard damaging testimony…
Sometimes using a burner phone isn’t enough. That’s a lesson learned for John Rivello, the Maryland 29-year-old currently facing federal and state charges for sending a flashing GIF to Dallas journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who is epileptic. Rivello’s story starts with his decision, sometime in the winter of 2016, to harass…
The most ominous thing for the defense after three full weeks of the federal prosecution of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price is the sheer volume of evidence. This week, the Department of Justice hammered the point home again and again. It’s a smorgasbord for the jury. If they don’t…
Had David Newsom known that Kathy Nealy was making payments to John Wiley Price, he told the jury Tuesday, he would’ve immediately terminated his employer’s relationship with her. It didn’t matter what the payments between Nealy and Price were for, said the ex-chief counsel of Ross Perot Jr.’s real estate…
The question has always been why. Why did the city of Dallas carry out a decades-long manifestly illegal campaign of persecution against a Dallas author. Now that author, a Kennedy assassination expert whose theories differ from what he says is an official city doctrine, has agreed to a modest out-of-court…
Despite a couple of bumps in the road, Christian Campbell gave federal prosecutors exactly what they wanted. Campbell, who was indicted with Price in 2014 but copped a plea a year later, admitted on the stand Wednesday what he’d admitted in federal court in 2015: He’d given cash to Kathy…
No one has been sure what role the state legislature will play in any solution to fixing the trroibled Dallas Police and Fire Pension system. On Tuesday afternoon, state Rep. Dan Flynn, chairman of the Texas House Pensions Committee, introduced his bill to patch the system’s multi-billion-dollar hole. It includes an overhauled…
Monday was supposed to be a good day for John Wiley Price’s federal prosecutors. After a week of largely exhausting financial and procedural testimony, they were finally going to connect jurors with one of the three women central to the indictment against Price. Karen Manning agreed to testify against Price…
While he’s not out of the woods, Ken Paxton got some good news Thursday when U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant dismissed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil case against the Texas attorney general. All that separates Paxton from a clean legal slate now are two criminal trials, both based on charges…
Great, I have an answer to a question. Now, after hearing opening arguments in the John Wiley Price case, I know why no Perots are indicted. I get it. But given the government’s theory on why no Perots should or could have been indicted — and given the opening arguments made Monday…
As was hinted might be the case late last month, the U.S. Department of Justice will no longer support the lawsuit filed by Dallas U.S. Representative Marc Veasey and several voting rights groups against the state of Texas’ voter ID law. In a filing made late Monday afternoon, attorneys for the…
It was, U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn said, the biggest jury panel she’d ever had in her quilt-bedecked federal courtroom. Seventy men and women from the seven counties that supply potential jurors to the Dallas division of the Northern District of Texas completely filled the courtroom’s gallery, relegating clerks, the…
In the federal corruption trial of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, which opens Tuesday for jury selection, lawyers will grind on for months through millions of pages of evidence gathered since federal agents raided Price’s home and office six years ago. But for me sitting in the gallery, it…
The home already has a federal tax lien against it, but the Justice Department claims the proceeds could go toward paying $20 million in back taxes.
Rosa Maria Ortega was sentenced to eight years in prison Thursday after being convicted Thursday of two counts of illegal voting. Ortega, 37, will also pay a $5,000 fine for casting ballots illegally during the 2012 general election and 2014 GOP primary runoff in Dallas County. Ortega, according to prosecutors,…
A couple days ago The Fort Worth Star-Telegram published the transcript of a voice recording in which Fort Worth police Officer William A. Martin explained the Dec. 21 arrest of a Fort Worth woman and her two daughters by saying, in part, “This all got blown out of proportion with…
Ahmed Motaz Al Olabi and his wife Basimal Labbad boarded an Emirates Airlines flight from Dubai to Dallas on Friday with a dual purpose: to see their sons, and for Ahmed to have a surgical procedure to get rid of his obstructive sleep apnea. What awaited them was President Donald Trump’s executive…
The forest, in the case of the United States of America v. John Wiley Price, is almost impossible to see for the trees. There is so much evidence, history and context swirling around the trial of Dallas County’s longest serving county commissioner that even starting to understand how we got…
New data from the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Policy Evaluation Project reveals just how drastically Texas’ anti-abortion law, House Bill 2, has limited access to abortion in the state, despite the United States Supreme Court striking down two of the law’s three major components. Because the law prompted closure of 24…
The Dallas County Medical Examiner has determined that attorney Brian Loncar died form the “toxic effects” of cocaine, officials told the Dallas Observer Thursday. Loncar suffered from cardio vascular disease that contributed to his fatal overdose, officials said. The American Heart Association calls cocaine “the perfect heart attack drug.” “Even so-called…
Navy veteran Kate Cochran-Morgan starts her day in her usual way, with a little lawbreaking and a cup of coffee. Morning, she says, is the best time to smoke marijuana. It’s just a small amount of a medical-grade cannabis of the sort available now or soon in Colorado and 27…
