"Juan!" shrieked Booby Witless-Cervezas, the publisher of El Brownsville Void. "I verified John Chambers side of 2002 story. He arrested the girl three times on drug charges. She was being monitored to make sure she was not distributing in the school or to other teenagers. The document thump posted is questionable. It was prepared by a cousin who was an officer. Juan, we both know no police department would release the name of a minor. So basically Eric is defending a female minor arrested three times on drug charges."
In his last campaign report Republican candidate John Chambers reported that he had paid Rodrigo Moreno, the owner of Pink Ape, $225,000. Did Moreno funnel some of that money to Witless-Cervezas because presently he is only writing positively about the good ol' boy Chambers while he rips the Democratic nominee Eric Garza?
Nobody has exposed Chambers' dastardly past more thoroughly than /DP-M, the publisher of The Brownsville Republic. Based on documents that we also have at The McHale Report, /DP-M posted that Chambers had been accused of stalking women in general and a 16-year-old girl in particular.
Giving /DP-M the peculiar name of "thump" after the monikers with which he had previously baptized him hadn't stuck, Witless-Cervevas countered, "The document thump posed is questionable." There is nothing questionable about the documents.
In fact, there is nothing questionable about the approximate 20 documents that detail Chambers' sordid character. His unprofessional actions led to his termination at the Early Police Department. Demonstrating that he has sold his soul to this Republican redneck, Witless-Cervezas scribbles incoherently, "Eric is defending a female minor arrested three times on drug charges."
And we thought only Trump made up facts. No publication has ever mentioned Garza's name in connection with Chambers' grotesque behavior. And why is he pleading with Juan whom he has always called a drunk among score of other epithets? Are he and Montoya in cahoots? Is Brownsville's most influential blogger also accepting money from the Chambers' camp?
/DP-M, in his usual fashion, was quick to retort. This is his response to Witless-Cervezas about the veracity of his reporting regarding Chambers and his crass comportment as a law officer:
The documentation of numerous on-the-job missteps is official, the documents we offered are real, and then there was this: When we reached him for comment, Cameron County Sheriff’s candidate John Chambers hung up the phone on us (see our previous stories).
In itself, his hesitancy was not a Big Deal.
We at The Republic had decided not to endorse his candidacy (nor that of his opponent Eric Garza) because we felt a looksee at his background was enough to see him as unqualified to lead such a large department.
Chambers does have law enforcement experience, but all of it is in small town settings. He has NOT WORKED for sophisticated police departments in San Antonio, Austin or Dallas. It’s been little Early, Texas (near Brownwood) and little Gruver, way up in the Texas Panhandle near the Oklahoma border. Closer to home, he was police chief of tiny Indian Lake, until he wasn’t. A good account at that episode can be found on Juan Montoya’s blog. Problems and trouble chased him nearly everywhere he went. Chambers did not want to discuss any of it, telling us tersely us to go vote for the other guy if that’s who we wanted.
A few of those problems made it into stories we have already published.
There is much more, but we hesitated in blowing them up into a full-fledged series for two reasons: The incidents chronicled in the material we received from a source who would not tell us who she represented were from the years 2002 and 2003. That, to us, seemed too-long ago. Perhaps more important for county voters to review would have been more recent episodes of bad law enforcement on his part. The second reason was that we felt our early writings about Chambers and his campaign had already defined him as a bad choice for sheriff.
Subsequent to all of this, we E-mailed the entire trove of material to Brownsville bloggers Juan Montoya (an educated Journalist) and Robert Wightman-Cervantes, the latter acknowledging receipt of the material today, after we noticed he had commented on Montoya’s blog questioning the newsworthiness of the documents.
They are newsworthy. There is no question here about that. Political candidates are open books, from birth to Election Day and, for some, beyond that.
Montoya did not reply; Wightman wrote back saying, “No journalist would find this (material) newsworthy.” That’s his opinion and who are we to quarrel with his idea of anything being newsworthy. We could, but we sorta know him by now. Wightman is not a Journalist, by training or by desire. His bent is to argue, to judge, to quickly convict, perhaps because of his legal background.
Chambers knows what sort of troubles he had earlier in his career. He even went on record with some obscure news outlets that he welcomed all inquiries from the press. He hung up the phone on us, after we asked him directly about the incident involving a 16-year-old girl in Early that his own police department logged as a “stalking” case, this, to be fair, after her mother alleged that’s what Chambers was doing.
The material we sent over to Bloggers Montoya and Wightman was not for discussion on our part. We’d made our decision to write-off Chambers with enough stories to offer the info to county voters, who ultimately will be the ones to decide whether he is worthy or not.
We simply thought that other eyes on the material might yield other reporting angles, or perhaps even an unfolding of every incident contained in the material. We were not looking for blogger support or for a definition of whether the material is newsworthy or not.
It most definitely is…if only because every page of documents goes to his police work, his behavior while employed by the department and on the job – something voters might wish to use when deciding which way to go on candidates.
There is a document or two in which Chambers says he is being ostracized by other officers, his colleagues, and he does blame some of the accusations on those fellow officers. But there is so much more, like his then-wife being accused of having multiple affairs with inmates at an incarceration unit where she worked.
That is neither here nor there as it relates to his candidacy.
But it is where he comes from, his law enforcement past, in other words, as he now wishes to lead a sheriff’s office 100-times the size of any other department he has been ever elected or hired to lead.
We say that is something to consider…
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