State Rep. Hires TRMPAC Lawyer

It's that time of year! It's like Christmas if you enjoy peering into the financial goings on of candidates and officeholders. Maybe more like a car wreck? January semi-annual campaign finance reports were due this week and they are all up on the Texas Ethics Commission website. You know what that means, time to check up on Rep. John Davis (R-Clear Lake) and find out how he is spending his campaign cash. There was a surprise or two.

I was really curious if he would have a lot of gas expenditures. No. A lot of meal expenditures? No. A lot of expenditures simply listed as American Express? No. A high-end boot purchase, maybe? No, not even that. Seems like Rep. Davis has cleaned up his act! Very cool. If I had something to do with that, well good.

The first interesting thing I discovered was that he had transferred over $77,000 of his campaign cash to a PAC - Texans for John Davis. Huh. There were not a lot of expenditures there, but there was one for an Edward M. Shack for professional services. $4950 on December 13th.

OK. And, then I looked at the report for his regular campaign account. Again, $8625 to Edward M. Shack 0n November 11th. Mr. Shack received a total of $13,575 from John Davis in December.

Who is this Ed Shack?

Well, he was Tom Craddick's attorney during his race for Speaker in 2003 (he received 8 payments from the official "Speaker's Fund".) Read a letter he wrote to the Austin Chronicle about the Speaker's Fund here. Some questioned if the expenditures from that fund were legal.

He was a TRMPAC attorney, approving all of the donations and expenditures of the Texas Association of Business (TAB). In that TRMPAC link, Bill Cerveha, TRMPAC Treasurer notes, "we had legal advice from day one to be sure we did everything clean so there'd be no question about it." Well there were questions. There is a continuing investigation into TRMPAC by Travis County District Attorney, Ronnie Earle. The TAB was indicted by a grand jury for raising money for political campaigns, paying staffers to do political work and for illegally sending mailers to Republican candidates, among other things. They hid their involvement in the 2002 election by having TRMPAC distribute the mailers.

He was the attorney for Leininger's PAC that targeted incumbent Republicans who were not pro-voucher during their 2006 primaries.

He was Henry Cuellar's attorney during the recount in the run-off against U.S. House incumbent Ciro Rodriguez in the 2004 primary (Cuellar won by 58 votes, but it took an appeal to the 4th Circuit Court to accomplish that.)

Governor Rick Perry hired him to the tune of nearly $20,000 in 2005. I wonder what for?

Other officeholders who have hired him include Representatives Craig Estes, Mike Krusee and Terry Keel.

And, Shack has testified in front of the Texas Ethics Commission on various matters, including a TEC proposal to clarify how candidates and officeholders report reimbursements to staff.

The kicker is that in 1991, he served as staff to the Governor's Task Force on Ethics charged with creating the rules and procedures of the newly created Texas Ethics Commission - which has been described as toothless and gumless.

WHY does John Davis need such a high powered, politically connected attorney? Perhaps it is because four ethics complaints were filed against him. These complaints, all accepted by the TEC, were for numerous violations including improperly reporting over $41K in expenses as simply "American Express", improperly reporting reimbursements to himself from his campaign cash, reporting expenses in the wrong reporting period and personal use of campaign funds (over $22K). Ch. 11, Houston, did a story on Davis which you can view through a link here.

So, if you are a Republican in an ethics mess in Texas, who are you going to call? A TRMPAC attorney, of course!