El Paso Fraud Case Update: On Friday, John Travis Ketner pled guilty to conspiracies ranging from mail fraud to wire fraud to bribery. He’d resigned about a month ago as Cobos’ CoS (also reported as the El Paso County Chief of Staff). El Paso Times’ Gustavo Reveles Acosta and Tammy Fonce-Olivias cover Ketner’s “short but often controversial political career.” Well, it was short, as far as being Hizzoner’s CoS. The man got the job on January 8th and resigned on May 17th.
More on Ketner’s plea here.
We’ll work on that link chart we made, and have a new version up next week.
El Pas County Commish Veronica Escobar expects more to follow. According to the article, she “had suspicions about some of the contracts that had gone before Commissioners Court.” Don’t they all, what with G-Men running around carrying footlockers of seized materiel, politicians speed-dialing local media to pooh-pooh the whole thing as a way of distancing themselves from the stink, and dire, third-hand accounts of why there’s “more to come.”
On the 5th, El Paso Times named some more names of those who were wiretapped by the FBI. They are: Beto O’Rourke, Eddie Holguin, Presi Ortega, Ysleta Independent School District Superintendent Hector Montenegro, and El Paso Times reporter David Crowder received the letters.
This investigation will all get uglier before it gets prettier.
Speaking of ugly, Hizzoner Cobos played a little low-rent politicking the other day. Seems he’s upset about the acquisition of structures over at Western Playland. Understood he wouldn’t get the vote he wanted. So he left a meeting of the Commissioners Court to deny quorum. A judge, a Playland and Sunland Park. Does it get any more interesting, or pathetic, in El Paso, Texas? I don’t think the Feds are too worried about the city buying a Slip-N-Slide. Those 22 mentioned by the Guvmint ought to be worried about the slippery slope of crime, and it’s consequences. They ought to be showing re-runs of Dragnet on the closed circuit monitors at City Hall.
Gotta learn more about this Commissioners Court and figure out why they give a flying burrito about unidentified structures at Western Playland, which in my view ought to be named Western Wasteland anyway.
