Katie Sartor

SEAN KENNEDY to the Texas House Select Committee on Oversight: “I have disturbing news for you... Not one of you, nor the governor, nor the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court, nor the Lieutenant Governor, nor the Attorney General are the most important or influential person in Texas criminal justice system right now. That woman is named Jessica Brand. It's not Jose Garza, it's not John Creuzot, it's not Joe Gonzalez, it's Jessica Brand. And I'll tell you why. My name is Sean Kennedy, and I'm the policy director of the nonprofit Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, and I'm the principal author of the September 2025 report, Outsourcing Justice: How Donors and Activists Control Progressive Prosecutors and Corrupt the Justice System. That report, based on 50,000 pages of open records requests, including the five DAs called the Texas Five here in Texas... and across 22 states, we identified 40 different DAs that were the advisees or clients of the Wren Collective. And I'll explain. In 2019, the Office of Dallas's newly elected district attorney, John Creuzot, signed a non-disclosure agreement with a group called the Justice Collaborative, which received $500,000 the year before in 2018 from George Soros' Open Society Policy Center. That same year, Mr. Creuzot's campaign received $1 million from the Texas Justice and Public Safety Political Action Committee and the Texas Organizing Project, whose almost sole donor was George Soros. The Justice Collaboratives, Jessica Brand, and a woman you may be familiar with here in Travis County, Trudy Straussberger, then provided Mr. Creuzot with policies on bail, marijuana, criminal trespassing, and theft. Tellingly, Mr. Straussberger told Mr. Creuzot's own personal assistant what policies he would be announcing at the press conference to follow. And then Ms. Brand provided Mr. Creuzot with final line edits on the letter he sent to the county judges and magistrates about his new bail policy. Ms. Brand and Ms. Strausberger arranged a briefing call over those policies with activist groups before the announcement, including the Creuzot donor, the Texas Organizing Project. Ms. Straussberger, who now serves as first assistant to Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza and Ms. Brand, also engaged with the Bexar County new district attorney, Joe Gonzalez. Ms. Brand communicated directly with Mr. Gonzalez and his first assistant, Ken Christian Hendrickson, providing policies on marijuana bail, sentencing, and plea guidelines, and directing them to even drop a specific death penalty case, as well as the charges against a man who assaulted a police officer and was then shot by that officer. But that free advice from Ms. Brand under the guise of her new consulting firm included communications help, policy prescriptions, and direct level advice that wasn't truly free. The way that Ms. Brand operates is not to provide free advice to her clients because somebody is paying her. It's just not the taxpayers, the people of Texas, or even directly the office that employs her. It is her donors. And her donors are very powerful and more importantly, are overlapping with the campaign donors to these same district attorneys. When Miss Straussberger moved on to Travis County in 2021, she also took on a new role as the board secretary for another major campaign donor to all these prosecutors, the Real Justice PAC and the its parent organization, the Grassroots Law Project. Together, those two groups at the same time paid Ms. Brand's firm over $1.1 million on behalf of these district attorneys, including direct compensation in 2021, the year after Mr. Garza took office for campaign work on behalf of Mr. Garza's campaign...” (LELDF Policy Director Sean Kennedy testifying today before the Texas House Select Committee on Oversight on the malign influence of radical third-party groups on DA Jose Garza's office in Travis County.)

Wow. Texas State Representative Mitch Little @realmitchlittle to a panel of victims testifying on the malfeasance of DA Garza: “I have some bad news for you. I think that what you're experiencing is part of an intentional project. That's the the least charitable, but I think most accurate way of describing it. There's an expression that every system is perfectly designed to yield the results that it yields. And I'll say that having heard what you have to say and having done a lot of study myself, what's going on here bears all the hallmarks of a racketeer-influenced corrupt organization. I am shocked that anybody thinks that the district attorney's wife being the chief of staff or the county judge is a coincidence or that it's a product of her resume. What we're dealing with here is a machine. I think we already heard the first aspect of the machine this morning, that what's going on here politically in this particular neighborhood where we sit today, they have created a disease and then attempted to sell the cure. I cannot remember any time in the past several decades where it was necessary for the district attorney to require the taxpayers of Texas to, I guess, harden his home from physical violence. You would think that that would be suggestive that maybe a district attorney needs to do something about the degree of violence that would require such preparation. Ms. Bynton, I'm very sorry for what you've experienced. I think the lawyers on this panel understand that the adversarial system is essential to justice. In fact, the Texas disciplinary rules of professional conduct require that attorneys diligently represent their client. And as I understand it, District Attorney Garza's client is the State of Texas. And if he cannot diligently represent the interests of the State of Texas rather than the victim, or I'm sorry, rather than the offender, then perhaps he shouldn't be doing that job. Fortunately, Texas law gives the legislature the ability to fire him. We have the ability to investigate this and fire him. And I think the legislature should heavily consider doing that. (Crosstalk: "Let's do it" from the audience) I can't think of anybody more vulnerable, probably, than a college student away from home, away from their parents for the first time being surrounded by homeless people pleasuring themselves, that the district attorney refuses to prosecute again and again and again. I think we have reached a boiling point as a legislature and as a state, and that boiling point suggests that maybe we are going to have to intervene because this this cannot persist...”