Rick Perry was vindicated today, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals tossed the last of the criminal case that derailed Perry’s presidential bid last year. As governor of Texas, Perry had threatened to veto funding to the Texas “Public Integrity Unit,” a creature of the liberal Travis County District Attorney’s office. Perry was charged in 2014 with abusing his office and attempting to coerce a public official. Those counts were officially put to rest today.
If Perry hadn’t been knee-capped, would he have had any better luck with his presidential campaign? Perhaps; perhaps not. But it’s worth noting that the abuse of the Texas legal system for ideological purposes succeeded in knocking out of the race one of the few candidates who was willing to take on Donald Trump directly. Perry called Trump a “cancer on conservatism,” and when he quit the contest back in September, Perry warned of Trump, “We cannot indulge nativist appeals that divide the nation further.”
The court’s decision in Perry’s case is yet another judicial rebuke to the Public Integrity Unit. The politically motivated prosecutors there were also responsible for the indictment, back in 2005, of Speaker of the House Tom DeLay. They were able to secure a guilty verdict in Travis County in 2010, but in 2014 DeLay’s conviction was thrown out by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
It isn’t just Texas where the left has made a habit of using phony public corruption charges to get inconvenient opponents out of the way – witness the abusive and illegal “John Doe” investigations used to terrorize conservatives in Wisconsin.
If you want to see what actual corruption looks like, cast a glance over to the federal courthouse in San Francisco where former state senator Leland Yee was sentenced to five years today for selling official favors for campaign cash. Caught on tape soliciting bribes from an undercover FBI agent, the Bay Area Democrat pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy, a case connected with organized crime in Chinatown.
And Yee wasn’t even running for president!
