CONFIDENTIAL MEMOS IN DA'S OFFICE WIDE OPEN NOW

By Juan Montoya
Efforts by a local blogger to get the "goods" on a personal spat between two employees in the  Cameron County District Attorney's Office has resulted in a precedent that will bare the most confidential – an sensitive – interoffice communications.
Texas Assistant Attorney General Britni Fabian wrote Asst. D.A. Matthew Kendall that his office must release two memoranda written by Public Information Officer Melissa Zamora where she outlined her "concerns" about unseemly entries in social media which she attributed to former fellow employee and community outreach coordinator Zeke Silva.
Fabian wrote the DA's Office and the requestor (Robert Wightman) that only information that would be highly intimate or embarrassing, the publication of which would be objectionable to a reasonable person" and "not of legitimate concern to the public" could be withheld.
Apparently, whiny non-complaints from one DA Office employee against another is open game. Once the AG let the cat out of the bag, it was just a matter of time for the Zamora letters to appear in the public realm.
In a May 13, 2013 missive Zamora wrote DA chief Investigator George Delaunay, and Deputy Chief for public integrity Victor Cortez about her "concerns...about certain incidents...(and said she worried about) the office's representation to the public."
She, then, without offering any conclusive proof, goes on to say that "it as become pubic knowledge that (Silva) has been using another name on social media to defame and slander individuals in the community. More recently, he did this to me when I came to someone's defense. And his attacks are viewable to the public. With this coming to the attention of another public official who is under profuse attack there is a potential for a lawsuit."
Zamora then states that "as public information officer in charge of public relations for the DA's Office, it is my responsibility to provide information to you."
Zamora, as a First Amendment practicioner, knows better than to use such flimsy excuses as "it has become public knowledge" to charge that it was Silva who used the pseudonym. Unless there is a definite IPO address clearly identifying the nom de plume of Casimiro Mas as Silva, she knows its pure conjecture but relishes standing up as the paladin of the DA's office to defend its good name and reputation. She is, in effect, a modern Joan D'Arc.
She might have said that she resented the fact that her buddy City Commissioner Jessica Tetreau-Kalifa was up to her usual tricks and came under ridicule not just from one commenter, but from a score of local residents who took umbrage with her public stunts. If anyone is giving a public entity a bad name, perhaps this "public official" needs to be reminded periodically that people identify her with the public office she holds.
In fact, by charging that Silva is using a pseudonym, she might want to consider the fact that she is not above all that, either. In the last two years, she has identified herself as Melissa Hernandez Zamora, Melissa H. Zamora, Melissa Zamora, Commissioner Zamora, Melissa A. Zamora and now Melissa Ann. She has numerous fake face book accounts plus her blog. So is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?
Her other memo is just as trivial and picayune. This one is dated July 24 and has to do with a number of petty differences between her view of the role of the office and her "concern" about the office's standing in the social media again.
In a nutshell, Zamora said she confronted Silva about paying for an advertising with this blog for his trucking business. Then she took offense at the fact that Silva also paid for the same spot on a DA-related campaign.
"He accused me of being best friend and of providing information to a local blogger (Wigthman). He said he had nothing to do with what is written in a certain blog of which I disagreed...I disagreed and told him it reflects poorly on the office."
There is something revealing about this second memo. Neither of the letters are classified as "complaints" and Zamora fastidiously stays away from the word. Indeed, the concern seems to be that someone associated with the DA's Office patronized el Rrun-Rrun by paying for a one-time ad.
It's telling that the blogger in question (her friend Wightman) also threatened some advertisers (candidates) to this blog with publishing embarrassing posts against them if they did not stop advertising with this blog. In fact, he went as far as to file an affidavit accusing this writer of attempting to extort the administrative assistant of the county judge and would write embarrassing things about Carlos Cascos, and old friend, if he wasn't forthcoming. His affidavit was rejected by the DA's Office who informed this legal eagle that the office took informations from law enforcement entities and not from individuals who might harbor personal grudges.
It is also instructional to us that after months of denial, the fact that Wightman has been receiving information from Zamora has now come to light. Since both memos were meant to be confidential interoffice communications between Zamora and investigators Cortez and Delaunay, no one but those three were privy to their existence. In fact, there is no copy on the memos to anyone else. And when we learned about their existence, we gleaned from Human Resources that no copies existed in their files.
So, if we deduct that two professional investigators would never reveal even the existence of confidential memos to anyone, who then, let on to Wightman that the two memos existed?  We doubt that Silva would do that to himself. The logical solution is that the revelation that the two unofficial "memos of concern" to individuals outside the DA's Office could only have come from Zamora.
But the fact that no investigation or disciplinary action resulted from the missives only means that there was nothing to them except for the continuing campaign to discredit Silva and Rrun-Rrun and remove him as an obstacle to Zamora "protecting" the purity of that office in what she saw was her role as defender of the True Faith.
This works out just fine with Wightman – a disbarred lawyer refugee from Dallas – who also has illusions of grandeur and of setting the local morons straight to his brand of feigned intellectualism. This is how Wightman sees himself as he bellows from behind the megaphone of his blog.
"I have never lost an Open Records Request which goes to the AG. My success rate with the Texas Ethics Commission, Commission on Judicial Conduct, and Texas Education Agency is solid," he wrote. He exhibits the photos of those chastised at his behest by these entities as trophies on the left-hand side of his blog. Only until former BISD president Enrique Escobedo passed away did he remove his photo from some complaint he filed against him and his treasurer for some campaign finance snafu years ago.
It was also instructive to see that instead of going to her immediate superiors – DA Saenz or First Chief Assistant to the DA Rene Gonzalez or to the DA Human Resources Director Tere Garcia – Zamora chose to go create a memo and send it to the two other people.

Given this precedent of exposing even the most mundane of internal memorandum (as Zamora's are), what will stop someone from demanding to see the work assignments of the Asst. DA's, their travel plans, itinerary, or contacts? All that, too is contained in internal memos. And what about memos between ADAs on cases currently being handled by the office?
And since the AG stated that "only information that would be highly intimate or embarrassing, the publication of which would be objectionable to a reasonable person" (and) 'not of legitimate concern to the public' could be withheld," the gate has been let open to any and all eventualities. Nothing, it would seem, is private under this definition. Is that considered a victory in some quarters? 

What possible public interest is there in finding out that a DA's Office employee – a former public official to make matters worse – is so thin-skinned that no confidential interoffice communications to or from her are private?
Is the endangering of DA's investigators and prosecutors worth that much to these people? "What profits the man...(and woman)...?"