Peter J LeCody

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.)