Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 041, Ed. 1 Saturday, September 12, 2015 Page: 3 of 24
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3A
Denton Record-Chronicle
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Perry leaves Republican presidential race
cision to get out of the race,” said
Huckabee, the runner-up for the
GOP nomination in 2008. ‘And
I hope that all of you will recog-
nize that it was a very difficult
decision. I’ve been there before.”
Four years after his first bid
for the White House ended after
disappointing finishes in the Io-
wa caucuses and New Hamp-
shire primary, Perry this time
couldn’t even make it to the sec-
ond debate night of the race.
After failing to poll well
enough to qualify for the fea-
tured primetime debate last
month, Perry was again relegat-
ed to a pre-debate forum for the
back of the pack at next week’s
debate at the Reagan Library
outside Los Angeles.
hands, as long as we listen to the
grassroots, listen to that cause of
conservatism. If we do that, then
our party will be in good hands.”
Dallas businessman and
longtime Perry donor Roy Bai-
ley said Friday that the former
governor called him Thursday
night and broke the news that he
was planning to leave the race.
“He was very matter of fact,
he was confident in his decision,”
Bailey said. “He hated it, because
he’s such a competitive person,
that’s what it came down to.
He’ll take a breather and jump
back into life out of politics.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike
Huckabee, who took the stage at
the Eagle Forum conference in
St. Louis immediately after Per-
He delivered a stronger per-
formance at that first event than
he did four years ago, when he
couldn’t remember the third
federal agency he’d promised to
close if elected and muttered,
a moment that
doomed his bid in 2012.
But few noticed in a 2016
GOP campaign dominated by
billionaire Donald Trump, who
stole away Perry’s Iowa cam-
paign chairman after Perry was
forced to suspend paying mem-
bers of his staff as his campaign
fundraising dried up.
“He could see it was pretty
obvious to him he wasn’t going
to be the next presidential nomi-
nee from the Republican Party,”
Bailey said.
By Steve Peoples
and Will Weissert
Associated Press
ST. LOUIS — Former Texas
Gov. Rick Perry ended his sec-
ond bid for the Republican pres-
idential nomination on Friday,
becoming the first major candi-
date of the 2016 campaign to
give up on the White House.
The longest-serving gover-
nor in Texas history told a group
of conservative activists in St.
Louis that “some things have be-
come clear” and he was sus-
pending his campaign.
“We have a tremendous field
of candidates — probably the
greatest group of men and wom-
en,” Perry said. “I step aside
knowing our party is in good
v
‘Oops’
% A
GOP presidential candidate, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry
speaks at the Eagle Council XLIV at the Marriott St. Louis Air-
port in St. Louis on Friday.
ry announced his exit, called on
the crowd to pray for Perry’s fu-
ture success.
“The only thing harder than
to get into a race for something
like president, is to make the de-
New leader to take
regional SEC reins
Study targets high blood pressure
lines are mixed but generally
recommend getting that top
number — called the systolic
pressure — down to about 140
in generally healthy adults and
to 130 in patients who also have
kidney disease or diabetes.
The institute sponsored a
nationwide study to test if
that’s the best goal, or if aiming
lower would either help or
harm. Starting in 2010, more
than 9,300 high blood pres-
sure patients were enrolled in
the SPRINT study, the Systolic
Blood Pressure Intervention
Trial. Half received an average
of about two medications with
the goal of lowering their sys-
tolic pressure below 140. The
other half received an average
of three medications with the
goal of getting below 120.
aggressively
treated patients saw their risk
of death drop by almost 25 per-
cent compared to the less con-
trolled patients, researchers
said. And rates of cardiovascu-
lar problems dropped by al-
most 30 percent in the better-
controlled group.
By Lauran Neergaard
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - Aiming
lower saves more lives when it
comes to controlling high
blood pressure, says a major
new study that could spur doc-
tors to more aggressively treat
patients over 50.
Patients who got their blood
pressure well below today’s
usually recommended level
significantly cut their risk of
heart disease and death, the
National Institutes of Health
his is a story about how
one man who was sup-
posed to protect us didn’t
do his job. Because of his failure,
lots of people were hurt.
Losses to thousands of inves-
tors climbed to $7 billion, prob-
ably the second-largest theft in
history. This all happened, sadly,
because of what didn’t happen
inside an office in a federal
building on Cherry Street in
Fort Worth.
The man’s name is Spencer
C. Barasch. He was a lawyer in
charge of enforcement at the Se-
curities and Exchange Commis-
sion for Texas, Oklahoma, Ar-
kansas and part of Kansas.
The SEC investigates wrong-
doing by public companies and
financial firms — or it’s sup-
posed to. But what Barasch did
— or did not do — casts a shad-
ow over the office to this day. Be-
cause of him, the Fort Worth of-
fice of the SEC has been an in-
ternational embarrassment.
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Dave Lieber
THE WATCHDOG
Toby Talbot/AP file photo
In this June 6,2013, photo, a patient has her blood pressure
checked by a registered nurse in Plainfield, Vt.
announced Friday. The benefit
was strong enough that NIH
stopped the study about a year
early.
boy to come out of the Fort
Worth office. Before him, there
was Phillip W. Offifl Jr., who
spent 15 years prosecuting finan-
cial crooks. Then he became
one.
eventually could influence
treatment guidelines.
“This study certainly sup-
ports that lower is better,” said
Dr. Mark Creager, president of
the American Heart Associa-
tion, who wasn’t involved with
the new study. He called the re-
search a possible roadmap to
treatment strategies “that will
save a significant amount of
lives.”
“This study provides poten-
tially life-saving information,k”
declared Dr. Gary Gibbons, di-
rector of NIH’s National Heart,
Lung and Blood Institute.
Doctors have long debated
how low blood-pressure pa-
tients need to go, especially as
they get older. Friday’s results
are preliminary, and research-
ers stressed that they shouldn’t
alter patient care just yet. But if
the full results pan out, they
U.S. has high blood pressure,
raising the risk of heart attacks,
stroke, kidney failure and other
health problems.
Normal blood pressure is
less than a measurement of 120
over 80. High blood pressure is
diagnosed once that measure-
ment reaches, or passes, 140
over 90. Only about half of di-
agnosed patients have their
blood pressure under control.
Today’s treatment guide-
After leaving the Fort Worth
office, Offill helped lead a stock
scam that pumped up the price
of company stock so investors
could dump their holdings
quickly for a profit. In another
case, he tried to hide money in
an asset freeze for a client. He al-
so helped broker the sale of a
fake Picasso painting.
Offill denied wrongdoing. He
was convicted of wire fraud and
conspiracy. He spent time in
prison.
Barasch never faced criminal
charges. He resigned from his
partnership at a prestigious law
firm. He paid a $50,000 fine in
2012 to settle charges brought
against him by the U.S. Justice
Department for violating federal
conflict-of-interest laws.
The lead prosecutor was a
young assistant U.S. attorney
with the unusual name of Sha-
moil Shipchandler.
He is known as an aggressive
white-collar prosecutor who led
the Plano office of the U.S. attor-
ney for the Eastern District.
Shipchandler went after mort-
gage fraud, oil and gas scams
and after Barasch.
Shipchandler is the reason I
tell this story. In a few weeks, he
takes over the Fort Worth office
of the SEC as its new regional di-
rector. He will be in charge of
120 employees.
He remembers what he
learned about the office from the
Barasch prosecution.
“I’m intimately familiar with
that time,” he says.
The
more
What happened
About 1 in 3 adults in the
After Bemie Madoff, the sec-
ond-greatest Ponzi investment
scheme was operated by R. Al-
len Stanford. He is serving a 110-
year prison sentence on charges
that he stole $7 billion from
25,000 investors in 100 coun-
tries.
Prosecutor links dead men to suspect
has a long history of mental ill-
ness and that he was “very re-
morseful” as well as “frightened
and concerned.”
Walter has not described his
relationship with his father, Staf-
ford said, calling it “a sad case.”
Police responding to a distur-
bance at the warehouse late
Tuesday encountered Walter,
who led them to two sets of re-
mains, since identified as Monty
Kaiser and Donald Fleming.
Walter initially blamed his wife
in the killings, but later said they
both hit the victims in the head
with a hammer.
brutal and seemingly senseless
and bizarre to some extent,” said
Justin Wood, a Harris County
District Attorney’s Office prose-
cutor. Authorities are still trying
to determine a motive for the
killings.
Walter has not been charged
in relation to the third victim
who authorities believe was Ste-
ven Walter, the suspect’s father,
Wood said.
Jamie Walter did not speak
in court Friday. He remains
jailed without bond.
One of Walter’s attorneys,
James Stafford, said his client
Authorities said the killings
took place April 6, but that Wal-
ter moved the bodies a few
weeks later, put them in 55 gal-
lon drums, burned them and
then dumped them in the ware-
house.
Walter’s wife, Rachel John-
son, who was also homeless, has
been cooperating with police,
and investigators are trying to
determine if she was involved in
the killings, Wood said.
Steven Walter was killed in
June, Wood said. Authorities
have not released details of how
the elder Walter died.
By Juan A. Lozano
Associated Press
HOUSTON - One of three
homeless men whose skeletal
remains were found in an aban-
doned Houston warehouse was
the father of another homeless
man charged in the other two
deaths, a prosecutor said Friday.
Jamie Walter, 27, is accused
of bludgeoning two of the vic-
tims with a hammer then burn-
ing their bodies before dumping
them in the warehouse. He has
been charged with capital mur-
der in those two deaths.
“It’s pretty gruesome, very
He was convicted in 2012,
but Barasch knew about his
fraud as early as 1997. On four
occasions, Barasch killed inves-
tigations into Stanford’s thiev-
ery.
Others in the Fort Worth of-
fice were dismayed, but they
couldn’t get past the big guy. Ba-
rasch always crushed them. If he
had stepped in, investors’ losses
could have been avoided.
The day after Barasch left the
SEC in 2005 to go into private
law practice, his former col-
leagues launched another inves-
tigation. Without Barasch there
to block it, this one stuck.
Notice of a Finding of No Significant Impact
The USDA, Rural Utility Service has received an application for financial assistance from Mustang Special
Utility District (MSUD). The proposal consists of the construction of a new 1,000 gpm well to replace the
existing MSUD Light Ranch Well and improve the ground water production viability of MSUD.
Private practice
A big problem among regu-
lators is the jumping from one
side to the other. It’s a revolving
door that causes critics to ques-
tion the SEC’s impartiality.
Nobody was more blatant
than Barasch. Three times after
leaving, he followed rules as a
former employee and asked the
SEC for permission for either
him or his firm to represent
Stanford. Three times he was
denied.
Each time, he did it anyway,
according to an inspector gener-
al’s report and an investigation
by Vice Media. Vice reported
last year that Barasch did legal
work for Stanford in his defense
before the SEC. A giant no-no.
Why did he? Barasch told the
inspector general in an inter-
view that when the Stanford
case blew up publicly in 2009,
“every lawyer in Texas and be-
yond is going to get rich over this
case. OK? And I hated being on
the sidelines. And I was contact-
ed right and left by people [to]
represent them.”
As required by the National Environmental Policy Act and agency regulations, the Rural Utilities
Service prepared an Environmental Assessment of the proposal that assessed the potential
environmental effects of the proposal and the effects the proposal may have on historic properties.
The environmental assessment was published on August 5, 2015 for a 30-day public comment period.
During this period, no comments were received. Upon consideration of the applicant's proposal,
federal and state environmental regulatory and natural resource agencies, and public input, the agency
has determined that the proposal will not have a significant effect on the human environment and for
which an Environmental Impact Statement will not be prepared. The basis of this determination is the
Environmental Assessment did not identify any direct or indirect environmental impacts associated with
the proposed project.
Fresh start
Shipchandler, 41, knows the
culture of the office. He knows
the needs and the traps.
“People in the office were
more upset about Stanford and
not taking that fraud scheme
down,” he says of his future col-
leagues.
“If you look at the people in
that office, they are passionate
about doing the right thing.
That’s why they are there. They
want to protect the people
around them and enforce the
Copies of the Environmental Assessment can be reviewed or obtained at 2 Financial Plaza, Ste. 745,
Huntsville, Texas 77340. For further information contact Monica Pierre, (936) 291-1901, ext. 116.
transparency and efficiency of
the markets. They are not there
for any other reason. That’s what
hurts the most.”
I tried to contact Barasch,
but no one answered his phone.
The State Bar of Texas fists his
law license as inactive, meaning
he cannot practice law here.
Staff writer Marina Trahan
Martinez contributed to this
A general location map of the proposal is shown below.
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Another bad employee
Barasch wasn’t the only bad
ALTERNATIVE 3 PROP
REFUCEMENT LIGHT
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report.
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ABOUT THIS COLUMN
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in business and government. We welcome your story ideas and tips.
ME T
Contact The Watchdog
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Call: 214-977-2952
Write: Dave Lieber, P.0. Box 655237, Dallas, TX 75265
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 041, Ed. 1 Saturday, September 12, 2015, newspaper, September 12, 2015; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1124769/m1/3/: accessed June 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .