Francis advised the young man that turning on Hutchison could jeopardize all his political ambitions. "The last thing in the world that you should be doing is taking on any of our elected officials, and getting the reputation as some sort of an attack dog or something... It just... it will be your kiss of death....'"
But Francis' call apparently didn't make a strong impression. Several weeks later, Francis testified, Senator Bivins, Criss' previous boss, called Francis to advise him that David wanted $250,000 for not going public with the story of his activities at the Treasury. Bivins told him that Criss wanted the Hutchisons to put him through law school, Francis testified.
"I stopped him," Francis testified. "I said, 'Teel, that's just extortion. That is blackmail, and tell him to go straight to the devil.' And I spoke it harder than that." When Criss called up a short time later, Francis testified, "I chewed him out pretty hard." (Criss repeatedly declined to discuss this matter or any other significant details with our reporter.)
Although Criss did not immediately follow through on his threat to go public, the former Treasury aide was a witness Hutchison could not count in her court. On May 12, 1993, he called Francis to advise him that the D.A. had subpoenaed him. He refused to answer questions before the grand jury.
But a few weeks before the Hutchison trial this February, Criss met with Assistant D.A. Darla Davis for a full day of informal discussions. There, the man who had once been the treasurer's closest staff ally told the assistant D.A., according to her notes, that his ambition was to "hurt Hutchison badly politically."
Unlike David Criss, computer wizard Wesley McGehee had little interest in cutthroat politics. A Corpus Christi native, McGehee had started working at the Treasury in 1980, two years after earning an undergraduate degree in business administration and accounting at UT, and quickly buried himself in hard drives and file servers. Though lacking formal training in computers, McGehee became a programmer-analyst -- a computer troubleshooter -- for the Treasury staff two years after joining the agency.
On Friday, April 17, 1992 -- the day Post reporter Selby met with David Criss -- the sound of his beeper interrupted McGehee's lunch break. His supervisor, R.T. Burkett, told him to report to the office of Deputy Treasurer Bell. It was the beginning of McGehee's reluctant role as expediter in what prosecutors describe as Hutchison's attempt at a coverup.
At that first meeting, the computer technician testified, his boss and the deputy treasurer asked a lot of seemingly innocent questions about the security of the Treasury's computer networks. Bell told McGehee that a reporter had acquired some Treasury documents; he asked McGehee to go to the backup tapes and restore whatever documents Criss had already deleted from his computer.
On the following Monday, Bell asked McGehee to begin reviewing log-in records to try to determine who was responsible for the information leak.
By Tuesday, the computer technician had begun to grow concerned about the turn the assignment was taking. That afternoon, as he and Burkett drove back to their office from a meeting with Barron, the scope and nature of the treasurer's "special project" began to dawn on him, he later testified. And he was frightened.
Despite his fears, McGehee felt certain what they were doing was wrong. According to his testimony, he told Burkett, "This is clearly against the law."
Burkett was also uncomfortable, McGehee testified, and instructed his deputy to keep a log of events. "We were breaking the law for sure," McGehee testified. "And we were being asked to and were trying to protect our -- or be able to respond and it wouldn't be our word against theirs."
The two also took another step to make sure they didn't end up as scapegoats for others' misdeeds. They ignored the directives from their superiors to completely erase all the files. Instead, Burkett and McGehee made copies of the material they were purging on separate computer tapes.
For a year after completing their boss' special project, McGehee and Burkett heard little about the allegations that Treasury employees had conducted political business on state time. Meanwhile, Hutchison was headed for the U.S. Senate.
Then, on June 9, 1993, Wesley McGehee paid a visit to investigator Tex Martin in the Travis County D.A.'s office. McGehee's role in the purging of state documents had troubled him for months. He had discussed the matter at length with his parents; he told them the whole thing seemed "shady dealings."
McGehee testified when asked to tell the grand jury why he had come forward, "I was bothered by what I was asked to do. And then as time went on, rather than dissipate, the feeling kind of -- it kept eating at me, what I had done, and bothered me. And then basically as of November of last year, I kind of had a life change where I tried to do the right thing for a change and take responsibility for my action... I waited until after the election to -- strictly not disrupt or -- I wanted the truth to be known, but I didn't want to be accused of political posturing or whatever."
