Before linking to my original story from just over ten years ago in this week’s LinkSwarm, I hadn’t thought of the Rosemary Lehmberg DWI case in quite a while. A short summary of the basic facts at the time of the arrest:
[Travis County Democratic] District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested and charged with drunken driving Friday night in Northwest Travis County…
According to the arrest affidavit, a witness called 911 just after 10:45pm to report a four-door Lexus wandering into the bike lane and then into oncoming traffic while traveling southbound on FM 620 near Comanche Trail. The car was being driven by Lehmberg, according to the affidavit.
Lehmberg told the deputy that she’d had two vodka drinks earlier in the evening and that she was on a prescription beta-blocking drug. According to the arrest affidavit, there was an opened bottle of vodka in the passenger area of the vehicle within reach.
(Sorry for linking to the Austin Chronicle but a lot of the original stories on the arrest no longer seem online.)
Here’s a pro-trip, boys and girls: If you you find yourself driving around at night (well, any time, but especially at night) while drinking from an open vodka bottle (she evidently had a blood alcohol level of .239), you have a problem, and you should seek professional help and/or check yourself into rehab.
Like, the next day.
Eventually Lehmberg spent 45 days in jail and declined to run for reelection, but wasn’t removed from office.
But the thing I remember most about the Lehmberg case was her in restraints…
Eh, not quite like that
…screaming “Call Greg!” (Dwight even bought me a bumper sticker.) The “Greg” in this case was then Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton, who Lehmberg obviously believed would get the charges dismissed.
Ten or twenty years before, that might have happened, but one big reason it didn’t happen in Lehmberg’s case was dashcam footage. (Another was that Travis County LEOs seemed to hate Lehmberg’s guts.)
Speaking of “Call Greg!”, many of the videos of her arrest I previously linked to seem seem to be dead. (It seems more likely for a book to survive 100 years than an online video to last 10.) So here is sort of a compressed “greatest hits” of Lehmberg at the booking station, including the magic phrase:
Some valuable takeaways still true ten years after the fact:
I did a search to see what Lehmberg was up to after leaving office, but I couldn’t find out anything. It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth. Hopefully she got some help for her alcoholism.
Ironically, though Lehmberg was an obnoxious drunk-driving Democrat who used her office to launch partisan witch hunt investigations of statewide Republican politicians, she was still better than current DA Jose Garza. For all Lehmberg’s myriad flaws, I never got the impression that Lehmberg was actually on the side of the criminals over law-abiding citizens.
Unlike Garza.
Tags: Austin, Crime, Democrats, DWI, Greg Hamilton, Jose Garza, Rosemary Lehmberg, Texas, Travis County
“Speaking of “Call Greg!”, many of the videos of her arrest I previously linked to seem seem to be dead. (It seems more likely for a book to survive 100 years than an online video to last 10.)”
You are not imagining things. This is happening frequently, especially if it’s politically damaging. The more damaging it is the harder you have to look. A good example for a while was Proj Veritas exposure video of ACORN, and it’s been proven there are companies that you can hire for online PR damage control to petition hosts or link sites to delete content for their clients. Rachel Dolezal (who does porn now) was even found to have hired one.
The entire public affairs/public relations/MSM triad is incestuously interlinked and in our current digital age the only way to ensure recall is to download and own the content on storage media not constantly connected to the net. A lot of “dead internet” conspiraspergs and others have even posited that the routine ‘dusting’ they do of the net still isn’t working well enough, which is why there’s big money behind deepfakes…if they can’t keep people from seeing the veil drop (which is happening more frequently) they will introduce enough plausible deniability that what you’re seeing might not be real.
If it’s damaging politically – regardless for which side – save it/screenshoot jt like your life depends upon it because someday soon it might. Information warfare at its finest.
Holy shit, has it been that long?!?!
“The “Greg” in this case was then Travis County Greg Hamilton, who Lehmberg obviously believed would get the charges dismissed.”
Um, for those of us non-Texans: Travis County what? Greg Hamilton.
Sheriff. Fixed.
re takeaway 3, see takeaway 1.
If you need a lawyer, spring for a good one. A cop friend told me about being accosted by a lawyer once after an arrest:
Lawyer: My client says you didn’t read him his rights.
Cop: True.
Lawyer: Then you’re going to release him now, right?
Cop: Nope.
Lawyer: That’s outrageous, you’re violating his constitutional rights.
Cop: [After a 10 second are you really this stupid stare.] I caught him coming out of the back of the store, so I don’t need any other evidence and I never asked him any questions. But I would appreciate it if you would tell him to STFU because he didn’t stop talking the whole way into the station trying to explain why he was stealing the TV and I have a headache.
[…] HISTORY: Remembering the Rosemary Lehmberg DWI Arrest 10 Years Later. “Here’s a pro-trip, boys and girls: If you you find yourself driving around at night (well, […]
I haven’t forgotten. Her antics remind me of David Dewhurst’s call asking for official privilege.
You do have to give Lehmberg credit. She proved the template of indicting Republican’s for following constitutional law as a way to prevent to them for running for President. Perry made a great mugshot, but for her act, I suspect any democrat will happily buy Lehmberg a Bud Light in any bar. It really is a reminder of how long this bullshit has been happening, the tolerance of voters, yet the realization that things seem to be getting worse.
Re: Dead Links
Gify is getting shutdown. Major gatekeepers decide that certain sites can’t host images, and so on. It’s pernicious. Probably malicious.
Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet spin-off of the former bad guys (The Sydicate) had a term for a legit person: “Hardcopy” because it couldn’t be changed after the fact (gas lit) We a quickly approaching the time when ONLY hardcopy is going to last.
Although her social media still lists her as Travis County DA, the State Bar of Texas says she is practicing “criminal law” in Austin without listing Travis County as an employer. My guess is she is now a Democrat politico waiting for her comeback opportunity.
To be fair, Dewhurst’s request was much polite, and couched in “if there’s anything I can do” plausible deniability.
Hopefully she retired to The Villages and can have drunked sex in golf carts.
But-she’s a Democrat- so she might be sitting on some featherbed job being paid a solid $150+ for doing nothing.