It has now been more than two months since a teenager walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on May 24 and brutally murdered 21 people, including 19 children. Yet we’re still learning new information about what exactly happened inside Robb Elementary School, and how Texas law enforcement and lawmakers mucked up pretty much everything they did in response to the tragedy. Chief among those mishandlers of the situation is governor Greg Abbott, who seems to have lost control of his own false narrative about his response to the tragedy.
Abbott, who did not arrive in Uvalde until May 25—the day after the mass shooting—explained that his absence was due to being in Abilene, Texas for a news conference about a growing wildfire. But records show that Abbott traveled from Abilene to Huntsville, where a fundraising dinner was being held at a supporter’s home as part of a private event. When questioned about why he didn’t postpone the dinner or skip it entirely, Abbott explained that he merely did a quick pop-in to “let people know that I could not stay, that I needed to go,” he said at the time. “And I wanted them to know what happened and get back to Austin so that I could continue my collaboration with Texas law enforcement to make sure that all the needs were being met here in the Uvalde area.”
However, The Dallas Morning News did some extra digging into Abbott’s movements that day and is reporting that the governor actually spent close to three hours at the dinner—which seems like an awful lot of time to spend telling people you “needed to go.” As the paper’s Austin Bureau Chief Robert T. Garrett writes:
Newly obtained campaign finance reports and flight-tracking records show that Abbott, using northeast Texas rancher-businessman Ricky Baker’s loaned jet, arrived in Huntsville at 4:52 p.m. on May 24. He was driven about two miles to a local supporter’s house and didn’t depart the city until 7:47 p.m.
On Thursday, Abbott campaign spokeswoman Renae Eze was asked about the governor’s statements suggesting he only briefly stopped en route from a news conference about wildfires in Abilene. Though Abbott said Huntsville was “on the way,” it’s actually 150 miles east of Austin.
Eze maintains that Abbott has been totally forthcoming about his movements on the day in question, then took the opportunity to trash the governor’s challenger. “Unlike Beto O’Rourke who took advantage of the tragedy in Uvalde by increasing his fundraising efforts and resorting to political stunts, Governor Abbott canceled all political activity, including fundraising,” Eze claimed in a statement. Yet… attending a fundraising dinner seems to contradict those points.
“At the Huntsville event, Abbott may have raised as much as $50,000, according to his campaign finance report covering Feb. 20 to June 30, which he filed with the Texas Ethics Commission on July 15,” Garrett wrote. “That doesn’t include an in-kind donation of meal and party expenses worth almost $6,900 from the host, Huntsville designer and chef Jeff Bradley.”
Abbott has visited Uvalde a total of four times since the shooting, though parents of the child victims claim that they have not heard a peep from the governor, nor did he bother to attend any funerals for the victims.
(Via The Dallas Morning News)