Free Republic

A shadowy for-profit company and its nonprofit counterpart provide free services to at least 40 far-left prosecutor offices, raising questions about whether it’s working on behalf of taxpayers or of donors who have essentially bought government. The Wren Collective is a shadowy group that emerged from a Cold War-era initiative aimed at promoting Soviet films in the United States. Its current iteration — funded by a former Enron executive and host of other leftist megadonors — claims that America’s “system of policing and mass incarceration is deeply flawed and intractably racist.” The group has intervened on specific criminal cases, written...

SAN ANTONIO – Over the past month, KSAT 12 has been investigating the relationship between the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office and the Wren Collective, a criminal justice reform group based out of Austin. KSAT 12 originally unearthed hundreds of pages of text messages between Gonzales, his staff and the founder of the Wren Collective, Jessica Brand, through a public information request. Now, we’ve obtained more than 400 pages of emails between Brand and Gonzales’ personal email that suggest Brand played a larger role at the DA’s office than Gonzales has admitted. Since our first report on Jan. 30, Gonzales...

SAN ANTONIO – KSAT’s discovery of hundreds of emails and text messages between the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office and an Austin-based criminal justice reform group has revealed just how much of an influence the group had on the DA. Earlier this week, KSAT obtained more than 200 pages of conversations between the firm’s founder, District Attorney Joe Gonzales and First Assistant District Attorney Christian Henrickson — many of which involve specific cases and policies. KSAT obtained the records through an open records request. The Wren Collective’s website states it is a strategic advising firm made up of former public...