Bexar County Dems’ murky finances will be a headache for FBI

Where there’s smoke, there’s not necessarily a smoking gun.

It’s something to keep in mind while we navigate through the maze of unanswered questions about the operations of the Bexar County Democratic Party under its former chairman, Manuel Medina.

On Wednesday, Monica Alcantara, the party’s current chair, stood in front of the Bexar County Courthouse and read a prepared statement announcing that she and a 12-member committee had found numerous instances of financial corruption on Medina’s watch, including “money laundering,” “forgery” and “excessive and illegal cash disbursements with no supporting documentation.”

Alcantara’s news conference was the culmination of a war between loyalists of the current and former chairs. It’s a war so riotous that the party got kicked out of one meeting site and faces the threat of expulsion from VFW Post 76.

Alcantara said she had turned over all relevant documents to the FBI, at the urging of Sheriff Javier Salazar and District Attorney Joe Gonzales.

Alcantara’s allegations carried a ring of familiarity. Medina, a freewheeling political operative who ran the party for six years (2012-18), always was viewed with suspicion by a faction of party veterans.

Medina tended to intermingle the affairs of his consulting firm with party business, most infamously in 2014, when he received $393,338 from the U.S. Senate campaign of David Alameel for consulting, canvassing and blockwalking services, at a time when Alameel was competing with four other Democrats for the party’s nomination.

During that time, Medina used the party’s office as a de-facto Alameel headquarters, something Medina also would do for himself in 2017 when he launched a failed bid for San Antonio mayor.

The party also demonstrated some sloppy bookkeeping during Medina’s tenure.

In 2016, Diana Arévalo simultaneously was running for state representative and serving as co-chair of the party’s coordinated general-election campaign.

Those two roles intertwined when her campaign reported making a cash payment of $6,000 to the BCDP, which Arévalo said she actually paid to blockwalkers on election day.

The Bexar County Democratic Party did not report that cash donation from Arévalo, but did report three expenditures, totaling $8,000, in “loan repayment/reimbursement” to Arévalo’s campaign.

Just as smoke does not guarantee the presence of a smoking gun, sloppiness does not prove corruption. But these kinds of incidents raised eyebrows among Medina’s detractors.

Based on the few hints Alcantara offered Wednesday, it’s fair to assume that one of her allegations is based around a series of BCDP transactions that occurred in November 2014. These transactions were targeted in a 2017 complaint filed with the Texas Ethics Commission against Medina and Arévalo by party activist Ralph Galvan.

They also illustrate how challenging it will be for the FBI (or any other investigative agency) to make sense of the party’s finances.

In early November 2014, with the midterm elections looming, superstar personal-injury attorney Thomas J. Henry made five donations to the party, totaling $156,044, according to BCDP campaign finance reports.

During that same period, Arévalo, on Medina’s behalf, made three deposits, totaling $36,310, to the party’s Chase Bank account. The oddity in those deposits was that Arévalo brought the money to the bank in cash and had the cash converted — in $1,000 increments — to money orders, before depositing the funds.

Medina insists that the reason for all this loose cash was that after Henry offered, on the eve of the 2014 election, to write a check to the party to pay for blockwalkers, Medina worried that it would take too long for the bank to clear the deposit. So he says he asked Henry to make out a check to Medina.

That way, according to Medina, he immediately could cash the check and pay the blockwalkers — in cash — by election day. Medina says any leftover funds were deposited in the BCDP account.

Henry did not respond to an interview request for this column.

The problem is that the BCDP campaign finance report numbers for Henry’s donations don’t match up with the deposits made to the party’s bank account. Because so much cash ended up flying around, it’s hard to make sense of it all.

Medina vehemently denied that any corruption occurred under his leadership.

“(Alcantara) has continuously divided the party with false allegations,” he said. “Then she runs to the media and plays the victim.”

In a way, it’s strangely fitting that it’ll come down to the nation’s chief law enforcement agency to play referee between the Medina and Alcantara factions of the Bexar County Democratic Party. After all, no one else has been able to do it.

@gilgamesh470

Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470