Secret Tech Emails Expose Retaliation, Cover-Up And Courthouse Lies

November 25, 2019

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Breaking news.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has just been named a defendant in the fight to get Texas Tech to stop hiding public records surrounding the controversial firing of former football Coach Mike Leach.

“The fight with Texas Tech is exposing the conflict of interest of the Texas Attorney General and the joke the Texas Public Information Act will become if this conspiracy between Ken Paxton and Texas Tech is allowed to stand”, says Wayne Dolcefino, President of Dolcefino Consulting.

The expanding legal action in the two-year-old Dolcefino Consulting lawsuit comes as we get secret records Texas Tech has been hiding.

The emails document the Tech Athletic Director in 2009 never wanted to fire Mike Leach for the alleged mistreatment of a player, but that the firing was instead retaliation for Leach exercising his right to seek court protection to coach the team in a bowl game.

One of the most disturbing discoveries in these previously secret records is that Texas Tech lied when it claimed in 2018 to a Judge it had never completed a report about Mike Leach. We now have evidence that’s not true, and that Tech actually altered the Leach report at the last minute to make it look worse.

“These new documents are the best evidence yet that Mike Leach had his civil rights violated by Texas Tech in 2009,” says Wayne Dolcefino, President of the Houston-based investigative consulting firm that now has those secret communications. “This discovery will likely set the stage for an expensive federal lawsuit against Tech and a few former public officials and drive up the cost of a potential settlement of the contract cheating. It should also scare every employee of Texas Tech who could be treated the same way,” says Dolcefino.

Some of the key documents unearthed by our investigation are available below.

“Once again we call on the Texas Attorney General to recuse his office from this lawsuit. It is becoming clearer every day that the Texas law that was designed to give the public the right to know is constitutionally flawed,” says Dolcefino.

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Jerry Turner, a regent and the Vice Chairman of Texas Tech, was emailing about ways to fire Leach on December 21, nine days before Leach was fired and before the investigation and interviews had been conducted.

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This draft letter to Mike Leach shows they were not going to fire him but instead reprimand him privately. The last line of the letter says the inquiry had been concluded. Instead, Leach was suspended the same day while the investigation that was “already over” continued.

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After Mike Leach planned to fight his suspension and coach the bowl game his team was playing, Chancellor Kent Hance questioned whether he could retaliate and fire Mike Leach before or after his filing of a TRO. Hance enlists Charlotte Bingham to create a timeline of the events. At that time, no written report of the investigation had been created.

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Regent Nancy Neal emailed Vice Chairman Jerry Turner and admitted some problems in their position, pleading that Texas Tech not be so hasty to fire Coach Leach. She questioned whether the university should pay the money they owed him instead of being cheap. This was the same day he was fired. Many of the communications between the Texas Tech officials who fired Mike Leach were kept hidden from the rest of the regents.

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Charlotte Bingham emails the Texas Tech Chancellor and President on December 31, 2009 saying that she had finished the report on Mike Leach. “I think it is done now.” The lawyers for the university have argued that there was no completed report on Mike Leach as a reason for denying access to public records.

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This is an example of the reaction from donors and Red Raider fans after the firing of Mike Leach. This donor called the dismissal of Coach Leach “non-professional and embarrassing.”

We have records Texas Tech University doesn’t want you to see. It proves Tech lied to fans 10 years ago and now has lied to a judge in our lawsuit trying to get the truth about the firing of Mike Leach and the cover-up ever since.

Breaking news as we take legal action against the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.