A Statement From Councilman Harrsion and his Team

Councilman Tom Harrsion and “Team Tom” Launch legal effort, and Sues the City Secretary with a writ of Mandamus to begin the effort force a proper airing of the  for recall vacating his City Council seat.
 
After 3 months of over-the top charges, claims of divisive behavior and wounds to the city’s sense of 
‘welcoming diversity’ demonstrations and the Mayor’s rushed call for three meetings (including a special
Sunday City Council meeting) addressing unsupported charges that a single personal  cell phone 
Facebook, clickbait  video should be responsible for removal of an elected public official, now the
petitioners must defend their campaign in court.
 
The Islamic interest groups and Collin County Democrat Party activists from  Plano, Richardson
Irving, Arlington and Dallas who have put together a petition for recall in response to Mayor Harry
LaRossilliere’s organizing press conference will finally have to prove up the viability of their petition
against  Councilman Tom Harrison in court.
 
“The petition was fatally flawed and vaguely dependent on the assurances of the petition collectors to
explain their view of the Councilman as a “racist bigot”, and included  wide variety of additional smears
and alluded to inapplicable city ordinances without making their case, specifically. That’s how a petition
collector chose to identify the unexplained ordinances to me when he asked me to sign it at Parr Library
on March 6th,” said Allan Samara who identifies as a friend of the Councilman.”
 
Harrison’s legal GoFundMe account was put together by Plano citizens who know Tom Harrison and
honor his commitment to fiscally responsible Plano growth, put a legal fund together and obtained a law
firm to defend the councilman and has filed a writ of Mandamus asking for a ruling on several
questionable issues contained in the petition document, Including insufficiencies of the signature count,
vagueness of the charge of misconduct in office, failure to notarize all signature sheets, and even highlyssdd
suspicious petitioner witness signatures are present in the documents.
 
Failed 2017 City Council candidate, and Democratic  Precinct Chairman Ann Bacchus who became
spokesman for the group collecting  the signatures has her name on 76 of the  10-signature sheets
personally asserting she witnessed the signing,
 
Democrat activist & Afgan-born Denton County Justice of the Peace candidate  Asad Shalami has his
name on 63 sheets and up to 1700 of the signatures are subject to challenge for a variety of flaws, he
court must now sort through.
The City Secretary accepted the signature sheets April 4th and without questioning the recorded obvious
failure to have attached the listed exhibits of the offending documentation, listed in the petition as
items A, B, C, D. Ignoring any ordinance-mandated sequence of notice and response time(See ignored
City ordinances (6.05,6.06, 6.07) for the “accused” Councilman, the city council voted to set a recall
election for November 2018,but only if they can convince the court the flaws of procedure and the
accusations contained in the document validly produced the required signatures.
 
We believe a manipulative fraud was conducted in the collection of these signatures after Mayor
LaRossiere called a press conference denouncing his fellow councilman, and after allegedly noticing the
Facebook posting only 10 hours after 3 of his fellow councilmen admonished him for boycotting
President Trump’s infrastructure Mayor’s conference in Washington the previous week at the behest of
sanctuary-city Mayors Garcetti of Los Angles, Landrieu of New Orleans and DeBlasio of New York.
 
The troubling partisan political issues, inherent in the presence of attorney Bacchus and David
Downs ,both losing candidates with the Mayor’s financial PAC support in June of 2017 runoffs, at the
petition turn-in press conference on April 4th suggest a political taint to this entire process.
A process that will now play out in court.
 
Councilman Harrison is represented by:
Attorney: Art Martinez de Vara