Should mayor turn over cell phone recording? DA, freedom of information attorney disagree

The district attorney told ABC-7 Wednesday he never received a copy of a cell phone recording Mayor Oscar Leeser told reporters and police he took the day he and the husband of a former City representative got into a heated argument inside a West El Paso restaurant.

The mayor not only told ABC-7 he recorded the incident, he also told police he did. Open records requests have not produced a copy, leaving the question: Where’s the recording?

“All I did was, pick up my phone, knowing they would probably become confrontational, I turned my recorder on,” Leeser told ABC-7 on Dec. 22, talking about a recording he took of an altercation two days earlier with former City Rep. Ann Morgan Lilly’s husband at Thyme Matters, which led the mayor’s wife to file assault charges against Rut Lilly.

The charges were later dropped by the district attorney citing a lack of evidence.

“We reviewed all of the available evidence before we made a decision and that included video at the restaurant, witness statements and a police report and I believe that that is all that there is,” said District Attorney Jaime Esparza, who saw security video from the restaurant, but was never able to review Leeser’s recording.

“It’s always helpful to have more evidence, a different angle, a different point of view. I was under the impression that there was either a video or audio recording that the Mayor possessed. It was never made available to us. I don’t know if that actually did exist or what was on it, but we had enough information in order to make our decision,” Esparza said.

The district attorney told ABC-7 it wasn’t necessary to have the Mayor turn over the recording.

So ABC-7 asked freedom of information attorney Joe Larsen if the Mayor should be forced to turn it over if it exists. “If it’s in connection with official business, which can be safely argued, if not conclusively shown, it is public information and he needs to ask for an attorney general ruling not to turn it over,” Larsen said.

Ann Lilly vowed to re-file an ethics complaint against Leeser. So ABC-7 reached out to the ethics commission chairman to see if they have subpoena power to obtain the recording, should Lilly’s complaint be heard.

ABC-7 had not heard back from him by deadline.

The El Paso Times has reported that Leeser called the police chief and an assistant chief to report the alleged assault, instead of calling 911.