Senator West Responds to MJ Hager's Remarks

DALLAS, TX — The campaign of State Senator Royce West on Wednesday issued the following statement from Communications Director Vince Leibowitz concerning "the latest outrageous lies and statements from the campaign of M.J. Hegar, which were republished this morning in a Tweet by Austin American-Statesman columnist Ken Herman."

The tweet in question makes the following claim: “It is telling that the in the final days of the runoff the West campaign has to resort to blatant lies and deceiving Texas voters. Voters across the state know damn well that MJ has been and remains 100% committed to fighting for Democratic values, including fighting tooth and nail for every Texan to have access to affordable health care,” said Amanda Sherman, MJ for Texas spokesperson.

"When will M.J. Hegar and her campaign stop telling fibs and taking 12-24 hours to come up with explanations while they double and triple-check their stories? Hegar was asked two simple questions during a televised debate, about her Republican voting record and about her donations to Republicans and John Cornyn. They didn't make much sense to most Democrats. She reacted defensively and angrily, and she's been trying to demean Senator West with racially-tinged smear tactics ever since. She's gone to a great deal of care to erase or gloss over her political past, if not her military past, before 2016, and the Senator has every right to bring up the questions.

Hegar's fantasy TV ads, as she romantically motorcycles by all of America's problems, don't ring true. The fact is, a lot of rank-and-file Democrats think Hegar has veered pretty far into hypocrisy. She's on TV talking about Black Lives Mattering when the black candidate in this race was blocked from funding and support given to her from Washington outsiders who created an uneven playing field from day one. It's just lip service. She talks about purity in politics, but she's fine with unaccountable super PACs bankrolling her television ads in this runoff. 

That in and of itself is the height of hypocrisy. You cannot rail against the very money you gladly allow to roll into your campaign coffers or to be spent on your behalf. 

Unfortunately, no, Texas Democrats do not know 'damn well' that M.J. Hegar is 100 percent committed to anything other than forwarding her own narrative to sell books and movies and disguise her own patchwork political past. She's avoided accountability to voters by skipping debates and forums to the point that it's a running joke in the party. She's never come up with a good reason yet for her 2016 Republican vote, which by the way happened after the person she said she voted for, Carley Fiorina, dropped out of the GOP Primary. She's never been able to give a good or believable reason or her donation to Cornyn. She's just trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Texas Democrats. 

All she has done is show she has minimal respect for a long-serving African American Senator who has done genuinely good work for Texans, and run a law firm on the south side of Dallas, with all the struggles that entails, employing people from his own community.

It is highly unfortunate M.J. Hegar has not been fully vetted by the Texas media, because what's out there isn't just surprising, it raises many, many questions to which Democrats need answers."