Texas State Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D) continues to express his dissatisfaction with Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and others in holding people accountable for the response to the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde.

Speaking with CNN on Saturday, Gutierrez said he was disappointed over the recent delay to a vote to determine whether district Police Chief Pete Arredondo would be fired. Arredondo was the on-scene commander at the shooting and has come under fire for a delay of over an hour to breach a room where a shooter was continuing to fire on children, some of whom were even calling 911 for help. A total of 21 students and teachers ended up losing their lives. In one interview after the shooting, Arredondo claimed he was not aware he was in charge of the scene.

Footage from the school has caused further outrage as numerous officers can be seen waiting in hallways with little to no direction on how to handle the situation.

“I think his termination is a foregone conclusion,” Gutierrez told CNN’s Fredericka Whitfield about Arredondo. “But to your point earlier, the community itself wants to have greater accountability at every level, including state police. Here we had the report last week indicate that each and every law enforcement that had superior firepower, training, and manpower, should have been able to go in and make the appropriate decisions. That didn’t happen here.”

Gutierrez is also demanding accountability from Texas Department of Public Safety head Steve McCraw, who has come under fire for his early descriptions of the police response to the shooting.

“I think that there needs to be a revamping of the school police. I think that the city is going to have to look at restructuring their own police department. But we at the state level, this governor needs to demand accountability of Steve McCraw and his agency,” the state senator said.

At the end of the day, however, Gutierrez places blame for the fallout from the shooting at the feet of the governor, calling his response to the shooting as big of a “colossal failure” as the initial police response to Robb Elementary.

“All of this falls on Greg Abbott,” he said. “These people directly report to Greg Abbott. And he has failed to ask for accountability and he has failed to provide adequate resources to this community. People of Texas need to be very aware of that failure.”

On the potential of the attorney general indicting police officers, Gutierrez seemed to suggest other officials should be indicted as well, though he did not specify who he was referring to.

“When she goes to indict somebody, I hope she remembers the law of parties in Texas, if you indict one, you better be ready to indict them all,” he said. 

Watch above via CNN.

Former federal prosecutor and current MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner tore into Secret Service agents who have “lawyered up” amid the January 6 hearings and a criminal probe over deleted texts.

After news broke last week that Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021 were deleted by the agency after they were told to preserve them, the January 6 Committee demanded all relevant evidence from Secret Service Director James Murray.

This week, the Department of Homeland Security opened a criminal investigation into the deletions, and instructed Secret Service to cease all internal probes into the matter. Key Jan. 6 member Zoe Lofgren also announced that Secret Service personnel have retained private counsel, including Robert Engel and the driver of then-President Donald Trump‘s SUV, as well as Tony Ornato.

On Saturday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s The Katie Phang Show, host Katie Phang asked Kirschner to weigh in on the “message” being sent by these agents lawyering up:

KATIE PHANG: What do you think about the fact that individual agents as high up as Tony Ornato have now lawyered up. Now, getting counsel is your right. You can do that. But what message is that sending to you about the absence of evidence? There’s none. There’s no phone call logs. There’s no photographs of the president now. There’s no text messages. And it sounds really suspect this idea about this phone data migration, the fact that people are getting lawyers at the Secret Service, what does that tell you?

GLENN KIRSCHNER: Yeah, Katie, listen, I embrace anybody’s 6th Amendment right to counsel, just like I embrace anybody’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. These are important constitutional rights that we have, at least until the Supreme Court chooses to take them away. But there is an incongruity here when a law enforcement agency like the Secret Service, lawyers up, or members of the Secret Service lawyer up because they are afraid of the consequences to come, or just the questions that will be put to them about why they erased their text messages.

And you’re right, Katie, I worked criminal cases with the Secret Service, including a case where a senator had his cell phone stolen and we had to use technology to track the thief through the city until we found him, caught him and put him on trial and convicted him. And here is the thing that really gets me so frustrated. The Secret Service is the premier law enforcement organization when it comes to investigating cyber crime. When I had cell phones or computers seized as part of my criminal investigations and I needed forensic searches done on them, particularly if evidence had been deleted and needed to be retrieved.

I didn’t go down to the FBI lab at Quantico. I went to the United States Secret Service Forensic Sciences Division, and they’re the ones who retrieved deleted information off of cell phones and computers. So now what? They can’t retrieve their own deleted information? I’m not buying it. I believe there’s adequate predication, that is, enough evidence to open a criminal probe. And if the Secret Service did nothing wrong, they should welcome that criminal probe.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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