Vegas Official Arrested In Reporter’s Murder, Fox News Mad Nobody’s Yelling ‘DEMOCRAT!’

As we noted in an update to our story about the murder of longtime Las Vegas investigative reporter Jeff German, police arrested Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles in the case Wednesday evening, hours after serving a search warrant at his home.

While Telles hasn’t yet been formally charged with stabbing German to death last Friday — that’s likely to happen next Tuesday — a judge in Las Vegas ordered yesterday that Telles be held without bail, and police announced that Telles’s DNA had been found at the crime scene outside German’s home. Police also said that shoes and pieces of a cut-up straw hat were found in Telles’s home, connecting him to photos of the suspect taken near the crime scene.

Previously on Wonkette: WE MIGHT HAVE FOUND A DEMOCRAT WHO DID SOMETHING BAD, LIKE MURDER

Also too, in a detail that they didn’t elaborate on because ew, police said that when Telles was arrested at his home Wednesday, he was taken away in an ambulance with “self-inflicted wounds” that authorities described as “superficial” cuts to his arms.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal, where German had worked since 2010 after decades at the Las Vegas Sun,reports that at yesterday’s bail hearing,

prosecutors linked German’s killing to his reporting on Telles’ conduct as an elected official. Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Scow said German’s reporting “ruined his political career, likely his marriage.”

“This was him lashing out, the defendant lashing out, at the cause of the unraveling of his life at this point,” Scow said.

In a briefing for reporters following the hearing, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said formal charges will likely be filed against Telles at a hearing Tuesday. He said the charge had yet to be determined, but that he expected it would be a charge of “Open Murder,” which includes First Degree murder but could also include Second Degree murder or possibly various lesser charges like manslaughter.

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Wolfson said “The evidence is compelling, and I expect us to file a charge of open murder against Mr. Telles,” and in response to reporters’ questions said that when Telles was questioned by police Wednesday, he voluntarily turned over his clothing, then was allowed to return home since investigators hadn’t yet collected sufficient evidence to keep holding him; once the DNA evidence was returned from a lab, police scooped him up.

“The ultimate decision to arrest was on the part of the police,” the district attorney said. “But yes, I was notified of the forensic evidence finding of the DNA, and yes, I thought it was appropriate to arrest Mr. Telles at that point.”

German (pronounced with a hard “g,” not like the nationality) had reported in May on allegations by employees in Telles’s office that he had created a hostile work environment involving “emotional stress, bullying and favoritism,” and that he’d had an improper extramarital relationship with a subordinate. The story angered Telles, who lost the Democratic primary in June to a top supervisor in the office who ran against him after the news broke.

Telles also posted angry online rants to Twitter about the coverage, the Review-Journal, and German’s reporting, tweeting that German was a “Typical bully” who couldn’t ” take a pound of critism [sic] after slinging 100 pounds of BS. Up to article #4 now. You’d think he’d have better things to do.” Which honestly was pretty normal behavior for an elected official in 2022.

In other developments, the Daily Beast brings us this very affecting story about how reporters at the Review-Journal have been responding to their colleague’s death. First they set to work reporting the hell out of it, drawing connections between police reports of the crime and the details they were gathering. Some in the newsroom recalled the “odd, angry, and often spiteful tweets directed at German” by Telles, although investigative reporter Briana Erickson noted that the tweets weren’t especially vicious when compared to voicemails she and other reporters have received from disgruntled readers. But they were odd, so the reporters followed up, as good reporters do:

[The] attacks led reporters and editors to search Telles’ address on Google Maps, where they found a photo of the vehicle that matched the police description in his driveway.

It was that revelation that led editors to assign reporters to stake out the house, hoping to get a glimpse of the car to confirm it. Reporters then drove past Telles’ house, where they captured photos of Telles washing his car just hours after police described the car. Police later carried out a search warrant on Telles’ home the next morning while he wasn’t home, and Telles’ car was towed by noon Wednesday.

Following Telles’s arrest, the reporters are still on the job, although they’re also feeling that, with Telles in custody, they now also have time to remember and grieve German. Go read the whole thing: It’s an excellent behind the scenes view of professional journalists doing the job, even as it’s a story directly affecting them.

And finally, the ever vigilant crew at Fox News sniffed out what they appear to think is the most egregious MEDIA HYPOCRISY, revealing that NOBODY was willing to focus on the real story: Telles was a DEMOCRAT who did a MURDER.

On Jesse Watters’s primetime program “I Can Be As Awful As Tucker And Sean, Just Watch!” Watters and guest Randy Sutton, a former Las Vegas Metro detective, marveled at how mainstream networks hadn’t covered the story at all because the murderer was a Democrat, over a variety of chyrons that emphasized that Telles was indeed a Democrat. (One chyron slipped up and focused only on horrific details of the crime.)

Watters: You’re not seeing the kind of massive coverage you’d expect when an American investigative journalist is knifed to death by a politician that he was covering.

Sutton: It is incredible, Jesse. It is incredible how, when a Democratic politician commits a crime or misconduct, it’s almost like it’s shoved away in a closet somewhere. And the mainstream media, which is always screaming for “accountability” from law enforcement, doesn’t care about accountability of politicians, and that’s why we see the incredible corruption and incompetence of Democratic politicians across the United States, leading to other people’s death and serious bodily injuries because of the policies they put in place.

Hell no he didn’t explain what Democratic policies are mass murdering Americans. Masks, probably? Then Sutton, really getting into it while Watters kept looking at the clock because of a commercial break, kept on going about how incredible it was that all the mainstream media were hiding away the story of an ordinary person just doing his job, murdered in cold blood by a “Democratic journalist,” because Sutton had apparently prepped himself to emphasize “Democrat,” with no thought to bickering about who killed whom. Then Jesse Watters mispronounced the beloved reporter’s name as “Germane.”

That clip, decrying how major media all ignored the murder, was included in today’s online Fox News story, which had to take a somewhat different tack because in fact all the major networks had indeed covered the arrest. The article acknowledges that ALL the networks reported on Telles’s arrest, but they “went out of their way to bury his party affiliation” through scandalously accurate descriptions of him as a “local politician” or a “county official.”

We honestly had no idea that the party affiliation of a minor county administrator was so key to understanding the crime. Maybe if he’d been a legislator?

We’re also annoyed that Fox didn’t even notice that Yr Wonkette had DEMOCRAT right there in our headline. Those bastards.

[Las Vegas Review-Journal / Daily Beast / Fox News]

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