“In recent days, Albuquerque’s KOB 4 Investigates obtained bodycam footage from inside the March search of Zorro Ranch — the first public look at how the New Mexico Department of Justice’s criminal investigation actually unfolded on the ground. All media outlets previously had reported simply that the Huffines were cooperating with investigators.

The footage, as KOB reported it, shows what the word “cooperation” meant in practice. Huffines’s representatives, lawyers among them, remained on site for the entire search, more than thirteen hours of it, hovering over everything investigators did. The search was governed by consent agreements — the owner’s terms, agreed in advance — and agents were reminded on camera that those agreements had to be followed before any intrusive search or seizure could occur. Lawyers had to be consulted before a carpet could be pulled up. Before property could be seized. Investigators can even be heard discussing when their body cameras should be turned off. At the end of the day, documentation of the evidence collected was handed to the owner’s representatives.

Read that again. This was a consent search, not a warrant search. When the NMDOJ thanked the property owners for their cooperation in March, and the wire services repeated the phrase, what it meant was this: the family that owns the property under criminal investigation set the conditions under which investigators could look at it, stationed its lawyers alongside the agents for thirteen hours, decided what could be touched and taken, and received a copy of the evidence log on the way out. This should have made headlines coast to coast. It didn’t.”

And he was just installed as the comptroller of the state of Texas, without a vote.