Political Operative: Case Study of How El Paso Matters Criminalizes People for Political Gain

Update, Bob Moore responded to our article late on Monday, February 10, 2026. We have published his entire email to us and responded to him in a follow up article available here.

Political operative (noun): A person who works behind the scenes to advance the goals of a candidate, political party, or interest group, often by influencing public opinion.

Journalist (noun): A professional engaged in reporting news content guided by ethical standards such as accuracy, fairness and independence.

Back on May 11, 2024, we reported how the arrest of two Socorro school board members and one of the wives was being driven by Bob Moore through El Paso Matters for political purposes. Although we had been provided with other 400 pages of documents the year before, we had chosen not to write the story. After we notified Gabriella Castellano that we would not be writing her story, she told us that we could “use my information to help your case against EP Matters.” We wrote the story based on her documents after her arrest because we felt much of the behind-the-scenes political manipulation was context missing from the public narrative. We believe the important context was missing for political expediency.

Political necessities were driving a narrative that helped obscure allegations of public corruption while criminalizing a single recording without full context.

For many years we have been documenting how Bob Moore has been operating in El Paso as a political operative under the guise of a journalist. Our numerous stories covering instances of misusing the El Paso Times and the El Paso Matters demonstrate reporting used as a tool for political purposes.

The fourth estate is intended to protect democracy by independently identifying political malfeasance without regard to how and who it benefits. A journalist seeks to offer factual and balanced information to the public irrespective of political necessities.

In these times of political uncertainty and rising tensions including allegations that the news media is failing Americans with – “fake news” – it is important to expose corrupt journalism so that the community understands how it works and why it works.

Because corrupt practices operate behind the scenes and is enabled by officials unwilling or unable to intercede on behalf of the people, it is difficult to offer the proverbial “smoking gun” to corrupt practices. But when the preponderance of evidence suggests that Bob Moore operates as a political operative it is imperative that El Pasoans know this to understand the politics behind the catchy headlines designed to protect special interests from people trying to expose corruption.

The story is long and complicated, but the outcome is simple enough.

Two people allege wrongdoing at Socorro Independent School District (SISD) that they were elected to represent. Soon after they allege several instances of wrongdoing at the school district, the board members and one of the wives are arrested on May 9, 2024. Jump forward almost two years and we learn that the three individuals that were arrested, were arrested on warrants that failed “to state an offense.” Failure “to state an offense” means that the reasons used to arrest the individuals were not crimes.

At the end of the day, the three individuals’ lives were severely affected, some can argue, ruined, their livelihoods threatened and their reputations in tatters. Why? Because they wanted someone to investigate alleged public corruption at SISD.

Today, the people arrested are working to recover their lives and SISD remains under the supervision of the Texas Education Agency (TEA). The TEA took control of the SISD school board in April 2024 after an investigation found several problems at the school district including improper graduations and problems with the school board.

Two new school board members were elected in May 2021, Ricardo Castellano and Pablo Barrera. Both were arrested on May 9, 2024. Also arrested was Gabriela Castellano, Ricardo’s wife.

Ricardo Castellano had alleged that the resignation of the school superintendent José Espinoza was a cover up. The two school board members also alleged Socorro students were graduating without proper credits.

On April 18, 2024, the TEA appointed two conservators to oversee the school district. A few days later the three were arrested. But the arrests had nothing to do with the TEA takeover of SISD. The TEA had been investigating the two school board members since 2021 on unrelated allegations.

El Paso Matters Criminalizes a Telephone Call

On December 22, 2022, then-El Paso Matters reporter, Molly Smith published a telephone recording extracted from a 30-hour long telephone recording Matters obtained from an open records request to SISD. A few months after her report, Smith left Matters and joined the San Antonio Express-News.

In her reporting, Smith characterized Gabriela Castellano as “incensed,” using an adjective to ascribe a personal bias towards the subject of her reporting. Because Smith never bothered to include the context of numerous allegations made by Castellano towards the person Smith described her as being “incensed” against, the reporter left a narrative suggesting that Gabriela Castellano was simply angry and thus retaliating in the recording. Smith also labeled Gabriela Castallano as a “disgruntled teacher” without bothering to add any context to that label, or explaining who said she was “disgruntled.”

Texas Ranger Juan Torrez officially said that he was assigned by then District Attorney Yvonne Rosales on March 8, 2022, to begin an investigation. Rosales resigned in November, and Bill Hicks was appointed to finish her term in December 2022.

Shortly before Rosales resigned, she accused Bob Moore of conspiring to remove her from office.

Although Texas Ranger Torrez had said that he was assigned to investigate Gabriela Castellano by Rosales, then-spokesperson Paul Ferris told El Paso Matters that it was not Rosales who assigned the case to the Texas Rangers but that it was County Attorney Jo Anne Bernal that initiated the investigation into the Castellanos. Bernal retired six months early to allow incoming Christina Sanchez to assume the office she won in the March 2023 primaries.

Although allegedly it was the County Attorney’s office that had ordered the investigation, if true, their authority to order the investigation would be outside of their responsibilities because investigating schools comes under the district attorney’s office.

It is important to note that the district attorney at this time was Yvonne Rosales, who was actively being investigated by Bernal on an unrelated matter. If we are to accept that it was Bernal that initiated the investigation into the Castellanos, then she may have done so by bypassing Rosales to order an investigation outside of her responsibilities.

Meanwhile, in an apparent attempt to further the illusion that Gabriela Castellano was at the center of a far-reaching corruption scandal into SISD, and likely to add some semblance of ethical reporting, Matters referenced the TEA report, at the heart of what led to masters being appointed to oversee the board. The problem is that Gabriela Castellano is only mentioned once in an appendix in the 36-page report referencing other allegations that were either not investigated or were resolved in other ways.

Thus, the El Paso Matters’ story publishing snippets of a lengthy telephone recording without important context based on one mention of their target in a 36-page report is at best negligent journalism or creating a public narrative for political purposes.

Had this being one example of using the publication for political purposes, it would be fair to argue that a mistake was made, or the political consequences were unintended. But there are numerous other examples.

El Paso Matters Reporter, It’s “My Boss” Who Decides What Gets Published

It wasn’t until March 22, 2024, that El Paso Matters got around to reporting “widespread failing at Socorro ISD,” as the publication’s headline read. This time it was reporter Claudia Lorena Silva who wanted to interview Gabriela Castellano about the TEA report that she had consistently being trying to get the news media to report on.

Gabriela Castellano implored Silva to “do your homework,” before reporting on them again telling the reporter that the information about the problems were in El Paso Matters’ hands because Smith had open record requests that address them. What the Castellanos were asking of Matters was to provide the full context behind the telephone recording and the problems at the school district.

In response, Silva told Gabriela Castellanos that Bob Moore was “my boss,” and that Moore doesn’t “really want to relitigate some of the things that happened back with Molly’s reporting.” Whether she intended to or not, El Paso Matters reporter, Claudia Lorena Silva, was suggesting that Smith’s reporting did not meet the standard for journalism.

Both Bob Moore and Claudia Lorena Silva refused to comment for our story back in May 2024, although we reached out to them for comment. We have not heard from them regarding our reporting.

Dear reader, I hope you appreciate this article. Before reading more, I ask that you consider my work and make a small donation to help keep this publication open for everyone. El Paso lacks news diversity. I offer 20+ years of historical knowledge about El Paso’s politics and public policy. Media diversity matters. Make a small donation today to help keep my work going for another 20+ years. Thank you.

The El Paso Independent School District Cheating Scandal

This is not the first time that Bob Moore allowed his reporters to report on school malfeasance that had flashy headlines and led to criminal investigations that ended years later without convictions. In 2010 the El Paso Times reported widespread cheating without any semblance of fairness or balanced reporting. The editor at the time was Bob Moore.

In May 2010, then-state Senator Eliot Shapleigh held a press conference accusing EPISD of widespread cheating and “disappearing” students. Ten years after Moore published several articles about widespread cheating at the school district, published the mugshots of administrators and reported on TEA taking over the school district, charges were dropped in 2020 against the administrators Bob Moore’s reporters had reported on and posted mugshots of in the El Paso Times.

In a 2021 book, one of the administrators caught up in the scandal, John Tanner wrote that without the “constant barrage of news coverage by Bob Moore,” the false allegation of “cheating” would not have ruined so many lives.

Why It Matters?

Interrupting an allegation of corruption with taxpayer funds at the cost of people’s lives does not happen without the willing participation of prosecutors, law enforcement and more importantly, a corrupt journalist with a platform to paint the picture they wish the community to believe.

This is what Bob Moore has been doing for years through his unethical work in the El Paso Times and now the El Paso Matters. To understand the scope of the problem it is important to see the mechanics employed by Moore to manipulate public perception. In other words, Moore acts willingly or unwillingly as a political operative.

While he was at the El Paso Times, Moore’s unethical behavior was a problem for the for-profit newspaper. But for El Paso Matters, the problem does not rest with Bob Moore but with the El Paso Community Foundation that risks its non-profit status by supporting a news outlet seemingly influencing political outcomes through selective and unfair reporting.

A journalist who allows themselves to be used for political purposes violates the fundamental ethics of being a journalist.

The Mechanics of Bob Moore as a Political Operative

There are many enablers that led to the arrest of three people on crimes that did not exist, including law enforcement and prosecutors. But without Bob Moore, none of this would have happened and the taxpayers of SISD may have a better understanding today of how their tax dollars were used were not for Moore allowing his publication to be used as a political weapon.

“El Paso Matters took the recordings and criminalized us,” Gabriela Castellano told us in a telephone call yesterday morning.

Bob Moore reached out again recently to Gabriela Castellano to interview her on the dismissal of the criminal charges against her. As is typical of Moore, he selectively chose to use part of her quote although she asked that her full quote be used.

Moore wrote under his byline that Gabriela Castellano told him that “you are a biased political operation who destroyed people’s lives and livelihoods, including ours.”

However, although she asked that Moore use the complete quote, Bob Moore dropped the rest of her quote. Moore dropped, “everything you published about us was libelous, and slanderous.” She continued, “we have no faith in your reporting, it was all malice by you, you cost me my livelihood.”

It would not be a problem if it was just one outlet, El Paso Matters failing journalistic standards.

But because of the lack news outlets in El Paso, television stations and even the El Paso Times often republish El Paso Matters articles extending the reach of their erroneous reporting.

For example, the El Paso Times took the El Paso Matters article and republished it on March 27, 2024. The El Paso Times followed with a second article on May 12, 2024, again republishing what El Paso Matters had published. The second article’s byline included Bob Moore. The newspaper also republished a third Matters article on May 23, 2024, pointed out the school board voted to fire Castellano.

In other words, there was no independent attempt by the El Paso news media to independently investigate the criminal allegations and the context behind them and instead relied on Bob Moore’s interpretation of what transpired to bolster the public narrative that the Castellano’s were criminals when they were attempting to expose public corruption at EPISD.

While the Castellanos were the focus of the allegations manufactured from a telephone recording without the necessary context, the allegations of corruption quietly disappeared without an extensive and unbiased investigation.

Whether intentional or not, Bob Moore used El Paso Matters to stop an investigation into public corruption at SISD before it even started. Moore chose to allow El Paso Matters to report on a telephone recording without full context and celebrated when their reporting was used to arrest people alleging public corruption at the school district.

That is the definition of a political operative instead of a journalist.

It can be easy to argue that the fourth estate expects journalists to uncover malfeasance, expose it and allow the officials to hold parties accountable. Probably the most celebrated example of the fourth estate exposing corruption at the highest levels are Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who brought down Richard Nixon by exposing him.

Bernstein and Woodward’s work did not lead to convicting Nixon, but it led to other convictions and Nixon’s resignation. But importantly, their work was clearly about exposing wrongdoing no matter where it lead to.

In the case of Bob Moore, his work reveals a pattern of selective targeting and selective ignorance of stories that impact the pocketbooks of the taxpayers and protects certain politicians at the expense of others. We have many reports documenting Moore’s pattern of publishing stories as a political operative but it is worth pointing out a recent example.

The Editorial Attacking Max Grossman

Late last year community activist Max Grossman was arrested on family violence charges. Probably one of the most egregious examples of political manipulation led by Bob Moore at El Paso Matters is that he published an editorial by Nicole Aldrete-Ferrini.

What makes the editorial egregious is that the editorial states that “for many women in this city,” the arrest “was confirmation” of a violent man. The editorial is a clear example of the widespread dubious journalism standards that is expected from Bob Moore. It started with allowing a statement to be made that Grossman is violent towards women a day after his arrest, without first reporting why he was arrested. Second, the editorial did not include the important context that the author has a personal bias against Grossman that journalistic fairness would require to be included for readers to understand her motivations for labeling someone as violent.

Making matters worse is that Bob Moore has yet to publish an article about the arrest and the subsequent dismissal leaving the violent man narrative in place. That is at best a failure of balanced journalism or at worst, a journalist acting as a political operative.

The latter becomes more apparent when the context is added that Grossman was instrumental in ending a controversial project that many supporters of El Paso Matters through the El Paso Community Foundation championed.

The El Paso Community Foundation

Bob Moore’s pattern of using news reporting for political purposes goes back to his years at the El Paso Times. Although today Moore holds himself out to be the owner of El Paso Matters, the true owner is The El Paso Community Foundation. Unlike a for-profit newsroom, a non-profit like El Paso Matters must ensure that they do not involve themselves in political influence activities to keep their non-profit status.

By allowing Bob Moore to offer selective news reporting, the El Paso Community Foundation invites scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to see if they are violating the terms of their non-profit status by inserting themselves into the political process, especially by a political operative.

Case in point is the lack of news reporting over allegations of malpractice at the El Paso Children’s Hospital that involved the lives of El Paso’s children and taxpayer monies.

The El Paso Children’s Hospital has everything that a journalist should be reporting on because it involves taxpayer monies, the welfare of children and most important the freedom of the press to access public records from a taxpayer funded entity. To this date, Moore has yet to report on the fact that the El Paso Children’s Hospital both argues that it is a governmental body for the purposes of being dismissed from lawsuits, while arguing it is not one for the purposes of open records.

Certain political officials benefit from not reporting the El Paso Children’s Hospital stories, something a political operative would strive for, not a journalist.

Bob Moore allowed a telephone recording to be used to criminalize people wanting to expose public corruption. At the end of almost two years, the alleged corruption was not fully investigated and the lives ruined by Bob Moore’s publication were ruined based on charges for a crime that did not exist.

We can only speculate as to what motivates Bob Moore to attack individuals for so many years, often for the benefit of someone’s political needs. But ethical journalism demands that the journalist seeks the truth behind the story without bias and without political motives. The record we have compiled on Bob Moore is clear that his news reporting benefits politicians at the expense of others. That is the definition of a political operative, and we believe the preponderance of evidence we have compiled demonstrates this unpleasant fact to El Pasoans wanting to know what is happening in their community.