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March 6th, 2023:

Nate Paul jailed for contempt

Mar 6th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Just a little story about one of Ken Paxton’s close personal friends.

Also associates with known criminals

A real estate investor accused of bribing the Texas attorney general has been ordered to pay over $180,000 in fines and spend 10 days in jail for contempt of court in Travis County.

The case is one of many that Nate Paul, a friend and campaign donor of Attorney General Ken Paxton, faces as he fights multiple bankruptcies and legal battles with creditors.

He and Paxton are the targets of an FBI investigation launched in late 2020 when Paxton’s aides went to local and federal authorities, claiming the second-term Republican abused his office and took bribes from Paul.

According to a letter from a staff attorney for Travis County District Judge Jan Soifer obtained by Hearst Newspapers, Paul is being punished for ignoring a court order, then later lying about it under oath. The court is fining him $181,760, and his confinement is set to begin March 15.

“Mr. Paul’s flagrant lies to the court while under oath were pervasive and inexcusable, and served to deliberately thwart the functions of the court in enforcing its injunction,” a staff attorney for Soifer wrote on her behalf. “Mr. Paul’s actions are part of a pattern of non-compliance with court orders.”

[…]

The conflict at the heart of the case goes back to 2011 when the nonprofit invested a portion of its endowment in Paul’s companies and a share of his properties. The nonprofit later accused the companies of breaching their contract by refusing to make certain financial disclosures.

Soifer approved an arbitrator’s $1.9 million judgment against Paul in July 2021, ordering that Paul’s companies shut down.

That was when Soifer issued the injunction that Paul flouted, which was meant to prevent him from moving or getting rid of assets to hide them from the court.

Paul appealed the district court’s decision in late 2021, but the panel of appellate judges affirmed the district court ruling against him. Court records indicate Paul’s attorneys plan to request a rehearing on that decision by the full court.

According to the letter from the district judge’s office, despite the injunction, Paul made at least two unauthorized transfers totaling just over $1 million. Paul was required by the injunction to file monthly sworn reports to the court showing all money transfers greater than $25,000, but he failed to report them, the letter said.

Paul later committed perjury by offering false testimony while being questioned by opposing counsel and Soifer, the letter from her office said. He lied about making the transfers, as well as about his own personal bank accounts, even when confronted with evidence of the accounts.

Chester said Paul lied at two separate court hearings in November 2022. At the first one, Chester presented Paul with his own bank statements, and Paul claimed he could not recognize them.

The court recessed for a week to allow Paul time to collect and bring in the bank records himself, so there would be no question of authentication. But at the next hearing, Paul also “completely lied about what bank accounts he had” and claimed he only had $6,000 to his name even though he lives a very luxurious lifestyle,” Chester said.

“The whole thing was very not-believable and showed utter disregard for the court,” Chester said.

If you’ve ever watched a TV show or movie based on some hot piece of longstanding intellectual property – say, a Marvel movie or The Mandalorian or Lord of the Rings, that sort of thing – you surely are aware that no matter how much you may think you know about the subject matter or the characters and their backstories, there’s so much more out there that not only do you not know it, you don’t even know enough to know that you don’t know it. There is Deep Lore that can only be fully understood by the most robust of nerds, who have spent their lives reading the books and comics and blogs and Wikipedia pages and fan fiction and watching the movies and bootleg videos and listening to the podcasts and on and on and on. You live in 2023, you know what I’m talking about.

Well, I’m here to tell you that the story of Nate Paul and his connections to Ken Paxton and all of the twists and turns and cul-de-sacs and rabbit holes associated with them are too deep and byzantine for even the likes of me to get my arms around. Suffice it to say that there’s more to this story than I can adequately summarize from this Chron article or this Trib story which is more expansive and would have required almost a complete copy-and-paste job to make sense here. Read them both, read through all of my Nate Paul-tagged posts, starting with these two – you can tell by the title of the first one that you’re already in a story in progress – and try your best to keep up. Just know that at the end of the day, Ken Paxton is a huge sleazeball who hangs around with a bunch of other sleazeballs, and sleazeballing is his core competency. The rest – so, so much of the rest – is details. And, God willing, the basis of an eventual federal indictment.

So whose fault is the Sidney Powell lawsuit dismissal?

Mar 6th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

My reaction to the news that the lawsuit brought by the State Bar of Texas against Trump nutcase lawyer Sidney Powell was being dismissed was that it was the State Bar’s fault for screwing up the paperwork. The DMN editorial board puts the blame elsewhere.

A local Republican judge’s decision to throw out the State Bar of Texas’ disciplinary case against former Donald Trump lawyer Sidney Powell on flimsy technical grounds was a disservice to the public the judge serves.

Collin County state District Judge Andrea Bouressa last week granted Powell’s motion for a summary judgment largely because of filing and clerical errors bar lawyers made. Among the mistakes Bouressa found so egregious were a mislabeling of the bar’s exhibits and a failure to file a sworn affidavit attached to a motion.

What a travesty of justice. Such errors occur in court cases often. And while not excusable, they shouldn’t be a basis for a judge to throw out such a serious case without considering evidence.

[…]

There’s no question the state bar made some careless errors in its brief asking the judge to deny Powell’s motion to dismiss the case for lack of evidence. Exhibits were clearly mislabeled and some were altogether missing.

But Bouressa’s heavy-handed ruling is concerning. First, it wasn’t rendered as part of an in-person hearing, during which the filing issues may well have been quickly resolved in open court.

Rather, her decision came after her private review of the parties’ documents. Her judgment says that she tried to contact the bar’s lawyers for clarification on their confusing exhibits, but it “responded that no corrective action was necessary.”

That’s puzzling. The court file revealed only one email exchange between Bouressa’s court coordinator and a legal assistant at the bar, and it involved only one question about one exhibit. The assistant answered the question.

We understand it’s within Bouressa’s right to rule against a party for clerical errors. But legal experts tell us that appellate courts lately have been frowning upon judges who dismiss cases based on filing mistakes rather than on actual evidence.

That’s what happened here. Eric Porterfield, associate professor at the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law and an expert in civil procedure, reviewed the judgment for us and said it’s clear that while the bar was sloppy, Bouressa’s decision wasn’t based on the merits of the case.

Instead, the regal Bouressa got hung up on what she called the “defects” of the bar’s documents. In doing so, she shut the door on the public’s right for a full hearing of the facts surrounding Powell’s outlandish conspiracy theories that threatened the peaceful transfer of the power of the presidency.

See here for the background. As I said, my initial inclination, made with admittedly limited information, was that the State Bar screwed it up. If this take is more accurate, then they were screwed by the judge. The good news there is that appealing the dismissal is an option and it has a decent chance of working. If they do that, then I retract what I said before about the State Bar.

A win for butterflies

Mar 6th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I’m sure this will end up in court, but it’s still a good thing.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday declared the prostrate milkweed an endangered species and mandated new habitat protections for the plant, closing a chapter in a feud between environmentalists and those who advocate for unfettered border wall construction in South Texas.

The rare milkweed, which grows only in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, has for months been at the center of the fight between butterfly lovers and Texas officials. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who supports new border wall construction, said last year that formally protecting the plant would create an “influx of illegal aliens” and endanger Texans. Environmental groups say the listing will help safeguard the charismatic migratory monarch butterfly, which has a deeply symbiotic relationship with the unassuming weed.

While the prostrate milkweed has a range of around 200 miles, only 24 populations of the species are known to still exist. Those are in Starr and Zapata counties in far South Texas, as well as in neighboring states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas in northern Mexico.

It’s the rarest species of milkweed, and it’s a critical habitat for monarch butterflies as they head north from Mexico after the winter. Monarch caterpillars can only eat milkweed, and female monarchs only lay their eggs on milkweed. Toxic compounds in the plant, which monarchs consume, help protect the butterflies from predators and give them their signature orange hue. In turn, monarchs help pollinate and spread the plants.

Historically, the FWS said in its final rule on Monday, patches of prostrate milkweed along the Texas-Mexico border were all geographically linked. They were separated and are “very unlikely” to reconnect, the agency said, due to what it called “disturbance” in the region.

That disturbance has included herbicides, oil and gas pipelines and, most notably, border wall construction green-lit by former President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration spurred a firestorm in 2017 when it began bulldozing habitat at the National Butterfly Center in South Texas, damaging habitat used by monarchs and other species. Officials with the center said they weren’t properly notified about construction and publicly criticized the Trump administration. The situation pulled some butterfly lovers into an unlikely partisan battle, and the center was later forced to temporarily close following threats and conspiracies about human trafficking.

While Trump is no longer in office, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a fellow Republican, has repeatedly said he also wants to build a wall. This year, he appointed a state border czar with a goal of speeding up that project.

In the process, the Texas state government became one of the biggest opponents of plans to list the prostrate milkweed as endangered, submitting multiple comments to the FWS. Among them was a comment from the state attorney general’s office warning the designation would have “a significant impact on national security by preventing Texas’s efforts to address the border crisis.” In response, the FWS said in its rule that prostrate milkweed is currently in danger of extinction and that the agency is therefore required to list the species as endangered.

[…]

The monarch butterfly has also been struggling, with population numbers dropping by 99.9% in some areas. The International Union for Conservation of Nature last year listed the monarch as endangered, citing declining milkweed populations as a factor, though federal officials have so far held off on making a similar ruling.

There are many factors behind the decline in milkweed, but one of the biggest is border wall construction, said [Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity]. Even after a section of wall is constructed, there is an “ongoing disturbance” as border officials keep clear land near the wall and drive vehicles along it.

“You don’t just put up the wall and leave it there,” Curry said.

I’ve noted the plight of the monarch butterfly and the battle between Monarch conservation and the border wall before. As you might imagine, I’m happy to see this news. I’m also a hundred percent certain it will draw a lawsuit, and who knows what happens from there. I’m sure I’ll keep an eye on it. In the meantime, let’s be happy that the right thing was done. There will be plenty of time to worry about any negative consequences later.