We’ll see if this time it sticks.
Still a crook any way you look
Texas will pay $6.6 million to four former top deputies to Attorney General Ken Paxton who say they were fired after reporting their boss to the FBI. This years-long legal saga reached its conclusion on Wednesday, when Paxton dropped his appeal of the April judgement.
The Legislature will still have to appropriate the funds to pay the judgment, either during the upcoming special session or during the next regular session. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a statement the judgment will accrue $1.2 million in interest if it goes unpaid until 2027.
“To avoid answering questions under oath about his corruption, Ken Paxton surrendered to the whistleblowers in the trial court and consented to judgment,” TJ Turner and Tom Nesbitt, lawyers for two of the plaintiffs, said in a joint statement. “But he appealed the judgment anyway, preventing the legislature from funding it during the recent session.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency said Paxton “closed the case,” but reiterated his position that it was a “bogus judgement in support of baseless claims by rogue employees.”
[…]
In dropping the appeal, Paxton resolves one of the last remaining legal inquiries into his actions as attorney general, after he evaded impeachment and eluded federal inquiries. In the Senate campaign, Cornyn continues to try to hammer Paxton on his alleged ethical violations, but Republican voters, at least, don’t seem particularly concerned. Most polls have Paxton ahead of Cornyn by a good margin.
See here, here, and here for some background. As with everything Ken Paxton, the lore is deep and there’s just too much to explain. The two main points to remember are:
1) Paxton spent all of his energy on this case trying to avoid being deposed. He did not, under any circumstances, want to be put in a position of having to tell the truth under penalty of perjury. He even went so far as to stipulate to all of the plaintiffs’ allegations as a way to avoid being deposed. This is why his protestations that the charges against him were made up by “rogue employees” – who had once been his most trusted lieutenants, by the way – ring so false. He refused at every opportunity to answer questions about the charges and to tell us, in his own words, why they were false. I’m hard pressed to think of a better illustration of sheer cowardice.
2) Paxton originally agreed to a $3.3 million settlement, which he then asked the Lege to fund via a separate appropriation – that is, to not just take that money out of his office’s existing funds. The Lege decided instead that they needed to take a closer look at this whole thing, which in turn led to the impeachment debacle. Lots of Republicans in the House thought Paxton had committed offenses that possibly merited him being thrown out of office. And then the Senate came in and cleaned up his mess, and we all shoved it all down the memory hole.
And now the House is being asked to cover an even bigger tab that Paxton has run up. My answer is the same as it was before, that they should take it out of his office’s budget. If he wants to get some sugar daddies to help him pay it off – I don’t know how that would work, legally speaking, but come on, who is going to stop him? – I suppose he can try. It shouldn’t be on the taxpayers, that’s all I’m saying. Good luck to John Cornyn to try to make that stick to him.