By Steve BermanI didn’t expect this, but it’s good news coming out of Austin, Texas. A Republican-led state House investigative committee has recommended 20 articles of impeachment to rid the Lone Star State of its MAGA attorney general. The decision was unanimous. If the full house votes to impeach as early as today, by Texas law he would be forced to step down immediately. I say good riddance.
Paxton is the very image of a modern MAGA general. He’s never lost an election, since his first race in 2002 when he was elected as a state representative for House District 70. He then moved to the state Senate in 2012 and represented Senate District 8 for two years before running for the AG slot in 2014, which he’s won by increasing margins. In 2022, he crushed George P. Bush in the Republican primary, before beating Democrat Rochelle Garza by nearly 900,000 votes in the general election.
Beneath all that winning is what appears to be a solid streak of corruption. In 2020, Paxton faced a “mutiny” when eight of his senior aides left, accusing their boss of bribery and abuse of power. Paxton’s back-scratching arrangement with major donor Nate Paul has been well-covered in the Texas media. In August, 2020, Paxton’s office rushed a legal opinion that squashed a foreclosure sale on real estate baron Paul’s Austin and San Antonio properties, which was scheduled for August 4th.
Paul has been the target of federal investigations and rolling bankruptcies as he clawed his was through the rungs of the real estate business. (Sounds like another wheeler-dealer whose properties are prone to bankruptcies in which he walks away with nary a scratch, huh?) But under the guise of COVID-19 protections, Patxon’s office stopped the sale of property that was over $20 million in default.
In 2015, Paxton was actually indicted on state securities fraud charges, a case that dragged on for years, yet he still won his 2018 re-election campaign. Paxton won by having his donors sue, claiming the special prosecutors on the case were overpaid. He got a six-figure payment voided by a Dallas Court of Appeals judge, and the case was put into limbo. By 2020, that case was still kicking around, due to multiple venue changes and recusals due to conflicts with judges (who themselves were being defended by the state AG office). The case is still pending.
Federal securities fraud charges also filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015 were dismissed by a federal judge in 2017. Paxton had encouraged investors to fund tech company Servergy Inc., without disclosing an arrangement giving him 100,000 shares of the company in exchange for raising $840,000 in investment.
Servergy, I should note, made “blade” servers used in data center applications. The company failed after several rounds of VC money, going out of business in November 2017. Those investors who backed Servergy at Paxton’s urging got nothing for their money.
Paxton’s corruption, or at least his tangental relationship with ethics and truth, is part of the MAGA cult’s worship of “winning” at the expense of doing the right thing. You could say that Paxton is a “survivor” because he’s—so far—successfully fought off these legal troubles while continuing to win elections and hold his office.
Paxton also filed the most heinous lawsuit with the Supreme Court of the United States, challenging election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The suit offered no evidence outside of the fabricated garbage that got 60 or so lawsuits dismissed in state venues, but charged that the existence of those cases must be enough to merit the ears of the Justices a hearing. The Court issued its equivalent of “lol” in response. This is also the background against the now-infamous dissent of Justice Clarence Thomas, who would have granted the motion to hear the case.
Now the weight of all those years of quid pro quo and donor cash have come to roost on Paxton’s head. His response: “The RINOs in the Texas Legislature are now on the same side as Joe Biden.” LOL.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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