paxton ag 2 bak

paxton819

this now main/current 121

see trump coup

see raga

see sedition caucus

hard to tally up damage from 2 raga TX abbott and paxton

who said i wake up and think how to sue fed govt? ABBOTT fed overreach BS

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why trump mini me? running for what?

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September 09, 2016 | Amicus Brief

AG Paxton Leads Coalition of 11 AGs to Defend the First Amendment on Climate Change Policy Debate

Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an amicus brief yesterday in defense of the First Amendment. The brief explains that the Attorney General of Massachusetts exceeded her constitutional authority by attempting to shut down a viewpoint on an issue of scientific debate – climate change.

At the “AGs United for Clean Power” press conference, a coalition of liberal state attorneys general announced they were going to use their official authority to go after one side of the policy debate on climate change. This overt use of governmental power to shut down particular viewpoints is a blatant violation of the Constitution. In this case, the Massachusetts Attorney General issued a Civil Investigative Demand against Exxon Mobil Corporation for its “marketing and sale of fossil fuel-derived products and securities,” demanding over 40 years of internal company documents. Exxon is seeking to block the Civil Investigative Demand from being enforced.

Attorney General Paxton and ten other state attorneys general are asking the court to grant Exxon’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the subpoena.

“The Constitution was written to protect citizens from government witch-hunts that are nothing more than an attempt to suppress speech on an issue of public importance, just because a government official happens to disagree with that particular viewpoint,” Attorney General Paxton said when filing the brief.

In addition to Texas, the other states who joined the amicus brief are Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and Nevada.

Click here to view the Amicus Brief

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always claim partisan witch hunt for crime:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/ken-paxton/

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an 7 22

"Ken Paxton seeks to dismiss state bar’s lawsuit against him over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeking to dismiss a professional misconduct lawsuit filed by the state bar against him related to his legal challenge of the 2020 presidential election, court documents show.

In a court filing June 27, Paxton asked a district court in Collin County to dismiss the Texas State Bar’s lawsuit. The state’s top lawyer, a Republican who is seeking a third term in office, said state bar investigators are biased and politically motivated against him.

After the 2020 election, Paxton filed a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn elections in battleground states where former President Donald Trump, a Paxton ally, had lost. The Supreme Court eventually dismissed the suit, saying that Texas had no standing to sue.

The suit against Paxton last year came after a group of 16 lawyers, including four former state bar presidents, filed an ethics complaint against Paxton arguing that he demonstrated a pattern of professional misconduct, including filing the suit challenging the results of the 2020 elections.

In the court filing, Paxton said the state bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline, which filed the suit, had no authority to “police the decisions of a duly elected, statewide constitutional officer of the executive branch.” Paxton also stood by his decision to challenge the results of the 2020 election.

Paxton did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Pennsylvania

texas v. Pennsylvania, 592 U.S. _ (2020), was a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the administration of the 2020 presidential election in certain states, in which Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump.

Filed by Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton on December 8, 2020, under the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction, Texas v. Pennsylvania alleged that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin violated the United States Constitution by changing election procedures through non-legislative means – thus violating the Independent state legislature theory. The suit sought to temporarily withhold the certified vote count from these four states prior to the Electoral College vote on December 14. The suit was filed after about 90 lawsuits arising from disputes over the election results filed by Trump and the Republican Party had failed in numerous state and federal courts.

The suit had been drafted by a team of lawyers with ties to the Trump presidential campaign. Paxton agreed to file the case after other state attorneys general declined to do so. The Solicitor General of Texas Kyle D. Hawkins objected to the suit and refused to let his name be added. Paxton hired Lawrence J. Joseph, who had helped draft the suit, as special counsel to assist with the suit.^[1]

Within one day of Texas's filing, Trump, over 100 Republican Representatives, and 18 Republican state attorneys general filed motions to support the case.^[2][3] Trump referred to this case as "the big one" of the election-challenging lawsuits.^[4]

Attorneys general for the defendant states, joined in briefs submitted by their counterparts from twenty other states, two territories, and the District of Columbia,^[5] urged the Court to refuse the case, with Pennsylvania's brief calling it a "seditious abuse of the judicial process".^[6] Legal experts argued that the case was not likely to be heard and not likely to succeed if it did get heard, and that it was thus a "Hail Mary" action.^[7][8][9]

The Supreme Court issued orders on December 11, declining to hear the case on the basis thatTexas lacked standingunder Article III of the Constitution to challenge the results of the election held by another state.^[10][11]

Background

Main articles: Pre-election and Post-election lawsuits related to the 2020 United States presidential election

Several states changed their voting laws prior to the 2020 United States presidential election to make postal voting easier, due to fears that in-person voting would expose people to COVID-19. Numerous legal challenges to voting changes were raised across the country. A number of these cases involved voting regulations that were altered by states' executive branches and not by state legislatures. In Texas v. Pennsylvania, Texas claimed that such alterations violated Article Two of the United States Constitution.^[12]

The initial tallies of votes in the election, completed within the week of election day, showed that Joe Biden had won sufficient votes in the Electoral College to secure the presidency over incumbent Donald Trump.Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) launched numerous lawsuits against various swing states challenging their vote tallies, particularly in states that had voted for Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election but had turned to Biden in 2020, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia.

Most of these cases raised by Trump and the RNC have been dismissed on procedural grounds or rejected on substantive grounds in the courts, and in so being have not affected the projected Electoral College result.^[13] PolitiFact noted that the forces behind reversing the election had by this point "lost dozens of election lawsuits."^[14]

Before and after the election, Trump stated his expectation that the Supreme Court would determine the outcome. After the election, his legal team sought a path to bring a case before the Court, on which conservative justices—including three appointed by Trump—held a 6–3 majority.^[15]

Filings

...

amucus

Supporting plaintiff Texas

Attorneys general of seventeen additional states filed a joint brief on December 9 supporting Texas.^[33][19][34]

On the same day, Trump filed a motion to intervene in his personal capacity, thereby attempting to join the case as a plaintiff.^[35] Trump's brief was filed by Chapman University School of Law professor John C. Eastman, who in August 2020 authored an article published in Newsweek questioning Kamala Harris's eligibility for the position of vice president.^[36]

On social media, the president referred to the case as "the big one".^[37] Over 120 Republican members of the House of Representatives filed an amicus in support of the suit, including leader Kevin McCarthy and his deputy Steve Scalise.^[38][39][40] 106 members of the House initially signed on to the lawsuit in support of the plaintiff.^[41] 20 additional members of the House signed on to the lawsuit in support of the plaintiff before it was dismissed.^[42]

Later on December 10, attorneys general of six states that had already responded in an amicus brief, Arkansas, Utah, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and South Carolina, petitioned to the Supreme Court to let them join Texas as a plaintiff in the case.^[43] This effort was led by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt.^[43]

...

RAGA

list of 17 attorneys general supporting Texas

Lynn Fitch, Mississippi

Tim Fox, Montana

Curtis Hill, Indiana

Mike Hunter, Oklahoma

Jeff Landry, Louisiana

Steve Marshall, Alabama

Ashley Moody, Florida

Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia

Doug Peterson, Nebraska

Jason R. Ravnsborg, South Dakota

Sean D. Reyes, Utah

Leslie Rutledge, Arkansas

Derek Schmidt, Kansas

Eric S. Schmitt, Missouri

Herbert H. Slatery III, Tennessee

Wayne Stenehjem, North Dakota

Alan Wilson, South Carolina

...

Politics

In favor

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott signaled his support for the case, saying the case "tries to accelerate the process, providing certainty and clarity about the entire election process. The United States of America needs that."^[23]

President Trump retweeted several tweets that expressed support for the suit.^[16] On December 9, he promised to intervene in the suit,^[55] and filed a motion to do so the same day,^[35][56][57] thereby attempting to join the case as a plaintiff. On December 10, he tweeted "the Supreme Court has a chance to save our Country from the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States."^[58] On December 11 he tweeted, "I just want to stop the world from killing itself! ... Now that the Biden Administration will be a scandal plagued mess for years to come, it is much easier for the Supreme Court of the United States to follow the Constitution and do what everybody knows has to be done."^[4]

Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both involved in close runoff races in Georgia, voiced support for the suit.^[59] In a tweet, Republican Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt stated his support for the suit, promising to "lead the effort in support of Texas's #SCOTUS filing today".^[60] On Twitter, Republican Arkansas attorney general Leslie Rutledge stated she would legally support the motion.^[61] Republican Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry also supported the complaint.^[62]

In response to an email to every Republican member of the House of Representatives from Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, 125 Republicans joined him to sign an amicus briefsupporting the suit.^[63][64] The number represented a clear majority of the Republican caucus in the House.^[4] Politico referred to the large number of GOP House members supporting the suit as "jaw-dropping".^[65] Republican members of the Senate, on the other hand, were much less likely to speak in favor of the suit, reflecting their different temperaments and political imperatives.^[65]

Against

The office of Republican Georgia attorney general Chris Carr also criticized the suit and Paxton. On December 8, Carr's spokeswoman said that Paxton was "constitutionally, legally[,] and factually wrong about Georgia".^[49][24]Georgia's deputy secretary of state Jordan Fuchs denounced the suit as "false and irresponsible".^[18] Trump warned Carr to not rally other Republican officials in opposition to the suit, and the Republican majority in the Georgia State Senate expressed their approval for the filing.^[66][49][24]

Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticized the suit,labelling it a "publicity stunt ... beneath the dignity" of the Texas attorney general office and saying "[t]he erosion of confidence in our democratic system isn't attributable to the good people of Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia[,] or Pennsylvania but rather to partisan officials, like Mr. Paxton, who place loyalty to a person over loyalty to their country."^[16]

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul called the case "genuinely embarrassing".^[18] Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro stated that "[t]hese continued attacks on our fair and free election system are beyond meritless, beyond reckless—they are a scheme by the President of the United States and some in the Republican party to disregard the will of the people—and name their own victors."^[29]

Attorney and Lincoln Project founder George Conway called the lawsuit the "most insane thing yet".^[67] Former Federal Elections Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky said, "By almost any measure, this is the legal equivalent of a Hail Mary pass."^[8]

Chip Roy, a Republican Texas congressman and former chief of staff to Texas senator Ted Cruz, characterized the suit as "a dangerous violation of federalism [that] sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states".^[68] Republican Texas senator and former Texas Supreme Court justiceJohn Cornynsaid he was unable "to understand the legal theory" behind the suit.^[69]

Governor Gary Herbert and Governor-elect Spencer Cox of Utah, both Republicans, denounced Republican Utah state attorney general Sean Reyes's decision to join the amicus brief in support of the lawsuit.^[70] Several other states also saw division among Republicans about whether coming out in favor of the suit was wise.^[58] The Associated Press wrote that the action "has quickly become a conservative litmus test."^[58]

Michael Steele, formerly the chair of the Republican National Committee, called Republican House members' decision to join the suit "an offense to the Constitution" that would "leave[] an indelible stain" on their "political skin".^[71] Jeb Bush opined on the suit: "This is crazy. It will be killed on arrival".^[72]

Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins, who normally would speak on behalf of the state in matters before the Supreme Court, was not listed on the suit.^[43]

Statistical analysis

The lawsuit included a declaration from Charles Cicchetti, who claimed that his statistical analysis showed that there was a less than one-in-one-quadrillion chance of Biden's having won any of the states in question.Cicchetti's analysis was widely criticized,^[73] since it assumed that voters behaved the same in 2020 as they had in 2016^[74] and because it assumed that vote tallying patterns were random over time. In reality, Biden was a different candidate than Hillary Clinton had been in 2016, and the marked shift of early Republican vote counts to later Democratic votes counts had been anticipated well in advance, because several battleground states had forbidden mail-in ballots from being counted earlier; mail-in ballots favored Biden in part because Trump had long attempted to discredit the reliability of mail-in voting.^[6]

Writing at PolitiFact, Eric Litke described the analysis as "wildly illogical", citing professors of political science who described the analysis as "ludicrous" and "statistical incompetence", with one wrong assumption being that "votes are all independently and randomly distributed".^[75]

At The Volokh Conspiracy, David Postdescribed Cicchetti's analysis as "idiotic" because it was based on two blatantly false assumptions: (1) that voters' preferences had not changed since 2016, and (2) that party preferences did not differ between mail-in and in-person voters. Post stated that Paxton's use of Cicchetti's work was "unethical" because Paxton had not mentioned Cicchetti's key assumptions.^[76] At The Washington Post, Philip Bump said that the analysis in the lawsuit was "utterly ridiculous", noting that the 2016 results could not be extrapolated to 2020, because Biden was more popular than Clinton and because voters had become more polarized. Bump also wrote that vote-counting was not "homogeneous", with the "blue shift" phenomenon being entirely expected due to mail-in ballots favoring Biden.^[77]

Outcome

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.

On December 11, in an unsigned ruling, the court ruled that Texas lacked standing and denied the suit.^{[78][79][80][81]}

The State of Texas's motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.^[11][82]

Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, disagreed with the ruling denying leave to file a bill of complaint, but did not otherwise find for the plaintiffs. He wrote that the Court is duty-bound to hear the case, referencing Thomas's dissent in Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. _ (Feb. 24, 2020):

In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction ... I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.^[11]

Aftermath

Texan Republican Party chairman Allen West (pictured in 2011) alluded to secession after the court's decision.

After the Court declined to hear the case, Allen West, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, suggested that "law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution".^[83]

The statement was criticized by Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger, saying the call for secession was dangerous. The Lincoln Project's George Conway and National Review editor Rich Lowry also criticized West's remarks, stating they were unrepresentative of the "Party of Lincoln".^[84]

President Trump harshly criticized the Court's decision, saying "This is a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice. The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!"^[85][86] White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany echoed the notion that the case was never given a chance, saying the justices "hid behind procedure ... There's no way to say it other than they dodged."^[87] Paxton, for his part, said the decision was "unfortunate".^[88]

The Biden campaign said of the ruling: "The Supreme Court has decisively and speedily rejected the latest of Donald Trump and his allies' attacks on the democratic process. This is no surprise—dozens of judges, election officials from both parties, and Trump's own attorney general have dismissed his baseless attempts to deny that he lost the election."^[89]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement that "The Court has rightly dismissed out of hand the extreme, unlawful and undemocratic GOP lawsuit to overturn the will of millions of American voters." and admonished that "Republicans must once and for all end their election subversion—immediately." Additionally she reprimanded House members who supported the lawsuit: "The 126 Republican Members that signed onto this lawsuit brought dishonor to the House. Instead of upholding their oath to support and defend the Constitution, they chose to subvert the Constitution and undermine public trust in our sacred democratic institutions."^[90][91]

New Jersey Representative Bill Pascrell, citing section three of the 14th Amendment, called for Pelosi to not seat Republicans who signed the amicus curiae brief supporting the suit. This proposal would have applied to nearly two-thirds of the Republican representatives of the incoming 117th United States Congress. Pascrell stated, "The text of the 14th Amendment expressly forbids Members of Congress from engaging in rebellion against the United States. Trying to overturn a democratic election and install a dictator seems like a pretty clear example of that."^[92]

AG Paxton’s campaign spent $50,000 at Mar-a-Lago: report

Alex Henderson

January 20, 2022

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has not been the type of Republican who is known for reaching out to the center. From his anti-Obamacare activities to a lawsuit that tried to throw out the election result...

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an 1 22

James Barragán, The Texas Tribune

"Attorney General Ken Paxton defies county official’s order to release records related to Jan. 6 Trump rally" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Attorney General Ken Paxton said the Travis County district attorney's determination that Paxton violated open records laws by withholding information related to his trip to Washington, D.C., on the day of the Capitol insurrection was "meritless" and that his office had fulfilled its obligation under the law.

Last week, the district attorney's office gave Paxton four business days to turn over communications requested by the state's leading newspapers relating to his trip or face a lawsuit.

On Friday, Austin Kinghorn, a lawyer for the attorney general's office, dismissed the district attorney's findings, saying that office had provided no provisions under the state's open records law that had been violated and implied that the newspapers had made the requests to publish stories about them.

Reference

Read the Attorney General's response to Travis County DA here.

(2.3 MB)

"In each instance, complainants' allegations rely on unsupported assumptions and fundamental misunderstandings of the PIA [Public Information Act] and its requirements," Kinghorn wrote. "Frustrated that they have failed to uncover anything worth reporting following 'numerous open records requests to AG Paxton office for various documents,' complainant newspaper editors have sought to leverage your office's authority to further their fishing expedition, or worse, manufacture a conflict between our respective offices that will give rise to publishable content for the complainants' media outlets."

Ismael Martinez, a spokesperson for that Travis County district attorney's office, confirmed the office received the letter but couldn't comment further.

The Travis County district attorney's office action stems from a complaint by editors from five of the state's top newspapers — the Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News — alleging that the state's top law enforcement official had violated Texas' open records law by withholding communications related to Paxton's trip to Washington, D.C., last year that they argue are subject to disclosure.

In a joint statement, the editors of the newspapers wrote, "We’re disappointed in the attorney general’s response. We believe these records are public and should be released. We hope the Travis County district attorney continues to hold the attorney general accountable for following our state’s open records laws and continues to advocate for the public’s right to know in this case."

The newspapers want records related to Paxton's communications in the days surrounding the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. On that day, Paxton spoke at a pro-Trump rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, also attended the rally.

In the letter, the attorney general's office said the newspaper editors base their complaint on an "awareness of a small number of inconsequential documents they believe should have been produced" in public records requests and "baselessly speculate" that Paxton is failing to comply with the open records law.

Kinghorn said the "inconsequential documents" include a text message sent to Paxton's personal cellphone by a Dallas Morning News reporter and two "spam" emails and an internal email that announced the temporary closure of an office parking garage.

The Texas Public Information Act grants the public the right to government records, even those kept on personal devices or on a public official's online accounts.

Normally, the Texas attorney general's office enforces the state open records law. But when an open records complaint is filed against a state agency, the law says the Travis County district attorney or the attorney general must handle them. In this case, the newspapers filed their complaint with the Travis County district attorney.

Paxton's office has dismissed the district attorney's actions as a "fake controversy drummed up by hard-left local officials because they want to reignite hysteria about the attorney general’s political speech on January 6 ... which was not an official state activity."

José Garza, the Travis County district attorney, is a Democrat. Paxton is a Republican and an acolyte of former President Donald Trump. He has been endorsed by Trump in his reelection bid, in which he faces three Republican challengers and several Democratic challengers.

In their complaint, the newspapers said Paxton was using attorney-client privilege to withhold every single email and text message around the time of the Jan. 6 rally.

The newspapers also complained that the attorney general's office had no policy for handling work-related records kept on personal devices or accounts, like the text message sent by the Dallas Morning News reporter to Paxton's personal phone.

The journalists further complained that Paxton had responded to a request for his text messages about a trip to Utah during last year's February freeze by providing the communications of Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, but not his own. When a reporter for The Dallas Morning News asked why the office had not provided Paxton's text messages, a lawyer for the attorney general's office responded, "General Paxton provided the messages."

Paxton is in the midst of his most difficult reelection cycle yet.

The two-term Republican is seeking reelection this year but is facing stiff competition from three GOP challengers: Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert.

The three have blasted the incumbent for multiple legal issues he is facing, including a 6-year-old securities fraud case that has dogged him since his first year in office. He overcame that to win reelection in 2018. But in October 2020, eight of his former top deputies accused him of bribery and misuse of office. Weeks later, all eight deputies had either been fired or resigned from the attorney general's office.

Four of those whistleblowers are now suing Paxton under the state's whistleblower law. They are seeking compensation for lost wages and other damages, and some are seeking reinstatement to their former positions.

Paxton is also reportedly under FBI investigation for the allegations registered by the whistleblowers.

He has denied wrongdoing in all of these cases.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/21/ken-paxton-travis-county-jan-6-texas/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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crew 1/22

corporate and industry PACs have also continued to support the Republican state attorneys generalwho attempted to invalidate the election results in four battleground states by falsely claiming that election procedures in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin violated federal law. Twenty companies including Boeing, Walmart, and Home Depot have donated $60,200 through their federal PACs to 12 attorneys general involved in the lawsuit, which was led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall collected the most in donations, bringing in $14,500. He is the head of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a dark money organization that paid for robocalls promoting the “Save America” rally held on January 6 before the insurrection....

Corporate and industry PACs have also contributed to the Republican state attorneys general who attempted to invalidate the election results by joining a lawsuit, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, against four battleground states won by Biden. Twenty industry donors including Boeing, Walmart and Home Depot have donated $60,200 through their federal PACs to Paxton and eleven other attorneys general who joined that lawsuit, attempting to decertify the results. The four states received historic turnout from voters of color.

Steve Marshall, attorney general of Alabama, has raised the most from these donors, taking in $14,500.He is the head of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a dark money organization that paid for robocalls detailing when and where individuals should meet for the “Save America” rally held before the insurrection took place at the Capitol. His efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election perpetuated the myth that it was stolen, while robocalls by RLDF urged rallygoers to “march to the Capitol” and “call on Congress to stop the steal.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton pulled in $6,000 from the Texas Farm Bureau and Valero Energy since leading the charge to invalidate millions of people’s votes. Attorney General Sean Reyes of Utah backed the lawsuit, further eroding confidence in this country’s democratic system. He pulled in $7,500 from two donors, including Home Depot.

Companies that cut checks to these election objectors had also made commitments about confronting systemic racism in this country. Only their efforts to curb racism apparently don’t include their political giving. Cigna, which shared its “resolute belief in diversity [and] inclusion” and described intolerance “as not only unacceptable, but as the antithesis of everything [they] stand for,” offered contributions to Florida Attorney General and former RLDF board member Ashley Moody. Walmart, which committed $100 million over five years to build a “center on racial equity” to address systemic racism, contributed to Marshall. Home Depot gave $1 million to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law “in support of its vital work to secure civil rights and equal justice for all,” then turned around and donated to Reyes.

These billion dollar corporations have contradicted their public commitments to racial justice by bankrolling attorneys general sowing doubt about a fair election in states like Georgia, which have historically suppressed Black voters. By funding these officials, the same companies claiming to support racial justice are giving political power to an anti-democratic and racist agenda.

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judge ok whistleblower in bribery

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ken-paxton/

DA says must give 1/6 docs

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/ken-paxton/

newspaper

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RAGA leaders were also involved in Texas AG Ken Paxton's lawsuit filed last month in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the presidential election results in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, claiming changes made to accommodate voters in the COVID-19 pandemic were unlawful. Among those signing on to the suit were RAGA's Hunter, Landry, Marshall, Moody, Reyes, Schmitt and Wilson, as well as the Republican AGs of Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Biden administration in bid to force construction of border wall

The Texas Tribune October 24, 2021

By Uriel J. García, The Texas Tribune

Oct. 21, 2021

"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Biden administration in bid to force construction ...

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921

AG Ken Paxton serves up incoherent attack on Merrick Garland: His job is to 'worry about Afghanistan'

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newspaper

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/we-just-want-him-gone-houston-newspaper-calls-for-ag-ken-paxtons-resignation/

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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/05/05/more-staff-flee-republican-attorneys-general-association-after-it-doubles-down

david a

staff and leadership exodus at the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) continues to grow in the wake of the group's decision to promote Peter Bisbee, who was responsible for generating robocalls to turn people out for the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, to be the group's new executive director.

In an Apr. 25 email obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), RAGA's director of operations, Jason Heath, writes, "After 8 years of service, I am writing to inform you that I have made the difficult decision to resign as RAGA's Director of Operations. I respect your votes, but the direction is not one I can honestly stand behind."

[txt]

heath had been working for RAGA since it broke off from the Republic State Leadership Committee in 2014.

Heath's departure comes on the heels of the sudden resignation of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr as RAGA's chair over Bisbee's selection, citing "a significant difference of opinion…as to the direction this organization should take going forward" and "vastly opposite views of the significance of the events of January 6."

Bisbee was formerly the head of RAGA's sister organization, the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), and was responsible for sending out robocalls encouraging supporters to "march to the Capitol and call on Congress to stop the steal" days prior to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol invasion.

Other RAGA staff have quit over Bisbee's selection as well. On April 22, the Alabama Political Reporter published a resignation letter sent to Republican attorneys general from Ashley Trenzeluk, RAGA's finance director stating that,

As RLDF Executive Director, Pete Bisbee approved the robocall expenditure, and was the only other person accountable for RLDF involvement in the January 6 events. Over the last few months, I have fielded, reassured and assuaged concerns from our core donor base on the future direction of our organization. The result of the executive committee vote to nominate Pete as RAGA's Executive Director is a decision I cannot defend.

Bisbee replaced Adam Piper, who resigned a week after the violent events unfolded at the Capitol and the story broke about RAGA's involvement. Before his resignation, Piper was adamant that RAGA and RLDF had no role in the insurrection.

At least one other GOP attorney general has signaled discomfort with RAGA's direction following the insurrection. in a Jan. 11 email obtained by CMD, Idaho's Chief Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane writes that "Idaho will not be participating in any RLDF activities until further notice," and any participation in RAGA will be "subject to the approval of Attorney General Wasden."

Carr has been replaced as RAGA's chair by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a strong Trump supporter. Schmitt received an invitation for an RLDF conference call with Bisbee on Jan. 5, but has not confirmed if he was on the call.

"Attorney General Schmitt absolutely had no knowledge of or involvement in the robocall, and condemns the violence that took place on [Jan. 6] in the strongest possible terms, period," Schmitt spokesman Chris Nuelle said in a statement.

Schmitt undeniably worked hard for Trump in trying to prove that voter fraud led to Biden's victory in November. On Nov. 9, nine Republican AGs joined Schmitt in filing anamicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in a case challenging Pennsylvania's vote-by-mail ballots.

Schmitt also joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's controversial suit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging those states' election law changes as unconstitutional. That case was dismissed.

Paxton, also a co-chair of Lawyers for Trump,was a speaker at the Jan. 6 rally preceding the violent events at the Capitol, where he told the crowd, "We will not quit fighting."

Schmitt's Solicitor General John Sauer registered for a "Senior Staff Summit" organized by RLDF on Sept. 23 and 24, where it held "war games" to map out post-election strategies if Trump lost.

Piper emailed on Sept. 24, "WAR GAMES – 32 AG Staff Members are huddled in Atlanta for a series of conversations planning for what could come if we lose the White House."

Piper also huddled the night of Jan. 5 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. in Trump's "private residence" with Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Peter Navarro, Corey Lewandowski, Michael Flynn, and others.

RAGA, RLDF, its members, and donors will be forever tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection, especially now that they have apparently doubled down on fanning the flames of Trump's Big Lie.

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ercot ~ foia, just failed no one knows why? 621 an

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ercot-2653531499/

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One need only compare now-President Joe Biden's losses in Texas in 2020 to his losses in Idaho or Wyoming to see that Texas has gone from deep red to light red. Biden lost Texas by 6%; he lost Wyoming by 43%, Idaho by 30% and North Dakota by 43%. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party has, historically, had a turnout problem in the Lone Star State; Democrats are going to need a heavier turnout in the Democrat-leaning parts of the state if they are going to win statewide races (presidential, gubernatorial or U.S. Senate) in the future. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, during a June 4 appearance on Steve Bannon's podcast, essentially admitted that voter suppression helped former President Donald Trump win Texas in 2020.

Paxton told Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration in 2017 following his years as chairman of Breitbart News, that had his office not blocked Harris County from sending out mail-in ballot applications to its residents, Trump would have lost Texas in 2020. Harris County includes Democrat-leaning Houston.

"Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas," Paxton told Bannon. "(The) Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million. Those were all illegal, and we were able to stop every one of them."

What Paxton described as "mail-in ballots" were mail-in ballot applications. There's a difference between sending out 2.5 applications for mail-in ballots and actually sending out 2.5 mail-in ballots. And there was nothing evil or sinister about the applications that Harris County officials wanted to send out, as Paxton claimed.

Nonetheless, Paxton's comments were revealing, as they underscore the fact that far-right Republicans like Paxton and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are scared to death of the possibility of Democrats ramping up voter turnout in the more Democratic parts of the state — which include not only Houston (which hasn't had a Republican mayor since the early 1980s), but also, Austin, El Paso, Dallas and San Antonio. However, the Texas GOP has a very strong ground game in countless rural counties in North Texas and Central Texas, and they really know how to turn out the Republican base in those areas of the state.

Journalist Sharon Zhang, reporting on the interview in Truthout on June 7, stresses that it's "unclear" whether or not Trump "would have actually won the state if Harris County had been allowed to follow through on its plan to make voting more accessible."

"While President Joe Biden won the county by a 13-point margin or nearly 220,000 votes, with record-breaking voter turnout, Trump carried the state with over 600,000 votes," Zhang explains. "Regardless of whether the results would have been any different for Biden had Harris County been able to send out mail-in ballot applications, Paxton's statement about the election results seven months after the fact is revealing of how conservatives view elections and voting rights. Rather than ensuring that elections are conducted fairly, they openly support blocking access to the ballot by any means necessary — especially among voters in more Democratic leaning and non-White areas."

Zhang continues, "Paxton, after all, is the same person who sued to disenfranchise millions of voters in battleground states following Biden's victory in the 2020 elections. Regardless of whether Paxton's lawsuit against the mail-in ballot applications handed Trump his victory in Texas, it was certainly one more tool in the GOP's voter-suppression toolbox for the state."

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CLAUDE WALKKER AG VI:

Exxon received some unusual assistance in its victory in the Virgin Islands case. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a tea-party-aligned Republican, went so far as to formally intervene—that is, he asked the court to allow the state of Texas to become a party to the case. Exxon, he wrote, had a First Amendment right to withhold the documents Walker was seeking. The brief was also signed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (R). (Paxton and Strange also objected to Walker’s use of a private law firm to help conduct the investigation.)

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AG Ken Paxton under investigation by state bar over 'professional misconduct'

Meaghan Ellis

June 13, 2021

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is now being investigated by the State Bar of Texas over his failed post-election lawsuit to overturn President Joe Biden's win....

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angling for trump pardon or just proof of post trump k?

9-0 scotus slapdown

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/biden-republicans

Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

Jan. 22, 2021

"Analysis: Top Texas lawyers skipping the honeymoon with the Biden administration" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Have a look at what the top attorneys for the state of Texas were offering on the day Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as president and vice president.

“My statement on Inauguration Day," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted from his agency's official account. “Congrats, President Biden. On Inauguration Day, I wish our country the best. I promise my fellow Texans and Americans that I will fight against the many unconstitutional and illegal actions that the new administration will take, challenge federal overreachthat infringes on Texans' rights, and serve as a major check against the administration's lawlessness. Texas First! Law & Order always!"

One of his deputy attorneys general, Aaron Reitz,retweeted that with his own topspin on the new chief executive of the United States: “Excited for the fight ahead. We will fight Joe Biden and the Democrats at every turn, because virtually everything they do is unconstitutional, illegal, bad for Texas, and bad for America."

Warms your little red, white and blue heart, doesn't it?

While the Republican attorney general and his deputies were suiting up for fights that haven't had time to start and tagging the newly seated Democrats as lawless before those Democrats have actually done anything, the new president was calling for unity.

“The answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don't look like you or worship the way you do or don't get their news from the same sources you do," Biden said. “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural vs. urban, conservative vs. liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts. If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we're willing to stand in the other person's shoes, as my mom would say, just for a moment, stand in their shoes."

Unity was the theme of Biden's inaugural address. “Politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path," he said. “Every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war."

It's like trying to reason with a cloud of hungry mosquitoes. To be more charitable about it, calming the partisans is going to require a lot of political rehab.

And to be fair, a number of elected Texas Republicans said they'd like totry working together. At least on the first day, people like U.S. Reps. Van Taylor of Plano and Beth Van Duyneof Irving unclenched their fists and offered to pitch in.

Paxton's contrarian streak isn't new; he was one of the speakers at the Trump rally in Washington two weeks ago that spawned the invasion of the U.S. Capitol. And he's not speaking outside the tradition of his state office. His predecessor, Gov. Greg Abbott, served as AG during the Obama administration. Abbott turned his resistance intoa campaign line: “My job's pretty simple. I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and then I go home."

It sounds like a state-federal beef, but this isn't about federalism and states' rights — it's about Republicans vs. Democrats.

While Biden is trying to de-escalate — and he's not alone here; there are Republicans working on the same project — the public will have to weigh in before the conversation will change.

The partisans are putting on these shows for the rest of us, for voters who have been so anxious and excitable about politics in recent years — and particularly during the presidency of Donald Trump. His skill at holding the crowd's attention and driving the public's emotion provided a lesson for the lesser lights in politics and government.

Trump has helicoptered away, but his devotees in public office are still following the playbook, confident that the same crowds who followed him will now turn and follow them.

It's the voters themselves who are being tested. Do they yearn for more of the kind of political tension they've been getting for the last four years — and honestly, for a good long time before that — or do they want something to happen after all the bickering?

More of the same, or something different?

Texans in office at all levels of government do a lot of the things that they do for an audience of voters. They are remarkably sensitive to public sentiment, and here's the thing about that: If they perform in a particular way, that's their read on what the public wants. What you see from them is what they think you want.

Maybe that means Texans want to hobble the new federal administration with lawsuits. Maybe they want everybody in public office to settle down for a little while. Maybe voters are still split; this unity thing is hard.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/01/22/biden-texas-republicans/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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PAXTON SPOKE

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/state-attorney-general

As more and more detail emerges about the events in the nation's capital Wednesday, it becomes clearer that this was a planned revolt and that it was organized within the Republican establishment. So much so that the Republican Association of Attorneys General (RAGA)—the chief Republican law enforcement officers for their states—used its dark money group to help organize the mob. The Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), a "nonprofit" set up by the RAGA, appears in a list of groups "Participating in the March to Save America" along with Stop the Steal, Turning Point Action, Tea Party Patriots, and others.

The RLDF sent out a robocall to activists saying: "The march to save America is tomorrow in Washington D.C. at the Ellipse in President's Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m." So they're making sure everyone knows where to go. It gets worse. "At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections." The call gives a web address, MarchtoSaveAmerica.com, and concludes: "This call is paid for and authorized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund." Again, this is coming from state attorneys general, the people elected to uphold and enforce the rule of law.

RAGA's chair, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, insists he "unequivocally had no knowledge or involvement" in the robocall and "is working diligently to determine how this situation occurred and ensure that it does not happen again."

The executive director of RAGA, Adam Piper, had the gall to issue a statement saying that the RAGA and RLDF "had no involvement in the planning, sponsoring or the organization of Wednesday's event" despite the fact that they are listed on the website as an organizing entity of the event and they sent the goddamned robocall telling everyone where to go and what the agenda for the coup would be. So that's believable. He added: "No Republican AG authorized the staff's decision to amplify a colleague speaking at the event."So we had nothing to do with it, but if we had anything to do with it, it's the staff's fault.

Few are buying that load, particularly the Democratic Attorneys General Association. Co-Chairs Massachusetts AG Maura Healey and Nevada AG Aaron Ford released a scathing statement:

"The continued peddling of conspiracy theories and pandering to President Trump's dangerous lies by the Republican Attorneys General Association, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, and some current and former Republican Attorneys General has gone unchecked for too long. Current and former Republican AGs have been directly involved with efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election, and now the party of so-called 'law and order' played a role in recruiting the domestic terrorists who breached the U.S. Capitol to attack Vice President Mike Pence for doing his Constitutionally-mandated job to certify the Electoral College.""RAGA, RLDF—and the Republican AGs who blindly take their support—have no legal or moral ground on which to stand here: the organization paid for robocalls to recruit attendees, it was listed as a sponsor of the event, its former Chair spoke at the rally that incited a mob, and former GOP AG Josh Hawley led the effort in Congress to undermine the election."

The DAGA is calling out every state Republican attorney general to "publicly distance themselves from the Republican Attorneys General Association and its leadership," and for every donor to the group, corporate or individual to "abstain from further supporting an organization that makes such a mockery of the rule of law and our beloved democracy." Speaking of those corporate donors, they're a who's who of dark money, including "Koch Industries ($375k), Comcast Corporation ($200k), Walmart ($140k), Home Depot ($125k), Amazon ($100k), TikTok ($75k), 1-800 Contacts ($51k), Chevron ($50k), The National Rifle Association ($50k), Monsanto ($50k), Facebook ($50k), Fox Corporation ($50k), Uber ($50k), Coca Cola ($50k), Exxon ($50k), and Google($25k)."

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https://www.alreporter.com/2021/01/08/alabama-ag-says-hell-investigate-his-groups-role-in-deadly-riot/

no lnx

Alabama AG says he’ll investigate his group’s role in deadly riot

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said he’s unaware the group he leads was involved in the rally.

Eddie Burkhalter Published 24 hours ago on January 8, 2021By Eddie Burkhalter

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall in a statement to APR on Friday said he was unaware the nonprofit he leads made “decisions” with regard to the rally that later devolved into an insurrection at the Capitol on Wednesday in Washington D.C.

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Marshall heads the Republican Attorneys General Association’s policy branch, the dark-money nonprofit Rule of Law Defense Fund, which is listed as a participating organization for the March to Save America on the march’s website, as are the groups Stop the Steal, Tea Party Patriots and Turning Point Action.

Prior to the protest, RLDF sent out robocalls detailing when and where citizens should meet, which was first reported by Documented.

“We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” the robocall says, as recorded by Documented. “We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com. This call is paid for and authorized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund.”

Marshall said in a statement:

“I was unaware of unauthorized decisions made by RLDF staff with regard to this week’s rally. Despite currently transitioning into my role as the newly elected chairman of RLDF, it is unacceptable that I was neither consulted about nor informed of those decisions. I have directed an internal review of this matter. As I said yesterday, I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the actions of those who attempted to storm the U.S. Capitol, a place where passionate but peaceful protestors had gathered and lawmakers debated inside.Our country is built upon the foundation of the rule of law. American democracy guarantees the right of peaceful protest. Those who chose to engage in violence and anarchy should and will be held accountable under the law.”

“We have no further comment,” reads a message from Marshall’s communications director, Mike Lewis, which accompanied Marshall’s statement.

APR’s attempts to contact RLDF and Marshall, through his office, on Thursday were unsuccessful, but RAGA’s executive director, Adam Piper, sent a statement to APR blaming staff for the nonprofit’s role in the rally:

“The Republican Attorneys General Association and Rule of Law Defense Fund had no involvement in the planning, sponsoring, or the organization of yesterday’s rally. No Republican AG authorized the staff’s decision to amplify a colleague speaking at the rally. Organizationally and individually, we strongly condemn and disavow the events which occurred. Yesterday was a dark day in American history and those involved in the violence and destruction of property must be prosecuted and held accountable.”

Wednesday’s riots and insurrection resulted in one woman’s death after she was shot by police while entering the Capitol, and the deaths of three others due to “medical emergencies” during the riot, including one Alabama man, Kevin Greeson of Athens. Another Alabama man, 70-year-old Lonnie Coffman of Falkvillle, was arrested near the Capitol and charged with firearms crimes. The New York Times reported a 70-year-old Alabama man was arrested with a gun and ingredients to make Molotov cocktails.

U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died at approximately 9:30 p.m. on Thursday after being injured by rioters during the Capitol siege Wednesday, Capitol Police said.

The website for the rally — marchtosaveamerica.com — is now down, but from the earliest archived version available, on Jan. 3, RAGA is listed as one of the 10 “coalition partners.” Later that same day, in a separate archived version of the site, RAGA was no longer listed as a participant but was instead replaced with RLDF.

Marshall isn’t the only state attorney general distancing himself from any connection to planning the rally that resulted in violence and death. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, an executive board member at RAGA, denied any knowledgeof the group and its policy arm being involved in the rally, according to the Arkansas Times.

“I had no knowledge or role regarding any efforts made by RAGA or RLDF as to this issue. Contact RAGA or RLDF for any further questions,” Rutledge told the outlet in a statement.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a former RAGA chairman and former RAGA executive committee member, spoke at the Wednesday rallyjust before riots broke out.

:{:{}:

“The message goes on. We will not quit fighting,” Paxton told the crowd.

Marshall in a statement on Wednesday condemned the violence at the Capitol:

“I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the actions of those who today attempted to storm the Capitol, a place where passionate but peaceful protestors had gathered and lawmakers debated inside. Our country is built upon the foundation of the rule of law. American democracy guarantees the right of peaceful protest. Those who chose to engage in violence and anarchy should and will be held accountable under the law. I stand by the brave men and women of law enforcement as they work to restore order. God bless the Capitol Police and all members of law enforcement who, as always, have showed such great courage in protecting their fellow man.”

Marshall was named to RAGA’s executive committee in November 2018, and became a member of the organization after being appointed the state’s attorney general by Gov. Robert Bentley in February 2017.

“I am honored to lead RAGA’s policy branch, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, and bring conservative attorneys general together in promotion of federalism, freedom, and the rule of law,” Marshall said in a Nov. 10 statement to RAGA.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas-supreme-court/

truscott salon

they didn't bother with writing articles of secession this time. No, Ken Paxton, the disgraced attorney general of the state of Texas, did that for them when he filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the presidential election. On Wednesday, Missouri and 16 other states filed a brief with the court seeking to join the Texas lawsuit, which alleges that the four decisive swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia violated the Constitution by allowing mail-in voting in the November election. On Thursday, a majority of the Republican caucus in the House, 126 members of Congress, signed on to the lawsuit along with the instigator in chief, Donald Trump. Twenty-five states and territories signed a brief opposing the Texas lawsuit. Friday evening, the Supreme Court rejected the suit out of hand.

The 18 states and 126 members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise, are seceding from democracy.It amounts to nothing less than an act of sedition by the entire Republican Party, 70 percent of whom believe that Joe Biden's election was illegitimate, according to a Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday. In contrast, 98 percent of Democrats think Biden's victory was legitimate, along with 62 percent of independents.

The last time anything like this happened was in 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln led almost immediately to declarations of secession by seven states between Dec. 20, 1860 and Feb. 1, 1861. Two months later, on April 12, the bombardment of Fort Sumter began, and the Civil War was underway.

It's not a shooting war — yet — but Texas didn't just file a lawsuit this week, it set a match to the Constitution of the United States. It isn't just that these Republicans don't recognize Joe Biden as our next president. They don't want to be part of the democracy that this country was founded on. They don't respect the votes of their fellow citizens. They don't want what more than 80 million people wanted when they cast their votes in this election. They want what Donald Trump wants.

Thankfully, it's not the whole country. The Quinnipiac poll found that 60 percent of registered voters think that Biden's victory was legitimate. But it wasn't the whole country in 1860, either. It was only after the election of Lincoln that the Southern states seceded from the Union over the issue of slavery.

This time there isn't a single issue, there's a single man: Donald Trump. In this way, what's happening right now in this country is eerily similar to what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s with Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Trump has identified and used the same sort of mass hysteria Hitler did — a sense of resentment among his supporters that somehow they have been left behind and misunderstood and humiliated, and that only he, Trump, understands them and is willing to stand up for them and will bring back their rightful way of life.

So far, Trump has only played around with the kind of violence that Hitler made use of to achieve power and then consolidate it. Trump used implied violence in the chants of "Lock her up" that energized supporters at his rallies in 2016 and throughout the campaign of 2020. By staying silent this year when armed protesters occupied the State Capitol in Michigan, Trump implied his support, and his exhortations to "liberate" states that were mandating lockdowns to fight COVID were taken by many as invitations to violence.

Now armed protesters have gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state, and Georgia election officials report that they are receiving death threats and racist voice mails. The Republican Party of Arizona has retweeted exhortations from those who say, "I'm willing to give up my life for this fight," suggesting it's time to "die for something." The New York Times reported this week that the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission has said that "people on Twitter have posted photographs of my house." Another tweet mentioned her children and threatened "I've heard you'll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door."

The conservative website The Bulwark reported this week that far-right websites have been posting addresses and other personal information about Republican elected officials in Georgia, superimposing target crosshairs over images of their faces. Right-wing Republicans are in full cheerleader mode trying to turn Kyle Rittenhouse, who is accused of murdering two people and wounding another at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest, into a hero of the Trump cause. A Democratic state representative in Pennsylvania told the New York Times that "we've been getting emails all the time, all hours of the day and night," and that "they're getting more angry, and a lot of calls are saying we won't be forgetting."

This kind of stuff is not a joke. The fantastic lie that has gripped the Republican Party started out with everyone going along with Trump's fantasy and kind of humoring him. But now it's taken a deadly turn. Trump has been calling Republican state representatives on the phone and pressuring them to go along with his demands that they ignore the votes that have taken place in swing states and appoint electors that will vote for him. If they step out of line, they're branded as traitors, cowards, RINOs. He's doing this kind of stuff to his own people, to loyal Republicans who have voted the party line since they were in short pants.

When you add in what's been happening in red states with COVID, it's jaw-dropping. Governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures are so intimidated that they won't pass mask mandates and bar closures, not to mention rules against mass gatherings. COVID cases and hospitalizations in red states are off the charts. They are lining up refrigerated trucks outside hospitals in states like North and South Dakota. Republicans are killing their own people in craven attempts to keep Donald Trump from attacking them on Twitter. God only knows what's going to happen in those states when the COVID vaccines become widely available, although we're getting some idea with reports of people standing up at meetings of county commissioners pledging not only that they won't wear masks, they'll also refuse to be vaccinated.

The Mason-Dixon line is psychological this time. These people have lost their minds. They have seceded from sanity and reason. This Civil War isn't being fought with rifles and pistols. It's a war fought with lies and delusions. This week it passed the number of Americans killed in World War II, and its victims are just as dead as the bodies buried at Anzio and Normandy. Americans are dying every time Mitch McConnell stands up and blocks a COVID relief bill. They are dying every time a Republican senator like Ron Johnson presents testimony from an anti-vaxxer as if it were a sane person instead of an outright idiot. They're dying by the thousands with their mask-less hubris. They're dying for Donald Trump, but at least for now, our democracy has not died with them.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/ken-paxton-2649469931/

tejas attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Sunday outlined President Donald Trump's path to victory after the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 election.

During an interview on Fox Business, host Maria Bartiromo asked Paxton if he had a "Plan B" for contesting the election results.

"Going forward,I think the Trump campaign is taking our arguments that we tried to get in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, they are now going to take those, I think, state by state," Paxton explained. "Because I think they are legitimately good constitutional arguments that don't depend on actually proving every little instance of fraud."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-ags/

With the Trump operation's legal effort to overturn the November election going nowhere, nearly 20 Republican attorneys general have decided to throw their support behind Texas AG Ken Paxton's desperate—and, according to analysts, doomed-to-fail—Supreme Court lawsuit against four key battleground states that have certified President-elect Joe Biden's victories.

Filed on Tuesday and enthusiastically celebrated in right-wing circles, Paxton's lawsuit (pdf) baselessly alleges "significant and unconstitutional irregularities" in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and pleads with the high court to delay next week's scheduled certification of presidential electors for those four states.

That the lawsuit was mocked as "utter garbage" and "factually untethered" by legal experts did not dissuade 18 Republican attorneys general, led by Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, from expressing support for Paxton's effort.

As of this writing, the Republican attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia have backed Schmitt's amicus brief(pdf) in support of the Texas lawsuit. Arizona Attorney General MarkBrnovich has filed a separate brief (pdf) "respecting" the Texas suit.

The New York Times reported that Trump asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Tuesday to argue the case if the Supreme Court hears it, and Cruz has agreed.

Late Wednesday, Trump—who has openly pleaded with the Supreme Court to undo Biden's decisive victory—filed a brief with the high court seeking to intervene in support of Paxton's lawsuit. Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the president's filing "reads like a rally speech."

"Were the Supreme Court to agree to hear this meritless suit brought by Texas," Clarke added, "we might as well toss the Constitution."

More than 3,000 Americans died from covid today, a new record, and instead of saving thousands of lives 18 GOP stat… https://t.co/tuKGOs12Mi

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1607565108.0

The Supreme Court—to which Trump successfully appointed three right-wing justices over his four years in office—has not yet decided whether to take up the case, despite viral right-wing social media posts to the contrary.

In a blog post, Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, called Paxton's complaint "a press release masquerading as a lawsuit." He elaborated:

Texas doesn't have standing to raise these claims as it has no say over how other states choose electors; it could raise these issues in other cases and does not need to go straight to the Supreme Court; it waited too late to sue; the remedy Texas suggests of disenfranchising tens of millions of voters after the fact is unconstitutional; there's no reason to believe the voting conducted in any of the states was done unconstitutionally; it's too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not).

While Paxton's lawsuit will almost certainly fail, observers warned that the willingness of so many top state law enforcement officials to back the effort to overturn the presidential election highlights the threat the right will continue to pose to democracy long after Trump leaves office.

"The president will leave the White House on January 20. The conservative attorneys who have become radicalized under his influence, however, will remain in power across the country," Slate's Mark Joseph Stern wrote Wednesday. "Paxton's suit asks the Supreme Court to throw out every vote in four states won by Joe Biden—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—then direct each state's legislature to declare Trump the winner."

"This act would constitute the single biggest incident of voter nullification in American history," Stern continued. "Paxton alleges that all four states illegally expanded mail voting, permitted egregious fraud, then concealed evidence that Democrats stole the election. There is no basis in truth for his factual claims and no basis in law for his legal theories."

Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law added on Twitter, "This is what anti-democratic conduct looks like."

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an 1220

texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the election results in four states that President-elect Joe Biden won: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. Michigan's Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, slammed Paxton for his frivolous lawsuit during a December 9 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" — stressing that Paxton's "publicity stunt" is showing a deep contempt for democracy. She also compared the barrage of GOP election lawsuits to the character Jason, a hockey mask-wearing serial killer in the "Friday the 13th" series of horror movies.

"This post-election process has been like a 'Friday the 13th moment," Nessel told "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski. "No matter how many times you shoot Jason or you stab Jason or you electrocute Jason, he just keeps on coming back at you over and over again — and he just won't stay down…. The claims (in these lawsuits) have been debunked time and time again, but it continues to erode people's faith and confidence in our electoral system. And that's the real lasting and damaging element of this, unfortunately."

Nessel noted that numerous GOP election lawsuits have been rejected or thrown out in the courts, including a Pennsylvania-related lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to even consider. Republican supporters of President Donald Trump have filed one lawsuit after another attacking the election results and claiming, without evidence, that Trump was the victim of widespread voter fraud. Paxton, in his lawsuit, alleges widespread voter fraud in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin but offers no proof of it.

"Everything about this lawsuit is egregious and disturbing," Nessel told Brzezinski. "But we have to take it seriously from the perspective of….. the lasting damage it is doing to our democracy."

According to Nessel, "The Texas AG seeks to overturn the will of the voters in four other states that he certainly does not represent. But he is essentially asking that the slate of electors for Biden in all four of these states — where, of course, the election has already been certified — be instead overturned, and that a slate of electors be chosen by the Republican legislatures to reflect a Trump win in all four states where we know very well that Biden won. And in my state, it was by over 150,000 votes. The vote was not even close."

On "Morning Joe," Nessel also discussed a frightening incident in which armed Trump supporters recently surrounded the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and shouted what Benson described as "baseless conspiracy theories about the election." Like Nessel, Benson is part of the Democratic administration of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was recently the target of a kidnapping plot by far-right white nationalists and militia members.

Grateful to state & local law enforcement who are working to protect my family, but by far the biggest thanks of al… https://t.co/IEoDM88nCg

— Jocelyn Benson (@Jocelyn Benson)1607304127.0

Nessel told Brzezinski, "This could all end tomorrow if Donald Trump would do the decent thing and concede the election…. Instead, he continues to cling to their false (accusation) that he was somehow cheated out of this election."

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today safe harbor for electors?

cruz offers go to scotus, dobbs po'd at s miller for not?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas-election-lawsuit/

Legal experts weighed in on Tuesday with their disapproval of the state of Texas' latest lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court against four battleground states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin — over the outcome of the presidential election.

The president and his legal team have claimed widespread fraud marred the election results, but their attempts to provide even a sliver of convincing evidence for this bold claim have fallen flat as judges have tossed out more than 45 of their lawsuits in states across the country. The newlawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) accuses states of " electoral irregularities." Although President-elect Joe Biden has already been declared the winner of the election, and the vote counts have been rigorously vetted, the lawsuit claims the so-called "flaws" within the election process "preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election," according to Law & Crime.

"Plaintiff State respectfully submits that the foregoing types of electoral irregularities exceed the hanging-chad saga of the 2000 election in their degree of departure from both state and federal law. Moreover, these flaws cumulatively preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections," Texas said.

It adds: "Taken together, these flaws affect an outcome-determinative numbers of popular votes in a group of States that cast outcome-determinative numbers of electoral votes. This Court should grant leave to file the complaint and, ultimately, enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the Defendant States' legislatures and remand to the Defendant States' respective legislatures to appoint Presidential Electors in a manner consistent with the Electors Clause and pursuant to 3 U.S.C. § 2."'

Legal experts see this lawsuit as yet another likely dead end for the Trump campaign. Steve Vladeck, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, pilloried the effort with a string of fiery tweets criticizing the lawsuit.

Vladeck tweeted, "It looks like we have a new leader in the 'craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election' category: The State of Texas is suing Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin *directly* in #SCOTUS."

According to Vladeck, the Supreme Court will "never" hear this case.

Although the Supreme Court has “exclusive” jurisdiction over disputes between states, it does not automatically hea… https://t.co/KGzhLlmIrV

— Steve Vladeck (@Steve Vladeck)1607436791.0

Josh Douglas, election law and voting rights professor at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law, also had critical remarks about Paxton and the lawsuit, which he described as "insane."

He tweeted, "Texas AG Ken Paxton--who is under FBI investigation for using his office to benefit a political donor and whose top lawyers blew the whistle and resigned--is now trying to have Texas sue PA, GA, MI, and WI over the presidential election. Insane."

Texas AG Ken Paxton--who is under FBI investigation for using his office to benefit a political donor and whose top… https://t.co/xikhafPvao

— Josh Douglas (@Josh Douglas)1607437990.0

The lawsuit is also being seen as an attempt to delay the Electoral College vote. However, like many of Trump's other post-election lawsuits, most legal experts are expecting this one to fail, as well.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ken-paxton/

"FBI is investigating Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, AP report says" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

The FBI is investigating Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Associated Press reported Tuesday evening, vetting allegations made by eight of Paxton's former top aides that he illegally used the power of his office to benefit a political donor.

Two unnamed sources told the AP that the bureau was examining claims made by the whistleblowers that Paxton broke the law by intervening several times in legal matters involvingNate Paul, a real estate investor and friend who donated $25,000 to Paxton's campaign in 2018.

On Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, eight aides in total told authorities that they believed Paxton had committed crimes as part of his relationship with Paul, citing bribery and abuse of office. Since then, four aides have been fired, three have resigned, and one has been placed on leave — sparking a whistleblower lawsuit.

Paxton, a Republican in his second term, has denied wrongdoing and said he will not resign his post, even as some in his own party call on him to do so and the state's top leaders call the allegations “concerning."

Earlier Tuesday, before the FBI investigation was made public, Paxton said in a statement that he knows “a little something about being falsely accused" and dismissed the allegations made by the whistleblowers as “overblown, based upon assumptions, and to a large degree misrepresent the facts."

Paxton has been under indictment for more than five years on securities fraud charges but has yet to stand trial. He has dismissed the charges as politically motivated and entered a not guilty plea.

Neither a campaign spokesperson for Paxton nor a defense attorney who is working on his long-running securities fraud case returned a request for comment about the FBI probe Tuesday. A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment.

The full scope of Paxton's relationship with Paul remains unclear, though Paul has characterized it as friendly. In a deposition earlier this month, Paul revealed that he had employed a woman at Paxton's recommendation, though he said it was not a favor to Paxton. The woman had been involved in an extramarital affair with Paxton, according to two people who said the attorney general told them of the relationship in 2018.

Since the allegations surfaced last month, four examples have emerged of Paxton using his 4,000-employee agency to benefit Paul.

The whistleblowers allege Paxton tried to help Paul on a pair of open-records disputes, urging state employees to release documents that should have been confidential, and that Paxton rushed a legal opinion on foreclosure sales during the coronavirus pandemic, which helped Paul avoid such sales on several of his properties.

The attorney general's office — at Paxton's direction, the whistleblowers say — also took the highly unusual step of intervening in a lawsuit between Paul and an Austin-area charity.

And in September, Paxton hired an outside attorney to evaluate a complaint by Paul that he had been mistreated during an FBI raid on his property in 2019. Paxton's staff, the whistleblowers say, had already vetted the allegations and found them meritless, but Paxton continued to push the investigation.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/17/texas-ken-paxton-fbi/.

The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state. Explore the next 10 years with us.

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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.:{motherjones.com/environment/2016/:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:06/exxon-ken-paxton-first-amendment/

Does Exxon Mobil have a constitutional right to sow doubt about climate science? That’s the subject of a high-stakes legal battle playing out between dozens of state attorneys general, members of Congress, corporate executives, and activists.

Last fall, investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that the oil giant has decades of internal documents showing that its own scientists and executives knew fossil fuels contributed to climate change. Publicly, the company argued that the threats posed by global warming were far from certain, presumably as part of an effort to fight off regulation[doc]

...March 2000 Exxon Mobil ad about climate science. (Click here for a larger image.) Greenpeace

The revelations have sparked a barrage of legal actions. The attorney generals of Massachusetts, California, and New York launched investigations of Exxon, while Democratic AGs from other states have expressed their support. Some have drawn parallels to the tobacco industry’s deception on the dangers of smoking. Exxon has countered that the investigations are unconstitutional and has filed motions asking courts to block the subpoenas. “This…is about freedom of political speech,” the company recently argued in the Massachusetts case.

In March, US Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker served the company with a subpoenaseeking records that he claimed might prove that Exxon had defrauded consumers and the government by “misrepresenting its knowledge” that its fossil fuels contribute to climate change. Walker specifically pointed to a state racketeering statute that prohibits obtaining money by false pretenses. He demanded any documents detailing Exxon’s knowledge of climate change and its strategies to address it, including research studies, publications, statements, and communications with outside groups. Exxon responded by filing a lawsuit against Walker to block the subpoena. Exxon prevailed on Wednesday, when Walker agreed to withdraw the subpoena.

Exxon received some unusual assistance in its victory in the Virgin Islands case. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a tea-party-aligned Republican, went so far as to formally intervene—that is, he asked the court to allow the state of Texas to become a party to the case. Exxon, he wrote, had a First Amendment right to withhold the documents Walker was seeking. The brief was also signed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (R). (Paxton and Strange also objected to Walker’s use of a private law firm to help conduct the investigation.)

In a press conference in May, Paxton had called Walker’s investigation “a fishing expedition of the worst kind” and said it represented “an effort to punish Exxon for daring to hold opinions on climate change that differ from theirs.”

“This is about the criminalization of speech and the criminalization of thought,” he said.

Two days later, Republican members of the House Science Committee sent letters to Walker and 16 Democratic attorneys general requesting documents related to the various Exxon investigations. They followed up with additional letters in June.

---

ref2

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-paxton-intervenes-in-first-amendment-case 404

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628180342/https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-paxton-intervenes-in-first-amendment-case

BS press release?

[vid]

attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday joined Alabama in asking a state judge toput an end to a ridiculous investigation launched against ExxonMobil by Claude Earl Walker, Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Walker, working with a Washington, D.C.-based private law firm, issued a subpoena for more than four decades’ worth of Exxon records, alleging the company has engaged in racketeering due to its stated position on climate change, in a clear contradiction to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“This case is about abusing the power of the subpoena to force Exxon to turn over many decades’ worth of records, so an attorney general with an agenda can pore over them in hopes of finding something incriminating,” said Attorney General Ken Paxton. “It’s a fishing expedition of the worst kind, and represents an effort to punish Exxon for daring to hold an opinion on climate change that differs from that of radical environmentalists.”

The First Amendment ensures that all people are free to hold opinions and promote them in public debate. This action by the Virgin Islands’ AG could effectively set a precedent that anyone can be criminally investigated because of their stated opinions. ExxonMobil, which employs thousands in Texas, faces high court costs if the investigation goes forward.

This version updates with the correct brief:

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/files/2016/2016-05-16_exxon_states_intervention.pdf

How Paxton measures success

The Texas attorney general’s office gauges productivity not in terms of the number of defendants but rather the number of offenses with which they are charged, spokeswoman Kayleigh Date said.

Still, the office’s production in 2020 declined by that metric as well. The number of charges has dipped by 28 percent since the midterm elections in 2018, going from 86 charges then to 62 this year.

Date added that the office’s election fraud unit has more than 360 offenses pending in court and more than 230 ongoing investigations.

Salary records show the chief of election fraud, Jonathan White, is paid about $140,000, a second attorney is paid $97,000 and the two other attorneys are paid about $85,000 each.

Myrna Pérez, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, said investing in a program that has not uncovered widespread fraud speaks to Paxton’s priorities.

“How many resources are they going to spend to try to put political wins on the board?” Pérez said. “No one is saying that there’s never mistakes or that fraud never happens. People are saying it’s extraordinarily rare; study after study demonstrates that that’s the case.”

Pérez added that the attorney general’s office tends to try to make examples out of voters who made mistakes and isn’t finding the organized election fraud that Paxton claims to be guarding against.

OPINION: Grieder: Punishment doesn’t fit crime for mother who got 5 years for ‘illegal voting’

For example, Crystal Mason, a 45-year-old Fort Worth woman, was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election — one that was never counted — while on supervised release for a federal conviction. She has said she did not know she was ineligible to vote. At the end of November, her lawyers filed a petition to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to review her case and acquit her of the illegal voting charge.

“Crystal Mason got more time than that ‘affluenza’ kid,” Pérez said, referring to a Texas man who got no jail time after claiming in court that his wealthy upbringing clouded his sense of right and wrong during his trial for killing four people while driving drunk. “It’s really hard to say who you’re protecting people from.”

Another is Rosa Ortega, a Mexican-born woman and permanent resident with a green card who was sentenced to eight years in jail after being convicted of illegal voting by a noncitizen. Like Mason, Ortega and her lawyers have also said it was an honest mistake. She is now on parole and facing deportation after serving nine months behind bars.

The attorney general’s office also made news in November when it announced it had assisted the Limestone County sheriff and district attorney in charging Kelly Reagan Brunner, a social worker in the Mexia State Supported Living Center, with election fraud for submitting voter registration applications on the behalf of 67 residents without their signature or effective consent. If convicted, Brunner could face up to 10 years in prison.

PAST COVERAGE: Texas Attorney General arrests Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina and wife on voter fraud charges

A handful of other alleged fraud schemes have also come to light over the past year or so: In April 2019, Paxton’s election fraud unit, in conjunction with the Hidalgo County district attorney’s office, announced it filed charges against Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina and his wife, Dalia, for voter fraud in his mayoral election. Molina allegedly coordinated voters from outside the city changing their addresses so they could vote for him.

In September, authorities arrested Gregg County Commissioner Shannon Brown and three others on charges in connection with an alleged scheme during the 2018 Democratic primary election. They are accused of marking able-bodied voters as “disabled” to qualify them to vote by mail, mostly without the voters’ knowledge or consent. Texas voters under 65 must have an excuse to vote by mail.

MORE ON THAT: Gregg County Commissioner among four charged with mail-in voting fraud

Most cases, however, do not end in jail time. As media outlets have reported over the years, the majority of voter fraud cases taken up by the office end in pretrial diversion or probation.

“There’s not usually much punishment for it,” Paxton told KXAN in September, after the outlet found that just 24 of the 138 people convicted of voter fraud between 2004 and September 2020 spent time in jail. “But I think the good thing about finding it, and doing a thorough job of investigation and prosecution, is at least you send the message to people that if you’re going to do this, there is some risk that you’re going to end up in prison for committing voter fraud.”

taylor.goldenstein@chron.com

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omfg

aug 3

Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election

James O’Keefe’s group is part of a sprawling campaign to delegitimize mail-in balloting in the fall—a campaign being led by the White House.

https://newrepublic.com/article/158622/inside-project-veritas-plan-steal-election

James O’Keefe had big plans for 2020. The founder of Project Veritas, the conspiratorial right-wing group that specializes in Fox News–friendly “stings” intended to expose supposed liberal bias and corruption in American society, was planning on getting married this past May. The wedding, to a public school teacher, was to be at an exclusive country club in upstate New York. The guest list was packed with Make America Great Again world cognoscenti: Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his activist wife Ginni were all invited, as were several of O’Keefe’s most generous conservative donors, including Texas shale oil billionaire George Bishop and Bullpen Capital founder Paul Martino.

The wedding was, per an email blast, “postponed indefinitely” over the coronavirus, as the pandemic swept across the state this spring and early summer. Although O’Keefe himself declined to comment on this and many other details for this story, a well-placed frenemy is “90 percent sure they broke up.” In any event, while the pandemic may have derailed his personal life, it has only heightened the urgency of some of O’Keefe’s most lucratively funded dirty tricks.

For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained. Diamond Dog began as only one facet of Project Veritas’s 2020 rat-fucking strategy, but with the onset of the pandemic, which has made in-person voting a dicey proposition, it has since become one of the group’s top-line action items.

The shift reflects the Republican Party’s near-existential concerns about mail-in voting in November. Donald Trump has disingenuously railed against the practice numerous times over the past few months, betraying a deep anxiety. “Mail in ballots substantially increases the risk of crime and VOTER FRAUD!” he has tweeted. At other times he has claimed: “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history”; “IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY”; and “SCAM!” Last week, he went so far as to suggest that the election should be delayed, saying that because of “Universal Mail-in Voting,” the vote would be “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT.”

The purpose of Diamond Dog, as one source close to the organization put it, is “literally to get Trump reelected.” This source, like other past and present Project Veritas employees who have talked to us for this article,expressed fear of reprisals from the group and would only speak under the condition of anonymity.

Last year, Project Veritas’s donor development team solicited big-ticket funders with a pitch deck—frequently tailored to a given patron’s pet ideological grievances and personal hang-ups—offering tantalizing details about the group’s undercover operations for the 2020 campaign cycle. One iteration of this Apple Keynote file was prepared for an ask meeting with a person who appears to beCognex Corporation founder Robert Shillman, a devoted funder of Islamophobic causes who was also one of O’Keefe’s would-be wedding guests. (Shillman ended up pledging to donate $50,000 to the group.) The slate of investigations in the “Dr. Bob” pitch included schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens voting,” mail-in ballot tampering at “nursing homes,” and “the sale of absentee ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.’”

By the end of summer 2019, Diamond Dog had already grown to be a cross-country effort, based on internal Project Veritas memos, research notes, and other documents that we have obtained. InCalifornia and Texas, Project Veritas has tasked its operatives with unearthing supposed evidence of widespread mail-in ballot forgery. In both states, Project Veritas has worked toinfiltrate the groups of volunteers and paid canvassers who collect absentee and mail-in voter applications from low-income, elderly, and minority groups—a perfectly legal practice in most states that conservatives have tried to label as nefarious “ballot harvesting.”

In Texas, Project Veritas has also coordinated in secret with a local Republican operative named Aaron Harris, codenamed “Dragon,” currently chief of staff toRepublican congressman Lance Gooden. In turn, through the activist group he founded, Direct Action Texas, Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,” one of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud.

Granted, Project Veritas, whose fervor to own the libs is matched only by its comical incompetence, is hardly likely to tip the election in Donald Trump’s favor all by itself. But it is at the vanguard of a larger underhanded approach that Republicans, starting at the very top, are taking to the 2020 cycle. If they want to win, they really have no other choice but to undermine the vote: Trump’s poll numbers are in the basement, and he appears constitutionally incapable of making appeals beyond his hardcore supporters on the right.

Republicans have all but admitted that this is their strategy. In coordination with the Republican National Committee and a raft of independent conservative groups, Trump has staked the success of his entire reelection campaign to a widespread voter suppression effort built on the pretext of preserving election integrity.The project, led by his campaign’s senior counsel Justin Clark, has worked to place operatives in at least 10 battleground states to challenge voter rolls and procedures. Between lawsuits and local advertising blitzes—all regularly relayed to Trump in the Oval Office—the effort could cost “well over $20 million,” as the RNC told The Washington Post.

Project Veritas has been among the on-the-ground organizations at the forefront of these efforts and has benefited substantially as a result. According to internal Project Veritas documents, the group’s fundraising total for 2019 leaped up to more than $13.44 million, $4.58 million more than their 2018 returns and the group’s largest reported annual revenue figure to date. The group may be comically incompetent, but in these cursed times, we all know how dangerous comical incompetence can be once enough money and clout line up behind it.

For an operation premised on conspiracy theories and fueled by raging paranoia, it will come as no surprise that the agents helping to spearhead Project Veritas’s election mischief are oddballs on the fringes of American political life. In one slide prepared for Dr. Bob, a 69-year-old Florida resident, a registered Republican named Joseph Vancheri notifies O’Keefe of his soon-to-be status as apoll worker in Broward County, likely for undercoverElection Day snooping on Project Veritas’s behalf. Vancheri, an ex-cop and die-hard Trump supporter, has routinely taken to Facebook to lash out against “all the Trump haters” and “SHEEP,” including “SHIFTY SCHIFF” and “the Idiot Warren,” using Trump’s preferred epithet “Pocohontas [sic].” A first-generation immigrant himself, Vancheri has nevertheless long harbored hardline views on immigration that echo his anxieties over the potential for illicit enfranchisement of foreigners.

In another slide, Project Veritas boasts of receiving a tip from a former broadcast meteorologist named Arch Kennedy, who found it suspicious that 300 people were all registered to vote at the address for Emory University’s Emory Muslim Student Association in Atlanta. (In all likelihood these voters, who constitute 2 percent of Emory’s total student population and .0028 percent of Georgia’s population, have their mail forwarded there.) In 2017, Arch organized one of the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America’s 28 nationwide “March Against Sharia” rallies. Held in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, it was a sparsely attended affair but still managed to include Republican Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, then mounting a doomed primary campaign for governor. [graf]

Iit’s unclear if either Vancheri or Kennedy’s offerings matured into full-fledged stings banked for the 2020 election. Neither they nor Project Veritas responded for comment, while the Project Veritas source who supplied the “Dr. Bob” pitch deck admitted that “a lot of it was kinda BS,” another example of the group “hyping themselves up to make themselves look better” and squeeze more money out of donors.Project Veritas went back to the well this weekend, soliciting donors in a mass email Saturday afternoon that promised a major ballot harvesting investigation that needs to be “completed as soon as possible.”

But other stings outlined in the Keynote file did materialize. The presentation, forexample, teased an inside man at Pinterestwho was “increasingly worried” about the platform’s “expanding community safety restrictions.” Sure enough, two months later, an ex-Pinterest Android app developer named Eric Cochran came forward with (later debunked) allegations in a series of Project Veritas and a *Newsweek*op-ed claiming that the platform was censoring anti-abortion Christian advertisers. The pitch deck also promised an exposé from a “CNN Insider” named Cary Poarch, a bombshell that fizzled in October 2019 when Poarch’s hidden recordings, taken while working as a freelance satellite truck operator for the news network, failed to expose more than the personal opinions of a few random employees.

Well before the pandemic drew national attention to mail-in voting, these documents show a discernible focus on “ballot harvesting” as part of the larger Republican effort to paint voting by mail as a threat to democracy. The concern stems from the party’s entrenched belief that, as Trump has tweeted, vote-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” since it often helps low-income people and minorities.

By late August 2019, the “Story Objective” for Diamond Dog had expanded, per one internal meeting document, to exposing “corruption within CA ballot harvesting companies and other states (TX) based on intel gains.” A Project Veritas undercover operative codenamed “Magnum” had been busy “attending local Democratic events in CA to find discussions of harvesting.” Another operative codenamed “GDog” was creating anentrapment scheme by posting “ads online looking for people to join his ballot harvesting.”

Texas has been a major theater for Project Veritas’s Diamond Dog operations, in no small measure because raw demographics have been threatening to turn the state blue for years. The sense of crisis comes from the state GOP’s failure to bring Latinos into their voting bloc. The legacy of such botched strategizing has been an assault on the state’s Latino electorate itself, with right-wing officials and political operatives raising suspicions about their very legitimacy as legal participants in the voting process.

Aaron Harris, a son of white evangelical missionaries who picked up Portuguese while growing up in Brazil and went on to become fluent in Spanish, has been relentlessly stoking paranoia over mail-in ballots since his first failed foray as a paid political consultant in 2014. Despite a sizable war chest from Dallas hotel magnate and Tea Party financier Monty Bennett, Harris’s candidates in the 2015 local election for the Tarrant Regional Water District lost. He quickly became fixated on the idea that thousands of forged mail-in ballot applications had been responsible for their defeat.

Unlike some Project Veritas associates, Harris has already managed to stir up some public alarm about alleged balloting fraud in cooperation with elected officials from the Republican Party. He has made repeated open records requests for “applications for ballot by mail” and copies of signed “ballot carrier envelopes” in Tarrant County and elsewhere in Texas, eyeballing the signatures on each for signs of fraud. (Emily J. Will, the board-certified forensic document examiner who tried to warn 60 Minutes about the dubious provenance of President George W. Bush’s supposedly doctored Air National Guard records in 2004, told us that a non-expert like Harris couldn’t be relied upon to discern a forged signature.)

In 2016, Harris sent the fruits of that labor to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, leading to four conspicuously timed indictments two years later on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. Paxton described the four Hispanic women, paid canvassers soliciting mail-in ballot applications door-to-door, as an “organized voter fraud ring.” He named (but did not charge) a former local Democratic Party leader, Stuart Clegg, as the ringleader in the court filings.

That case, which is still ongoing, reveals the ways in which the official GOP subtly coordinates with its army of right-wing irregulars in the field. Paxton stridently enforces one of the strictest voter I.D. laws in the nation, while Harris and his political allies at Direct Action Texas and Empower Texans work to independently legitimize the attorney general’s partisan vendettas. Harris and local Republican lawyer Alex Kim, for example, inserted themselves into the prosecution’s caseby independently visiting one of the charged canvassers in prison, seemingly on their own initiative, in an effort to coerce the woman into flipping on Clegg.(A month after helping Harris sneak into the Tarrant County Jail to harass the canvasser, Kim won a local race to preside over the entire county as a judge for Texas’s 323rd District Court.)

Paxton’s office has often pursued these voter fraud cases through a prosecutorial diversion program, allowing them to juke their stats with “de minimis” cases without ever having to prove their arguments in open court or subject their methods to independent review. Their biggest confirmed conviction to date: sending a 37-year-old Mexican citizen and mother of four, Rosa Maria Ortega, to prison for eight years for the high crime of being confused that her status as a legal resident in Texas did not actually confer unto her the voting privileges of full United States citizenship. Ortega voted in five elections between 2004 and her 2017 sentencing, casting ballots for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012—and, tragically, for Ken Paxton himself in the 2014 Texas attorney general’s race.

All signs point toward Paxton getting even more aggressive in 2020, thanks to a wrecked-up and paralyzed response to the pandemic by both Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Republicans are nervous that even blood-red Texas might be in play come November. Last April, Paxton threatened felony charges for anyone who requests or advocates for mail-in ballots “based solely on fear of contracting Covid-19”—a move that was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in May, then by the Trump-stacked U.S. Supreme Court in June. It’s now sure to set the stage for many of the alleged mail-in schemes that Project Veritas will purport to expose later this year.

---

One local Project Veritas operative assigned to coordinate with Aaron Harris in Texas is also a former undercover volunteer: Cassandra Spencer, codenamed “Foxtrot” and sometimes “Foxtrot Smith” internally. In 2017, Spencer became O’Keefe’s “Facebook Insider” after leaving a public information officer post with the Pflugerville, Texas, police department to join Facebook’s contingent workforce operations at BCForward in Austin as a social media content moderator.

Spencer has positioned herself at the extremely online intersection of gaming culture and the alt-right. She has described herself as a “Proud Boy’s Girl” on Medium and attended “Austin’s premier anime convention” IKKiCON in Final Fantasy X cosplay. She traveled to Washington, D.C., for the inaugural DeploraBall and operates her own Twitch stream, which she dubbed “a First Amendment zone” for her conservative followers, “not like many others.”For the 2020 Democratic primary in Iowa, Spencer posed as a volunteer for presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as part of a Project Veritas sting then-codenamed “Gold Mine."

[graf doc]

al?ready staked out on the Texas ballot-harvesting vanguard, Aaron Harris “met with Foxtrot” in person and “gave her a lead with someone to follow,” per internal Project Veritas research notes. As Diamond Dog progressed, Harris’s ties to Project Veritas deepened to include longtime employee and recruiting director Spencer Meads, codenamed “Brady,” and possibly an undercover journalist (UCJ[)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MEd6N_I-P1Tt3XHXvOlDgskd6AbsOtuA/view?usp=sharing) codenamed “Peter Pan.” Project Veritas’s expanding pool of Texas sources was meant to be a state secret, but the document offered a huge clue about who might be involved in an all-caps and highlighted portion that read: “CANNOT MENTION ATTORNEY GENERAL.” In the same document, after listing a series of major metropolitan areas in Texas as potential sites for their “ballot harvesting” investigation,a question is proposed: “Where does the AG’s guy suggest they go?”

When pressed for comment on his apparent role in facilitating communications between the Texas attorney general’s office and Project Veritas, Harris responded via his congressional email, “Do not contact me about my previous employment on official channels. Learn to be competent at your job.” After it was pointed out to Harris that the internal Project Veritas documents were sourced in the early fall of 2019, approximately 10 months after he became Congressman Gooden’s chief of staff, Harris became belligerent. To questions reiterated via personal text message, he responded, “I’ve asked you to stop harassing me and you want to argue about it? You are an idiot. You just keep proving it.”

Spencer did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Only two principal targets, old Harris foes, were mentioned by name in the Project Veritas strategy document: Texas-based personal injury attorney Domingo Garcia, a former state representative and the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; and the Harvest Project Food Rescue of Dallas, a community group that Harris seems to believe is an insidious front through which the state’s left-wing operatives entice immigrant communities, with the lure of unsold fresh produce donated by local distributors, into filling out their own mail-in ballots and thus enfranchising themselves. (“I wake up usually at 4:30 in the morning, I have to go pick up the food by six,” Harvest Project co-founder Danaë Gutiérrez-Martínez said when asked about Harris’s allegations. “I don’t get home ’til eight at night, nine at night, sometimes, to get up the next day and do it again, especially right now with everything that’s happening. You know, I must be Superwoman if I have time to do anything else.”)

A long-since-ousted co-founder of the Harvest Project, Jose Barrientos was very publicly implicated in a mail-in ballot forgery scheme in 2017. But Paxton and the local district attorney ultimately indicted someone else entirely, 27-year-old Miguel Hernandez, for the felony offense. After 180 days stewing in jail, Hernandez was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor with the understanding that his sentence would be limited to time served.

The beef between Harris’s groups and LULAC has been considerably more fraught. In the fall of 2016, Garcia publicly offered a $25,000 reward, funded through LULAC, for any information leading to the conviction of individuals “trying to intimidate a senior in Fort Worth or anywhere in Texas.” The target of their bounty was pretty clear, teed-up as it was by a Texas state representative, Ramón Romero, who had called out Harris by name for his door-to-door inquisition of seniors in Fort Worth’s predominantly Hispanic north side. Later at that same press conference, a related community service nonprofit, the United Hispanic Council of Tarrant County, announced that it had filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice against Harris’s Direct Action Texas for creating “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation” in local Hispanic neighborhoods.

In January 2019, LULAC filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Paxton and the secretary of state in Texas, David Whitley, accusing them both of violating the Voting Rights Act in their haphazard attempt to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens.

Whitley’s offices would quietly walk back their initial list of 95,000 suspicious voters, many of whom were discovered to be, in fact, naturalized citizens. Shortly thereafter, San Antonio federal district court Judge Fred Biery put a stop to the purge, declaring that state Republicans were trying “to ferret the infinitesimal needles out of the haystack of 15 million Texas voters.” Harris, for his part, was unrepentant, telling the*Texas Observer*, “We are changing the entire discussion on voter fraud in Texas.” He was not wrong. While Harris is now planning to run for a House seat himself, his tireless efforts there have laid the groundwork for Project Veritas and its GOP partners this election season.

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When mainstream Americans think about James O’Keefe, if they think about James O’Keefe at all, it’s usually in reference to his most hilarious failures: ruining his own sting on George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by leaving a self-incriminating voicemail; failing to lure a CNN reporter onto his yacht for a detailed “faux seducing” prank; revealing his unseemly ties to the billionaire mercenary Erik Prince by posting his own vanity spy training photos on social media. If Diamond Dog follows the Project Veritas playbook, it will likely focus on goosing a few unguarded comments out of canvassers and other volunteers in the hope of netting an inflammatory sound bite or two.

A modest, practically harmless October Surprise. But it’s typically down ballot where the average Project Veritas video tends to have its most pernicious effects. Less well known than O’Keefe’s blunders on the national stage are the numerous documented instances in which his stings have been cited to justify new and more onerous voter I.D. laws or other election integrity legislation in state legislatures across the country.

In April 2012, Chris McDaniel, then Mississippi’s Senate elections committee chairman, cited a Project Veritas voter fraud video as evidence justifying the passage of the state’s “photo identification requirement” bill⁠, which the state’s Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed that May. Despite legal challenges, this law is still on the books today.

Also that year, a Republican Minnesota state representative, Steve Drazkowski, praised a locally shot O’Keefe video—in which Project Veritas undercover operatives requested ballot applications for their friends “Timothy Tebow and Thomas Brady”—during a floor debate for his party’s own draconian voter I.D. bill. While Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a strict version of that voter I.D. legislation, and Minnesota voters backed his decision in a ballot initiative later that year, the state’s Republican Party still plans to revisit the issue again this year. (“We have had a number of studies that have been completed, there’s a lot of new data on this topic, and there are court cases that have been decided,” as Minnesota GOP State Senator Scott Newman ominously put it, “none of which we had in 2012.”)

O’Keefe’s “Primary of the Living Dead” stunts during the and primaries in 2012—in which his operatives requested but crucially did not actually attempt to use, the ballots of deceased primary voters—aided the passage of stringent voter I.D. laws in those states. After New Hampshire enacted a law in 2018 tightening the state’s voting statutes, partly in response to a new series of Project Veritas videos, Democratic legislators made repeated attempts to repeal them, only to be thwarted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu’s veto.

O’Keefe’s wealthy donors surely remember these and other victories in vivid detail, in no small measure because they are reiterated tirelessly during O’Keefe’s paid speaking engagements and fundraising conclaves. Among Project Veritas’s 2019 contributors were several wealthy political groups, charitable foundations, and conservative billionaires with apparent interests in the outcome of Diamond Dog.

From California, a donation of at least $10,000 from a pledged $100,000 came to Veritas from Susan Groff, president of the Los Angeles-area construction equipment rental company Northwest Excavating. A prolific Republican donor along with her husband Howard, both Groffs were praised as “good friends, entrepreneurs and patriots” in a loving tribute entered into the Congressional Record by their longtime beneficiary, former GOP House Rep. Elton Gallegly.(Another $50,000 came into Project Veritas from a donor listed only as “Arnott”; the Orange County-based investment guru Robert D. Arnott, a Koch network ally and prolific Republican donor, denied responsibility when reached via email.)

In Texas, another $50,000 was passed on to Project Veritas from the Texas Free Market Fund through the group Donors Trust, the dark money “donor-advised fund” that has helped make contributions from the Kochs, the DeVos family, and others untraceable in future IRS filings. The charitable foundation of late Texas oilman Ken W. “Stinky” Davis, based like Project Veritas ally Aaron Harris in Tarrant County, also kicked in $5,000 to the group, the latest in the foundation’s influential spending spree on Republican politics in the Lone Star State and across the country.

In Florida, another donation of $50,000 came to the group through Donors Trust, this time from the free market defenders at the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.

There was also a whopping $261,000 donation from the “Smith Family.” Could it be the Smith family that has monopolized local network TV affiliates through Sinclair Broadcasting? Or is it Randall and Barbara Smith, Palm Beach residents whose vulture fund Alden Global Capital was once described by Joshua Benton, the founder of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, as “the gelatinous cube scouring the news industry’s dungeon”? Neither Smith families responded to requests for clarification on this issue.

Many additional hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contributions to Project Veritas were attributed solely to “DT” on the group’s quarterly financial meeting documents. The initials may refer to Donors Trust or to the constellation of corporate and (ostensibly) philanthropic organizations tied to President DonaldTrump himself. While Trump is a well-known past donor to Project Veritas—a framed photo of him and O’Keefe rests prominently on a bookshelf at Project Veritas headquarters in Mamaroneck, New York—many other donors were evidently so secret that they were listed simply as “anonymous” even on the group’s own internal documents.

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Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connectionsare where the depth and seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which Project Veritas is but a humble node.

Take litigator William Consovoy, the legal point man on many of the conservative-funded election integrity cases pursued during the Trump era. He is, like O’Keefe, a New Jersey native with a long history in local Republican politics. A former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Consovoy is also reportedly a friend of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, whose nephew David Maxham has been a friend of O’Keefe’s since their undergraduate years at Rutgers. (Maxham, naturally, was also invited to O’Keefe’s wedding.)

This year, Leonard Leo has stepped aside from day-to-day management of the Federalist Society to run a new conservative donor group, CRC Advisors, that is pouring money into Consovoy’s legal challenges in key battleground states across the country. CRC has been steering money into something called the “Honest Elections Project,” a fictitious name filed in Virginia for Leo’s old group the Judicial Education Project,now officially called the 85 Fund. As The Guardian reported, 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project’s funding in 2018 was a single $7.8 million donation funneled through Donors Trust.guk?

With generous assistance from the Honest Elections Project and the RNC, Consovoy’s firm Consovoy McCarthy PLLC has recently brought cases against the re-enfranchising of felons in Florida and sued to block California’s plans to deliver absentee ballots to all of the state’s registered voters. Consovoy has contributed to related motions filed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Texas, where Ken Paxton’s victory against mail-in voting in May earned praise from President Trump on Twitter.

If you strain to look beyond the lonely partisan kitsch of James O’Keefe’s bungled scams and harebrained hoaxes, it’s plain to see the march of a whole battalion of Diamond Dog operatives and lawyers turned loose on the integrity of the ballot in key battleground states.

Liz Farkas, a New York state–licensed private investigator, provided additional reporting and research for this article.

Matthew Phelan @CBMDP

Matthew Phelan has written for Chemical Engineering, New York, Jacobin, and Gawker, where he founded the conspiracy vertical Black Bag in 2014.

Jesse Hicks @jessehixxx

Jesse Hicks is a journalist whose work has appeared in Vice, Politico, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

The Soapbox, Politics, Election 2020, Donald Trump, Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump Jr., Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, FOX News, Texas, California, Republican Party, Federalist Society, Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, Aaron Harris, George Soros, Erik Prince, Voting Rights

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/republican-attorneys-general-go-to-war-for-trump/

For decades, the two partisan political organizations dedicated to electing attorneys general had an agreement not to attack the other side’s incumbent candidate. During President Donald Trump’s time in office, however, theRepublican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) has thrown that accord out the window, lurching further to the right year after year and weaponizing the partisan polarization gumming up the country’s political apparatus.

“Our friends on the other side and particularly donors, much earlier than Democratic donors, started to recognize the power of the office of the attorney general,” Sean Rankin, executive director of the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), told Salon in 2018, as competition for the once-obscure elected office grew hot across the country.

“They saw this as a real opportunity todevelop the Republican bench, as well as derail those Democrats who had promising careers,” he said.

Spending escalated quickly on the Republican side. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, DAGA’s GOP counterpart, RAGA, raised $16 million in 2014 and nearly $27 million in 2016. In contrast, DAGA raised nearly $9 million in 2014 and nearly $10 million in 2016.

Attorneys general essentially have the final say in prosecutorial discretion, or which cases get taken to court, a fact understood by lobbyists. Industry groups have depended on help from AGs, includingthe National Rifle Association (NRA), which made a $700,000 donation to RAGA four weeks after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.

After that donation, 24 out of 27 Republican AGs wrote Congress asking for a billto make concealed-carry federal law.

Now RAGA has turned its sights to Democrats, launching a new “Lawless Liberals” campaign last month, which parrots Trump’s belligerent race-baiting about the social justice protest movement sweeping the country. The campaign is an unsubtle effort to appeal to a unsubtle president, whose AG endorsements have provided critical support in previous elections.

The group’s most recent ad, however, appears to have nothing to do with attorneys general.

The — “Erasing History” — digitally wipes the faces of all four presidents off of Mount Rushmore one by one, while headlines show people calling for the removal of other monuments featuring their likenesses.

It also apparently has little to do with law enforcement. Of the video, RAGA executive director Adam Piper said: “‘Erasing History’ is a poignant reminder about the dangers of the current ‘cancel culture,’ the threat to our nation and the rule of law posed by anarchists and lawless liberals.”

RAGA bought airtime for the ad in Rapid City, South Dakota, on July 3 and 4, for cable networks MSNBC, CNN and Fox News. This might seem like a strange use of funds, because there is no attorney general election in South Dakota this year. However, Trump will visit the area on those days to celebrate the Fourth of July at Mount Rushmore.

The president’s endorsements have proved critical before, such as with the election of Kentucky’s Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron last year.

Cameron, however, has been taking heat for the handling of the investigation into the shooting death of EMT Breonna Taylor by Louisville police this March, which turned the city into one of the major hotbeds for social justice protests this June.

RAGA’s website exploits that unrest, featuring an animation of a car in flames for the banner imageand threats that Democratic AGs will dissolve police departments and destabilize law and order.

Ironically, Republican attorneys general have recently themselves run afoul of law and order.

In 2015, Texas AG Ken Paxton was indicted on felony securities charges. His trial has been pushed back numerous times since then, but while Paxton waited, RAGA appointed him as its chairman.

“The chief law enforcement officer has a primary responsibility to protect the people. I’m proud to stand with Ken and the rest of my colleagues in working to elect more Republican AGs who will protect our communities and stand for the rule of law,” RAGA vice chairman, Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill, said in the November 2018 announcement.

Hill, however, had been accused of groping four women at a bar nine months earlier, and that summer a bipartisan coalition of Indiana lawmakers called for his resignation.

Hill did not resign, and is in fact seeking re-election in November. His largest first-quarter contribution in 2020 came from the RAGA Action Fund, which donated $25,000 to his 2020 campaign.

In May, the Indiana State Supreme Court suspended Hill’s law license in lieu of the groping allegations. RAGA gave him another $11,000 the next month.

Three days after receiving the contribution, Hill defended himself against the allegations at the Indiana Republican Convention.

“Like President Trump, I have faced accusations and investigations designed to destroy me politically,” he said. “Like President Trump, I’m a threat to Democrats and a radical liberal agenda. Both President Trump and I are wounded, some would say, and yes, we are both warriors with battle scars.”

Though Hill’s comments might come off as a stretch — Trump received a Selective Service deferment during the Vietnam War, exempting him from the draft because of alleged problems with bone spurs in his heels — they exemplify RAGA’s all-in merger with MAGA.

RAGA has inserted itself into the nominally independent judiciary, promoting what it calls its own “judicial farm team.”

It has also sought to restrict vote-by-mail — again citing Paxton — based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

[twt no lnx]

It has also sought to restrict vote-by-mail — again citing Paxton — based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

The group has also waded into the fight against the Affordable Care Act, attacking presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden for “politicizing” the coronavirus pandemic. (Biden had written a letter castigating Trump for his “unconscionable” pursuit of a lawsuit “designed to strip millions of Americans of their health insurance” amid a national health emergency.)

“His letter to President Trump on the legal issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act is not only in poor taste but also uninformed. A federal court has already ruled that the ACA is unconstitutional. It is critical the Supreme Court finish its review,” wroteLouisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, RAGA’s chairman.

It was not the only time Landry waded into health care to advance Trump’s interests. In March he secured for his state 400,000 doses of hydroxychloroquine, the now-discredited COVID-19 treatment hawked for months by Trump.

RAGA has spent tens of thousands of dollars on dinners for chief law enforcement officers and their top donors at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. It also filed an unprecedented letter in support of Trump during his impeachment trial in the Senate and called on a Washington, D.C., district court judge to obey the Justice Department’s request and drop all charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.

“It has become trendy in recent years for courts to weigh in on the wisdom of this administration’s policy decisions. Too often, that commentary comes in grandiose terms more appropriate for an op-ed than a judicial opinion,” the group said, urging the judge to dismiss the case “without irrelevant or personal comment.”

Sean Rankin of DAGA — RAGA’s Democratic counterpart — told Salon in a statement that “RAGA and this group of Republican AGs have quite a strategy: they’re trying to tear away affordable health care from millions of Americans, and they’re against voting by mail – both of these things in a pandemic. They’re against equal rights for women and LGBTQ people, and they don’t believe in science. They stay in lock-step with Trump’s missteps – and then are baffled by the fact that their incumbents are now vulnerable in red states …. I, for one, do not plan on interfering with my opponents while they continue to hurt themselves.”

FEC filings indicate that RAGA, for whatever reason, appears to have iced much of its direct spending in 2020, but it has dropped money into Push Digital, the company that produces the “Lawless Liberal’ videos. To see what kind of production values they’re getting, watch one here:lawless liberals vid

new

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/indicted-texas-attorney-general-sides-with-anti-gay-judge-instead-of-state-agency-in-legal-fight/

indicted Texas attorney general sides with anti-gay judge instead of state agency in legal fight

Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

get lnx

Indicted Texas attorney general sides with anti-gay judge instead of state agency in legal fight

Written by Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos January 31, 2020

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is refusing to defend a state agency that’s being sued by a a bigoted justice of the peace who got pissed that she was disciplined for refusing to follow the law and marry same-sex couples. “We believe judges retain their right to religious liberty when they take the bench,” said Paxton’s spokesperson, Marc Rylander.

It’s not just that Paxton is camouflaging his own homophobia and lawlessness in claims of “religious liberty”; it’s that this shameless motherfucker is also doing it while he faces three securities fraud charges.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/19/1517425/-Indicted-TX-Attorney-General-knows-lawlessness-when-he-sees-it-and-Obama-s-crossed-the-line

https://www.statesman.com/news/20200117/criminal-case-against-paxton-still-inching-along

This upcoming summer will mark five years since Paxton was indicted for allegedly violating state securities laws, and for nearly five years now he and his legal team have apparently pulled every trick in the book to delay his trial. Prosecutors said that those tricks have included an alleged “campaign to taint potential jurors by maligning the prosecution and the case against him,” the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Prosecutors moved to have the trial take place in Houston, but Paxton, who could face as long as 99 years in prison, argued “that his case was improperly transferred to Houston by a judge who no longer had the authority to issue such a ruling,” the Statesman continued. Someone facing as serious charges and prison time as Paxton probably shouldn’t even be in office while doing so, yet Paxton not only refuses to budge—he’s gonna stay to buck his own state’s commission to continue his anti-LGBTQ agenda.

The office he’s refusing to defend, the Commission on Judicial Misconduct, had warned justice of the peace Dianne Hensley for “her yearslong refusal to marry gay couples while continuing to marry heterosexual couples,” NBC News said, with PinkNews reporting that Hensley had allegedly called gay marriage “offensive.” She then sued the commission for $100,000, PinkNews continued, “claiming that her rights have been infringed upon.”

In what’s surely just a coincidence, CBS Austin reports that the firm defending Hensley, First Liberty Institute, is led by Kelly Shackelford, who has “endorsed Paxton and contributed to a legal defense fund Paxton has used to fight off a four-year-old criminal indictment for securities fraud.” Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing at all.

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-attorney-general-ken-paxton-wont-defend-state-agency-in-gay-marriage-case

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new cmd

Michigan

The 2018 AG race in Michigan was another open contest between candidates with a stark contrast on energy policy. Republican candidate Tom Leonardran with explicit support for an aging Enbridge oil pipeline, while Democrat Dana Nessel pledged to shut it down in her first act as attorney general.

Enbridge did not donate to RAGA in the 2018 cycle, but ExxonMobil, with which it co-owns multiple pipelines, gave over $125,000. This year, Enbridge contributed $25,000 to RAGA.

RAGA spent at least $1.5 million backing Leonard and gave $6,800 to the Leonard campaign, but Nessel won the race. Under Nessel, Michigan has joined other Democratic states to challenge Trump initiatives including its Clean Power Plan replacement. She also withdrew the state from the Republican challenge to the Clean Power Plan and from a Murray Energy lawsuit against EPA clean air regulations, which the state had joined as a petitioner.

In the next AG race, in 2022, RAGA will very likely harness cash from its fossil fuel donors in an attempt to reinstate a pro-industry Republican.

Texas

In the Longhorn State, Attorney General Ken Paxton, RAGA's chair in 2019, ran for re-election against Democrat Justin Nelson in 2018. Like other Republican AGs seeking new terms, Paxton got major support from RAGA, which made $650,000 in direct donations to his campaign as well as $21,500 in in-kind contributions for research. Paxton won the race by 3.6 percent of the vote.

Paxton's RAGA biography boasts that he has sued the Obama administration 22 times. The suits include challenges to the Clean Power Plan, the EPA's "Regional Haze" rule, methane emission standards, and restrictions on coal mining near waterways.

This year, Paxton sued ExxonMobil over a fire at its chemical plant that injured 37 people, the fourth fire that has occured at the Bayton, Texas plant this year. But his lawsuit, filed at the state level, could upend two suits by the county in county court, putting Paxton in charge of the whole operation. Some, wary of his fossil fuel-friendly history, worry he might go easy on the oil giant.

TARGETED by jcn?

https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Attorney_General_election,_2014

voter suppression

dan branch: https://ballotpedia.org/Dan_Branch

www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/06/exxon-ken-paxton-first-amendment

nat s

Last fall, investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that the oil giant has decades of internal documents showing that its own scientists and executives knew fossil fuels contributed to climate change. Publicly, the company argued that the threats posed by global warming were far from certain, presumably as part of an effort to fight off regulations.

[doc]

In March, US Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker served the company with a subpoena seeking records that he claimed might prove that Exxon had defrauded consumers and the government by “misrepresenting its knowledge” that its fossil fuels contribute to climate change. Walker specifically pointed to a state racketeering statute that prohibits obtaining money by false pretenses. He demanded any documents detailing Exxon’s knowledge of climate change and its strategies to address it, including research studies, publications, statements, and communications with outside groups. Exxon responded by filing a lawsuit against Walker to block the subpoena. Exxon prevailed on Wednesday, when Walker agreed to withdraw the subpoena.

Exxon received some unusual assistance in its victory in the Virgin Islands case. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a tea-party-aligned Republican, went so far as to formally intervene—that is, he asked the court to allow the state of Texas to become a party to the case. Exxon, he wrote, had a First Amendment right to withhold the documents Walker was seeking. The brief was also signed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (R). (Paxton and Strange also objected to Walker’s use of a private law firm to help conduct the investigation.)

“This is about the criminalization of speech and the criminalization of thought,” he said.In a press conference in May, Paxton had called Walker’s investigation “a fishing expedition of the worst kind” and said it represented “an effort to punish Exxon for daring to hold opinions on climate change that differ from theirs.”

Two days later, Republican members of the House Science Committee sent lettersto Walker and 16 Democratic attorneys general requesting documents related to the various Exxon investigations. They followed up with additional letters in June.

On June 15, Paxton and 12 other GOP attorneys general signed a letter criticizing the Exxon investigations. The letter laid out a free-speech argument in stark terms, saying, “Actions indicating that one side of the climate change debate should fear prosecution chills speech in violation of a formerly bi-partisan First Amendment consensus.”

Exxon, which is headquartered in Texas and is a major employer in the state, did not respond to a request for comment. The company’s former vice president of public and government affairs, Kenneth P. Cohen, previously told the New York Times, “We unequivocally reject the allegations that Exxon Mobil has suppressed climate change research.”

Paxton’s involvement in the case alarmed some environmentalists, who note that attorneys general are charged with enforcing state laws and regulations. It’s unusual for a state to intervene in support of a company that is under investigation, said Stacey Geis, managing attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization.

It’s as if Paxton were trying to act as Exxon’s lawyer, she said.

Paxton’s deputy Brantley Starr disputed that allegation.

“If we were intervening on behalf of someone, it would be the Constitution,” he said in a phone interview.

Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor and senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, agreed that Paxton’s intervention was “highly unusual.” Nevertheless, he added in an email that Walker’s subpoena was “quite possibly unconstitutional.” Exxon, he said, has “a right to have a position on global warming.”

Other scholars and activists reject that argument. Naomi Ages, a project leader at environmental advocacy group Greenpeace, called the Virgin Islands investigation “legitimate” and said Paxton’s intervention was “unprecedented” and based on “pretty specious legal grounds.”

Robert Post, the dean of Yale Law School, argues that it is “irresponsible to invoke the First Amendment” to defend Exxon. “There are circumstances when scientific theories must remain open and subject to challenge, and there are circumstances when the government must act to protect the integrity of the market, even if it requires determining the truth or falsity of those theories,” wrote Post in a Washington Post op-ed last week. “Public debate must be protected, but fraud must also be suppressed.”

Starr counters that the Texas AG’s office was not claiming corporations can never be investigated for fraud, but rather that an investigation cannot be based on a public policy debate. “What we shouldn’t do is investigate public debate and say that there’s only one side of the public debate that we’re investigating,” he said.

Paxton has received nearly $1 million dollars in contributions from the oil and gas industry during his seven runs for public office, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. During a recent event at the conservative Heritage Foundation, he warned that the investigation of Exxon could have resulted in job losses in his state, though he declined to provide a specific estimate of how many jobs were in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, Paxton is facing legal challenges of his own. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against him in April, alleging that he had recruited investors for a company without disclosing that he was receiving compensation in the form of stock in the company. This complaint followed three state criminal indictments on charges of securities fraud and failing to register as an investment adviser.

In a video released by his campaign in May, Paxton called the charges “false” and “politically motivated.”

When asked for comment on the SEC investigation at the Heritage Foundation event, Paxton declined to answer.

On Thursday, Paxton released a statement hailing the withdrawal of Walker’s Exxon subpoena as a triumph for free speech.

“The so-called ‘investigation’ by Walker was a constitutionally improper attempt to suppress the freedom of speech based only on the content being communicated. In America, we have the freedom to disagree, and we do not legally prosecute people just because their opinion is different from ours.”

This article has been updated.

contrast:

Exxon Tries To Bury Climate Documents By Claiming First ...

www.huffingtonpost.com/.../exxon-first-amendment_us_571662c6e4b0060ccda46d6...

Apr 19, 2016 - Exxon's invocation of the First Amendment is fairly unusual for a ... But others have tried to defend the oil company's free speech rights on this ...

First Amendment Freedoms Must Be Protected | The Daily Caller

dailycaller.com/.../texas-is-fighting-back-against-the-activist-ags-dangerous-climate-su...

Jun 2, 2016 - A view of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas, in this ... Texas AG's Decision To Fight In Favor Of ExxonMobile's Constitutional Rights?

https://dailycaller.com/2016/06/02/texas-is-fighting-back-against-the-activist-ags-dangerous-climate-subpoena/

Ken PAXTON

TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL

June 02, 2016

While the debate over climate change has been, at times, contentious and even mean-spirited, it’s never been criminalized.

Until now.

Recently, Claude Earl Walker, the attorney general for the U.S. Virgin Islands, issued a criminal subpoena to ExxonMobil in Texas. What crime are they investigating? Thoughts. Walker is investigating Exxon’s expressed doubts on the issue of climate change and those who they communicated with about this questionable subject.

Now, anyone who has expressed such thoughts has increasingly found themselves under vocal assault from politicians, federal funding agencies, universities, professional societies, and journalists. But this may be the most shocking assault yet. A government official is actually using his prosecutorial power to attack a company for nothing more than expressing an opinion that’s unpopular with the environmental left.

That is why my office and the Alabama Attorney General have joined ExxonMobil in an effort to have this abusive and unconstitutional subpoena thrown out of court.

This is the strongest demonstration yet of the almost-religious zeal with which climate change proponents attack those with whom they disagree, and how little the First Amendment freedoms mean to people with such an agenda. During a press conference announcing the investigation, Walker – along with a coalition of other environmentally activist AGs – said that his office has launched an investigation into a company whose “product is destroying the earth.”

Those words reveal the true motive behind this effort. Walker and the environmental activists he is beholden to are not neutral parties investigating possible wrongdoing. They are zealots on the hunt for a trophy.

Today, Walker is targeting ExxonMobil. But the coalition of activist Attorneys General that are operating alongside him suggests that the campaign for absolute orthodoxy on climate change could go national at any time, and who knows who could be next.

Unlike being criticized in the media or on college campuses, this isn’t merely an unfair annoyance. Companies being targeted will have to spend substantial financial resources to defend themselves, which serves as a massive de facto “fine” before any wrongdoing is even demonstrated. And that’s money that could otherwise go toward paying higher wages, hiring more employees, and investing more in the company.

In the subpoena, Walker demands four decades worth of ExxonMobil records, which is the very definition of a massive fishing expedition. They’re hoping to bring in as much information as possible so they can pore over it later in the hopes of finding somebody at ExxonMobil who did something wrong at some point in the company’s history — perhaps as far back as the Ford Administration.

Walker has floated a “theory” that the company’s speech somehow amounted to a criminal racketeering violation. In reality, this is an obvious attempt to criminalize views on one side of a debate, in flagrant disregard of the First Amendment.

Once we cross the line into prosecuting people for what they believe, we will have abandoned one of America’s founding principles. Our First Amendment freedoms must be protected.

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Does Exxon Have a Constitutional Right to Deny Climate Change ...

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/.../exxon-ken-paxton-first-amendme...

Jun 30, 2016 - Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took Exxon's side in the company's ... In March, US Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker served the ... The brief was also signed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (R).

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/heres-what-we-know-about-the-texas-voter-citizen-checks-and-its-not-what-donald-trump-claimed/

Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune

Jan. 25, 2019

“Texas officials flag tens of thousands of voters for citizenship checks” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

The Texas secretary of state’s office announced Friday it would send local election officials a list of 95,000 registered voters who the state says counties should consider checking to see whether they are U.S. citizens and, therefore, legally eligible to vote.

In an advisory released Friday afternoon, the office said it was flagging individuals who had provided the Texas Department of Public Safety with some form of documentation — including a work visa or a green card — that showed they were not a citizen when they were obtaining a driver’s license or an ID card. Among the individuals flagged, about 58,000 individuals cast a ballot in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018, the secretary of state’s office said.

It’s unclear exactly how many of those individuals are not actually U.S. citizens and whether that number will be available in the future. In its notice to counties, the secretary of state’s office said the names should be considered “WEAK” matches, using all capital letters for emphasis.

That means counties may now choose to investigate the eligibility of the individuals who were flagged, which would require them to send a notice asking for proof of citizenship within 30 days, or take no action. By law, the counties aren’t allowed to automatically revoke a voter’s registration without sending out such a notice.

It’s possible that individuals flagged by the state — who provided DPS with documentation that indicated they were authorized to be in the country — could have become naturalized citizens since they obtained their driver’s license or ID card. A spokesman for the secretary of state said officials are “very confident” that the data received from DPS is “current.”

In announcing the review of the rolls, Secretary of State David Whitley — who was appointed to the post last month after serving as deputy chief of staff to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — immediately handed the data over to the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who said his office will “spare no effort in assisting with these troubling cases.”

But without additional verification, you can’t say these individuals all engaged in illegal voting, said Chris Davis, the head of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.

“People get naturalized,” Davis said. “It’s entirely too early to say that.”

The numbers were released just a few weeks into a legislative session during which lawmakers may take up proposals to require some form of citizenship verification before registering to vote. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 rejected states’ efforts to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Other federal courts have knocked down more recent efforts.

“Integrity and efficiency of elections in Texas require accuracy of our state’s voter rolls, and my office is committed to using all available tools under the law to maintain an accurate list of registered voters,” Whitley said in a statement.

But Beth Stevens, voting rights legal director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the announcement echoed efforts around the country to remove eligible voters from the rolls.

“The secretary’s actions threaten to result in tens of thousands of eligible voters being removed from the roles, including those with the least resources to comply with the demand to show papers,” Stevens said.

In a state where about 15.8 million Texans are registered to vote, the AG’s office has recently pursued a small number of convictions of illegal voting by non-citizens. Past reviews of the voter rolls by other states ultimately found that only a small number of the thousands of non-citizens they initially flagged had actually voted. For years, researchers have found that voter fraud is rare and claims that non-citizens are voting in large numbers have not been substantiated.

Read related Tribune coverage

Trump election fraud commission bought Texas election data flagging Hispanic voters

Judge blocks Texas secretary of state from giving voter information to Trump commission

https://www.ecowatch.com/texas-plastic-bag-ban-2580367535.html

Texas Supreme Court Rules Cities Cannot Ban Plastic Bags

The Texas Supreme Court struck down the city of Laredo's plastic bag ban—a decision that will likely overturn similar bans in about a dozen other cities, including Austin, Fort Stockton and Port Aransas.

The court ruled Friday that only the state has the authority to regulate solid waste disposal in Texas. In the 19-page opinion, Chief Justice Nathan Hecht wrote that the Texas Constitution prohibits city ordinances from conflicting with state law.

"Both sides of the debate ... assert public-policy arguments raising economic, environmental and uniformity concerns," Hecht said. "We must take statutes as they are written, and the one before us is written quite clearly. Its limitation on local control encompasses the ordinance."

The Laredo Merchants Association sued the city in March 2015 to overturn the ordinance, arguing that state law pre-empts the bag ban. The move was supported by 20 state senators and representatives, all Republicans, that filed an amicus brief in support of the merchants for an earlier appeal of the case.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also backed the merchants. A press release from his office states that the ruling "effectively invalidates unlawful bag bans across Texas."

"I hope that Laredo, Austin, and any other jurisdictions that have enacted illegal bag bans will take note and voluntarily bring their ordinances into compliance with state law," Paxton said in a statement. "Should they decline to do so, I expect the ruling will be used to invalidate any other illegal bag bans statewide."

In a statement after today's ruling, Laredo mayor Pete Saenz called the decision a "major blow to all Texans who want to see a cleaner, healthier and more beautiful state."

He said that banning plastic bags helped protect the environment, reduced clean-up costs and "beautified" the city. He also said that Laredoans quickly adapted to bringing their own bags to stores.

"Single use plastic bags have contributed to flooding, mosquitoes, costly clean up for local governments, and disruption of sensitive ecosystems and wildlife," Saenz said. "Laredo's ordinance helped reduce clean up and repair costs to our storm water, sewage and water utilities systems. It also beautified our city and helped wildlife with it."

He encouraged residents and all Texans to continue bringing reusable bags, straws, cups and containers to stores.

Environmental groups were disappointed by the court's decision.

"Plastic pollution is harming wildlife, marring the beauty of our cities, and threatening our health, safety and economy," said Environment Texas executive director Luke Metzger in a statement. "Nothing we use for five minutes should pollute our environment for hundreds of years. We call on major retailers, like HEB and Walmart, to continue observing the ban in these cities and ask the Legislature to remove the preemption statute."

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/08/how_republicans_are_extorting_trump_into_killing_daca.html

...Republicans criticized DACA as executive overreach and successfully sued to block Obama from expanding the program to the undocumented parents of lawful residents. The 2016 Republican Party platform slammed DACA as “unlawful amnest[y],” and Trump promised to end it. But his Department of Homeland Security has continued to issue and renew DACA permits even as its law enforcement wing occasionally targets DACA recipients for deportation. In June, DHS announced that DACA would remain in effect for the time being.

Shortly thereafter, a coalition of Republicans sent Attorney General Jeff Sessions an ultimatum: Kill DACA by Sept. 5 or we’ll take you to court. The letter argued that DACA is illegal and that the signatories were prepared to sue the Trump administration for allowing its continuation. Idaho Republican Gov. Butch Otter signed the letter, as did the GOP attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spearheaded the effort.

Indicted Fraudster Ken Paxton is a Little Fuzzy on Free Speech

Texas attorney general and Dukes of Hazard villain Ken Paxton is not pleased with former deputy chief of consumer protection John Owens. Ownes recently spoke to reporters and disclosed that a state investigation of Trump University was shut down for political reasons by then-attorney general and current Governor Greg Abbott.

We don't necessarily have to take Owens' word for it. Greg Abbott's campaign received a $35,000 donation from Donald Trump shortly after Abbott dropped the investigation. That's not exactly a slam-dunk, but it certainly lends credence to the accusation.

The Abbott administration could have simply denied the accusations and moved on, but Attorney General Ken Paxton has gone a step further by sending a cease and desist letter to John Owens.

In a letter dated Friday, First Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Mateer asks John Owens to "immediately cease and desist from disclosing any privileged or confidential information" from his time in the office, which ended when he retired in 2011. [...]

"While everyone has First Amendment rights to free speech, the law strictly prohibits attorneys from releasing confidential and privileged information."

John Ownes has denied that he has released anything confidential or privileged and, ironically, Paxton's claim that Owens has released confidential information makes his accusation against Abbott seem even more credible.

Why would Paxton try to use the power of the state to silence a critic if the critic is wrong? If there's nothing to see here, why try to claim Owens has disclosed privileged information? If Owens simply made it up, how could it be privileged?

It wouldn't exactly be a big surprise if Paxton didn't think this all the way through.

As you know, Attorney General Ken Paxton is a little unsure how the law works. Paxton is currently facing criminal and civil charges for fraud. Paxton did not disclose that he was paid to lobby for a fraudulent business while he was a state representative.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi's campaign also received a large $25,000 donation from Trump after dropping an investigation of Trump University.

ref

...

s scores of students complained that Trump University was a ripoff, the Better Business Bureau in 2010 gave the school a D-minus, its second-lowest grade. State regulators also began to take notice.

Besides the probe that led to Attorney General Schneiderman's suit in New York, the office of then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, opened a civil investigation of "possibly deceptive trade practices." Abbott's probe was quietly dropped in 2010 when Trump University agreed to end its operations in Texas. Trump subsequently donated $35,000 to Abbott's successful gubernatorial campaign, according to records.

A spokesman for Abbott, now Texas governor, declined to comment.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi briefly considered joining with Schneiderman in a multi-state suit against Trump University. Three days after Bondi's spokeswoman was quoted in local media reports as saying the office was reviewing the New York lawsuit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation made a $25,000 contribution to a political fundraising committee supporting Bondi's re-election campaign. Bondi, a Republican, soon dropped her investigation, citing insufficient grounds to proceed....

//Raga

By Matt Corley

May 12, 2016

The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) is making news these days as the main conservative group seeking to block President Obama’s ability to seat a replacement on the Supreme Court for late Justice Antonin Scalia. The nonprofit group, which does not disclose its donors, is spending millions on ads attacking nominee Merrick Garland and pressuring Republican senators to hold the line against even holding a hearing on his nomination.

Though it is much better known for its focus on the judiciary, JCN has also long-cared about electing conservative attorney generals who can be “key leaders in the battle for limited, constitutional government.” Since 2014, JCN has contributed at least $2.445 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which is dedicated to “electing Republicans to the Office of State Attorney General.” In 2014, the group also directly intervened in attorneys general races, running ads in Republican attorney general primaries in Nebraska and Arkansas.

JCN also has sought to influence the slate of state attorneys general by working with other groups to run issue ads in attorney general elections, particularly Republican primaries. Between July 2013 and June 2014, for instance, JCN gave $250,000 to a nonprofit called the American Dream Initiative (ADI), which went on to spend at least $532,000 to run ads attacking then-Texas attorney general candidate Ken Paxton’s ethics just days before a runoff election in the 2014 Republican primary. JCN’s funding covered nearly half of ADI’s expenses for the year. JCN also reported on its most recent tax form giving $1.35 million to the American Future Fund, a notorious dark money nonprofit that ran ads alongside JCN in Arkansas’ 2014 Republican attorney general primary. Another group, the Rule of Law Project, got $100,000 from JCN in 2014 and ran nearly $190,000 worth of ads boosting the Republican nominee for attorney general in Wisconsin while attacking the Democratic nominee.

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6/16 fuel fix bs

A campaign by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to end the investigation into ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies over false statements on climate change is gaining support among other state law enforcement officials.

Attorneys general from 13 states signed an open letter Wednesday, arguing that climate change is a public policy debate, not a criminal matter, and urging law enforcement officials in other states to “stop policing viewpoints.”

“We all understand the need for a healthy environment, but we represent a wide range of viewpoints regarding the extent to which man contributes to climate change and the costs and benefits of any proposed fix,” the letter reads. “Nevertheless, we agree on at least one thing—this is not a question for the courts.”

Attorneys general from Alabama, Michigan, Texas, Alaska, Nebraska, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and South Carolina signed the letter.

Paxton made headlines last month when he and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange filed a motion seeking to block a subpoena by the U.S. Virgin Islands for ExxonMobil’s internal documents related to climate change. Paxton called the the probe a “a fishing expedition of the worst kind.”

AG Coalition Resp Letter 2016-06-15

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late to team red?

he top law enforcement officials of Texas and Alabama are jumping in on the side of ExxonMobil, objecting to a racketeering investigation of the oil giant by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The attorneys general of Texas and Alabama filed notice that they intend to intervene in the case, contending that Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker is abusing his authority. According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, Walker overstepped his bounds in opening the investigation that has no legal basis.

In a filing in Texas state court where Exxon sued Walker a month ago, Paxton and Strange said they agreed with Exxon's argument that the investigation violates the company's Constitutional rights. They also said Exxon is correct in arguing that the Virgin Islands' hiring of an outside law firm to handle the probe on a contingency-fee basis is an unconstitutional delegation of prosecutorial power.

"We agree with ExxonMobil that serious jurisdictional concerns exist, but to protect the fundamental right of impartiality in criminal and quasi-criminal investigations, we intervene," said the plea filed by the attorneys general for Texas and Alabama. Exxon's corporate headquarters is in Texas.

In a statement, Walker said investigating fraud is something that attorneys general do every day and that Exxon may be continuing to misrepresent the risks of climate change to investors.

"I have no substantive comment on the effort by the Texas and Alabama Attorney Generals' effort to intervene in ExxonMobil's lawsuit, which seeks to justify its refusal to cooperate with our investigation," Walker said in the statement.

"I seek to protect consumers and investors in the Virgin Islands; they wish to lend a hand to ExxonMobil, which is their choice."

Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at Columbia University, said it is difficult to predict the weight that Paxton and Strange's action will carry.

"It is more for appearances—what we lawyers call atmospherics—than for substance," he said. "This is more a reflection of the politics of the states. This is a political and ideological brawl being carried out in judicial context."

Walker subpoenaed a wide swath of Exxon records covering almost four decades, citing suspicion that Exxon's statements on climate change may have violated the territory's anti-racketeering law and defrauded the government and consumers of the islands.

Virgin Islands authorities are relying on its "Baby RICO" statute, one of a class of racketeering laws adopted by more than two dozen states and territories after Congress passed the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. The laws were intended to give officials stronger weapons for prosecuting organized crime.

Walker engaged the Washington, D.C., law firm of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll to handle the case. Cohen Milstein and Linda Singer, the firm's lead attorney in the case, were named as co-defendants in the Exxon suit against Walker. Neither Singer, Paxton's office, nor Exxon responded to requests for comment.

Strange said he decided to jump into the fray on Exxon's side because he thinks Walker is conducting a "witch hunt."

"The Attorney General of the Virgin Islands, an American Territory, is abusing the power of his government office to punish and intimidate a company for its climate change views which run counter to that of his own," Strange said in a statement.

"This is more than just a free speech case," Strange said. "It is a battle over whether a government official has a right to launch a criminal investigation against anyone who doesn't share his radical views."

Gerrard said the intervention of the two state attorneys general lends some credibility to Exxon's argument.

"It shows it is not a corporation acting alone in terms of protesting," Gerrard said. "Exxon now has two sovereign states agreeing with them."

Walker is part of a coalition of Democratic attorneys general organized by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. They vowed to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their conduct on climate change. The first sentence of Paxton and Strange's motion to intervene cites a comment Walker made at the announcement of the coalition. Paxton and Strange are both Republicans.

Exxon sued in Texas state court last month to block Walker's subpoena for documents on climate change. Exxon argues the subpoena is invalid because it seeks records beyond the five-year statute of limitations of the territory's Baby RICO law, and that it violates the company's constitutional rights and "constitutes an abuse of process, in violation of common law."

In their filing, Paxton and Strange said they support Exxon's contention that the investigation is politically motivated.

"General Walker's investigation appears to be driven by ideology, and not law, as demonstrated not only by his collusion with Cohen Milstein, but also by his request for almost four decades worth of material from a company with no business operations, employees, or assets in the Virgin Islands," they said.

Paxton and Strange said that by hiring an outside law firm to handle the investigation, the Virgin Islands case is driven more by the firm's desire to collect contingency fees based on civil settlements rather than following the law and finding the truth.

"Contingency fee arrangements cut against the duty of impartiality by giving the attorney that represents the government a financial stake in the outcome," according to the intervention notice. "Thus, the use of contingency fees is highly suspect."

Walker defended the use of outside lawyers, saying it levels the playing field and has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"ExxonMobil's annual revenue is about five times the gross domestic product of the Virgin Islands," he said. "The use of outside counsel permits us to apply the law to even the largest corporations."

Intervention by the AGs will likely have few practical consequences, according to Robert Percival, director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland School of Law.

"It's political grandstanding on the parts of the AGs," Percival said.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/16052016/texas-alabama-attorneys-general-taking-exxon-side-objecting-climate-probe-virgin-islands

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The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, prepared on Sunday to become the latest powerful state official booked on felony charges. But unlike when Governor Rick Perry smiled for his mugshot last year, Republicans are not rushing to Paxton’s defense.

A day after news broke that a grand jury had indicted Paxton on felony securities fraud charges, Governor Greg Abbott, Perry’s successor who was Texas attorney general for 12 years, remained silent. So did GOP presidential candidate and US senator Ted Cruz, who in 2014 praised Paxton, a like-minded Tea Party favourite.

Other Texas GOP leaders also kept to themselves about Paxton, who is expected to turn himself in on Monday near his home in suburban Dallas. Attorney Joe Kendall said in a brief statement late on Saturday that he and Paxton would honour a judge’s instructions to not publicly comment.

It offered a sharp contrast to how conservatives rallied around Perry last year when a grand jury in liberal-leaning Austin handed up a two-count indictment against Texas’s longest-serving governor, over a 2013 veto. A judge earlier this month tossed out one of the indictments, leaving only an abuse of power charge.

The cases against Paxton and Perry widely differ, including the fact that Paxton was investigated by the Texas Rangers.

“The Texas Rangers aren’t politically motivated in investigating the crimes they’re investigating,” said David Owens, a former Texas prosecutor who is now a criminal defense attorney. “If you’ve got the Texas Rangers bringing forth this case, it’s serious.”

Barely seven months after becoming Texas’s top law enforcement officer, Paxton faces accusations that he mislead investors in a McKinney-based tech startup before taking office, special prosecutor Kent Schaffer told the New York Times....

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rawstory

Indicted GOP Texas attorney general caught handing out high-paid taxpayer-funded jobs to political buddies

Bethania Palma Markus

01 Apr 2016 at 16:08 ET

The Texas attorney general may be the state’s top law enforcer, but Ken Paxton has raised eyebrows recently by hiring two high-paid staffers without following the law, the Dallas Morning News reports.

The positions for assistant attorney general and communications director were not listed for the public, even though two outsiders were hired, the News reports. Texas law states that jobs must be posted and open to the public if outside applicants are being considered. Paxton personally selected the two men he hired and did not advertise their positions.

Paxton hired Jeff Mateer, an attorney with the non-profit law firm, First Liberty, which litigates so-called religious freedom cases, and Marc Rylander, a former pastor at Paxton’s church.

Paxton’s office confirmed to the News that the positions weren’t publicly posted, and that he interprets the law to mean he can appoint people who are above the level of deputy to taxpayer-funded positions.

“It’s important that the attorney general, or any leader of any of the state agencies, has in his leadership positions persons he trusts and believes have the ability to lead the particular organization,” Mateer told the News. “Those have been, historically, positions that have been appointed, and I think that is across the board, not just in the attorney general’s office, but across Texas state government.”

This type of activity isn’t new for Paxton — or for Texas’ conservative leadership.

The Austin American-Statesman last year reviewed hundreds of pages of personnel files and found that several people with political ties to Paxton, Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Rick Perry were given coveted government jobs before they had even filled out applications — if they ever filled them out at all.

Others, who didn’t have those connections, faced “months of red tape, interviews and vetting — just the sort of competition that state law envisions for coveted state jobs,” according to the Statesman. Documents obtained by the paper indicate Paxton was promising well-paid public sector jobs to his political allies before he took office.

A spokeswoman for Paxton’s office told the paper that jobs were doled out to hand-picked appointees without advertising or even the necessary paperwork — and claimed there was nothing wrong with that.

“It is common practice for high-level positions to be appointed to help the constitutional officer implement the policies the people elected him or her to do,” Cynthia Meyer wrote in an email to the Statesman. “We are confident that we followed applicable law in selecting high-level staff.”

The result? High-level staffers making more than $70,000 a year — hired without competition. One of those, according to the Statesman, was Paxton’s former spokeswoman Allison Castle, who sailed into the $137,500-a-year job without ever bothering to apply for it. Rylander replaced Castle.

Per the Statesman:

Neither [Castle or Meyer] answered questions about how the agency picks and chooses who is appointed and who must face traditional hiring hurdles. Nor could the office point to any specific exemption from the far-reaching state statute, which reads: “Any agency … that has an employment opening for which persons from outside the agency will be considered shall list the opening with the Texas Workforce Commission.”

While the hirings appear to be illegal, the Statesman points out there is no enforcement provision written into the law.

“We don’t enforce the rule,” Lisa Givens, spokeswoman for the Texas Workforce Commission, told the Statesman. “We accept the postings. There’s no enforcement in this provision.”

Mateer confirmed to the News that Paxton personally approached him to offer him the job.

While neither man has experience working in government, both are making slightly more than their predecessors, the News reports.

Rylander helped slash the prosecution budget targeting Paxton in a securities fraud case for which he is indicted, urging the Collin County Commissioners Court in August to cut the $2 million in funding for the case. That day, the commission agreed to cut the budget drastically down to just $285,000, then later to $100,000 — though they have since been forced to pay more than double that for prosecuting attorneys’ work on the case, the News reports.

Paxton is facing three felony counts and has unsuccessfully tried to have the indictments dismissed, according to the News. He is accused of ” funneling his legal clients to a friend’s investment firm without being registered with the state as an ‘investment adviser representative,’ a third-degree felony,” along with two fraud charges of allegedly encouraging two people to invest in a tech start-up without disclosing he was being compensated by the company.

raga bs bio

Texas’ 51st Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is known for his principled and uncompromising devotion to America’s founding values, and as a man who has demonstrated enormous political courage throughout his service to Texas.

The son of an Air Force veteran, General Paxton is a stalwart leader with an abiding passion and deep-seated respect for our U.S. Constitution.

While serving in both chambers of the Texas Legislature, General Paxton worked to protect the 10th Amendment, defending Texas’ state sovereignty. He co-sponsored and defended Texas’ Voter ID bill, and has been a prominent voice in the defense of religious liberty and the protection of the unborn.

A defender of our free enterprise system, General Paxton has worked to make Texas a beacon of economic prosperity, opposing burdensome government regulations that harm Texas jobs and stunt economic growth.

Ken Paxton was born December 23, 1962, in Minot, North Dakota, while his father was stationed at Minot Air Force Base. He graduated from Baylor University, where he served as student body president, earning a B.A. in psychology in 1985 and an M.B.A. in 1986.

In 1991, he earned a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, founded by Thomas Jefferson. After law school, he joined the firm of Strasburger & Price, LLP, and later served as in-house counsel for J.C. Penney Company.

First elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 2002, General Paxton represented House District 70 for 10 years, one of the fastest-growing regions in the state. In 2012, he was elected to the Texas State Senate, representing Senate District 8 in Collin and Dallas counties.

He met his wife Angela, a guidance counselor at Legacy Christian Academy in Frisco, while they were students at Baylor. The Paxtons have four children: Tucker, Abby, Mattie, and Katie. They are members of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano.

official bs

Joint Sting Operation Leads to Arrest of 16 Suspected Child Predators

Monday, July 20, 2015 – Cleburne, Texas

The Texas Attorney General’s Office (OAG) today announced the arrest of 16 suspected child predators following a joint sting operation between the OAG’s Child Exploitation Unit, the Johnson County Special Crimes Unit and Sheriff’s Office, and the Cleburne and Burleson Police departments.

Attorney General Paxton Statement on Two Year Anniversary of HB 2

Friday, July 17, 2015 – Austin, Texas

“Two years ago this weekend, House Bill 2 was signed into law, recognizing the dignity of life in the womb at 20 weeks, as well as the need to improve both sanitary conditions and the quality of care available to Texas women. I was proud to co-sponsor House Bill 2 in the Texas Senate and help elevate the Lone Star State as a leader for life, and I’m proud to have led the effort to defend portions of HB 2 in court."

Media Advisory: Clifton Lamar Williams scheduled for execution

Wednesday, July 15, 2015 – Austin, Texas

Pursuant to a court order by the 114th Judicial District Court of Smith County, Clifton Lamar Williams is scheduled for execution after 6 p.m. on July 16, 2015. In 2006, Williams was convicted and sentenced to death for the capital murder of ninety-three-year-old Cecelia Schneider.

Texas Attorney General’s Office Investigating Planned Parenthood After Shocking Video About Sale of Baby Body Parts

Wednesday, July 15, 2015 – Austin, Texas

“The Office of the Attorney General has launched an official investigation into Planned Parenthood following the release of a video that details the organization’s calculated slaughter of human babies to maximize the available body parts they plan to sell."

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ggl 8 22 election lawsuit

U.S. Supreme Court throws out Texas lawsuit contesting 2020 ...https://www.texastribune.org › 2020/12/11 › texas-law

s...

Dec 11, 2020 — The lawsuit challenged election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The high court said Texas did not have standing to ...

Texas v. Pennsylvania - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Texas_v._Pennsylvania

Texas v. Pennsylvania, 592 U.S. _ (2020), was a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the administration of the 2020 presidential ...

Filings · ‎Texas · ‎Amici curiae respondents · ‎Reactions to court filing

In the Supreme Court of the United States

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov › files › Press

PDF

by K Paxton — Defendants. MOTION FOR LEAVE TO FILE BILL OF. COMPLAINT. Ken Paxton*. Attorney General of Texas. Brent Webster. First ...

### AG Paxton Sues Battleground States for Unconstitutional ...

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov › news › releases

Dec 8, 2020 — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton today filed a lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the United States Supreme ...

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paxton ag 2 bak

AG Paxton Leads Coalition of 11 AGs to Defend the First Amendment on Climate Change Policy Debate

Background

Filings

Supporting plaintiff Texas

Politics

In favor

Against

Statistical analysis

Outcome

Aftermath

See also

AG Paxton’s campaign spent $50,000 at Mar-a-Lago: report

Reference

AG Ken Paxton serves up incoherent attack on Merrick Garland: His job is to 'worry about Afghanistan'

AG Ken Paxton under investigation by state bar over 'professional misconduct'

How Paxton measures success

indicted Texas attorney general sides with anti-gay judge instead of state agency in legal fight

Michigan

Texas

Texas v. Pennsylvania - Wikipedia

In the Supreme Court of the United States

Supreme Court Rejects Texas Suit Seeking to Subvert Election

The Failed Texas Lawsuit Challenging 2020 Election Results

Supreme Court Rejects Texas' Lawsuit Over Election Results

Justices throw out Texas lawsuit that sought to block election ...

Texas sues four battleground states in Supreme Court over ...

Explaining the Supreme Court lawsuit from Texas and Trump ...

paxton ag 2 bak

AG Pax­ton Leads Coali­tion of 11 AGs to Defend the First Amend­ment on Cli­mate Change Pol­i­cy Debate

Background

Filings

Supporting plaintiff Texas

Politics

In favor

Against

Statistical analysis

Outcome

Aftermath

See also

Reference

How Paxton measures success

Michigan

Texas

AG Paxton Leads Coalition of 11 AGs to Defend the First Amendment on Climate Change Policy Debate