The Texan Podcast - Inside the Impeachment: Paxton on Trial — Episode 1: The Whistleblower Allegations

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Don't forget to support us by subscribing at: https://thetexan.news/Welcome to Inside the Impeachment: Paxton on Trial. In this special podcast series from The Texan, we're delving into the historic impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton, accused of bribery and abuse of office — charges that have set the stage for one of the most riveting political sagas in the Lone Star State. Inside the Impeachment offers an exclusive backstage pass to the trial’s drama, strategy, and real-time developments. Whether you’re a political junkie or simply curious about the inner workings of Texas governance, this podcast is your front-row seat to history in the making. What can you expect?Daily debriefs during the trial, starting September 5thIn-depth analyses of arguments from both sidesBackground context to help you follow the proceedingsExpert interviews and insider insights Ahead of our daily podcasts at the start of the trial, we’ve already released our first episode to give you background on the allegations first raised by senior assistants to Paxton three years ago.Look out for Episode 2 in just a few days.

Mackenzie Delulo, Senior Editor of The Texan Howdy, folks. My name is Mackenzie Delulo, and I'm the Senior Editor of The Texan. Welcome to our new special podcast series, Inside the Impeachment, Paxton on Trial. For the first time in over 100 years, a sitting statewide elected official was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives. Attorney General Ken Paxton has been accused of bribery and abuse of office, allegations that first surfaced from his senior staff several years ago. Now temporarily suspended from his position as the state's attorney,

Paxton's impeachment moves to the Texas Senate for a trial, where senators will decide whether to convict him and formally remove him from office or acquit him and reinstate him to his position. When the trial begins on Tuesday, September 5th, return here for a daily debrief on everything that happens in and around the Senate chamber. Until then, we'll release several episodes giving you the background context you need to follow the arguments from both the House impeachment team and Paxton's defense. Be sure to follow

The Texan wherever you listen to podcasts to stay up to date on new episodes. And if you're on Apple Podcasts, be sure to leave a rating and review so that more people can find us and stay informed with news you can trust. Howdy folks, Mackenzie DeLulo here with senior reporter Hayden Sparks. Welcome, welcome to the very first episode of Inside the Impeachment, Paxton on Trial. When this episode comes out, we will be a mere eight days out from the start of the proceedings in the Texas Senate that will determine whether suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton will be permanently removed from the office he's held since 2015. We'll publish two more preliminary episodes before the trial begins, and then we'll publish episodes daily while the proceedings are underway. Hayden will join us as often as he can. He'll be

over in the Senate, and I'll be joined daily by Matt Stringer and Brad Johnson from our team, along with the occasional guest to debrief each day of the trial. Today, we'll be going back to square one, addressing the whistleblowers from Paxton's office who started a windfall of legal action, press coverage, and speculation about the Attorney General's official and personal practices. We'll also quickly go over his political background and the ramp up to his becoming the state's top lawyer. Hayden, are you ready for this? I think so. But is Texas ready for it? That's the real question. I don't think so. So let's go ahead and jump into this. We'll start off by talking about the Attorney General, the suspended Attorney General's political

background. Now, he is no stranger to Texas politics and has been active for over 20 years at this point. So let's start off with a little bit of his background. Paxton was elected to the Texas House in 2002. So we're not talking about a short political career here. This is a decades-long political career that has culminated in this impeachment proceeding. Paxton was in the Texas House for a decade as a legislator, then went to the Texas Senate for a brief time before running for Attorney General in 2014 and winning a runoff against State Representative Dan Branch. He won that runoff and then proceeded to defeat a Democrat named Sam Houston in the general election. Which is quite an electoral feat in and of itself. Absolutely. Sam Houston's

on the ballot and you beat him. Sure, you're a Republican in Texas at the time, but still, Sam Houston's on the ballot. And name ID goes into voters' choices a lot. So beating a name like that on the ballot, even in a red state is notable. But that all to say, Paxton was working toward being AG for a while, and he had already been involved in Texas politics for close to 15 years before taking that oath of office for OAG. But he did go from the legislative side of things to the enforcement side of things as the state's top law enforcement officer. But that adds to this whole situation because Paxton has seen his position from the perspective that lawmakers have now. He has been a lawmaker. He has probably seen investigative reports produced by the General Investigating Committee that recommended his impeachment.

So Paxton has a lot of perspective on this situation. He knows what it's like to be in the House and the Senate. And he has really racked up those electoral victories and fundraising numbers. And notably, too, while he was in the House, he was not just there for 10 years as furniture, which is an award given out at the end of session. It's like, who's been the quietest and least disruptive during the session? He ran against incumbent speaker Joe Strauss. And he dropped out at the last minute, but he certainly had at least a dozen or so, I want to say, members who supported his campaign, which out of 150, sure, that's not that many. But to challenge an incumbent speaker and have support is still very notable. And he was making

a name for himself in those ways. I know that when he was there and he dropped out on the first day of the legislative session of the race for speaker, there never ended up actually being a vote. But there were people in the gallery with anti-Joe Strauss t-shirts that were there in support of Ken Paxton. I believe he was in the Senate only for a year or two before he ran for attorney general, which is notable in that he only spent one year in an upper chamber where there is typically more notoriety given to the members, right? There's a little bit more high profile. You have 31 members there versus 150 in the House. Right. And you're exactly correct. He was sworn in in January 2013 as a member of the Senate. And the very next year was on the campaign trail asking the voters of

Texas to make him attorney general. And they did. He was sworn in at the OAG in January 2015. So he only spent a brief time in the chamber where his wife now serves, Senator Angela Paxton, and continued to make McKinney, Texas and Collin County his home base. And that's where the district his wife represents is located. And his home is still in Collin County. But he has become a national figure for his lawsuits against the Biden administration and his aggressive defense of Republican platform planks. His wife was also supportive of him as O.A.G. She even, I think, famously came up with a song. I'm a pistol-packing mama and my husband sues Obama. I won't torture

our listeners by attempting to sing it but she went on the campaign trail it was a catchy song it's on youtube go check it out don't take our word for it and she i think was very effective with that and the paxtons have truly branded themselves as nationally prominent conservatives absolutely and very prominent in Collin County. Collin County, as you're mentioning, is their home base, of course. But that means that, you know, the attorney general has served as a House member, a Senate member, and then a statewide elected official, bringing a lot of pride to his home Republican Party voters. There's a lot of pride when somebody from home base comes out and gets some sort of elected position at the state level, right? It's like the hometown hero going and making it to the

NFL, right? Absolutely. That's the equivalent for these local Collin County folks. The Paxtons have been just hallmark members of their community for a very, very long time. And he's gone a long way. I mean, I'm not suggesting that he was on the precipice of running for governor or something, but I don't know how far you go beyond AG without an office like governor or U.S. senator. He was on an upward trajectory politically, and he had held this AG spot for many years. And as you mentioned, while his home base is Collin County, he and Angela Paxton have really worked on their national profile. And the stakes could not be higher for his career politically. And I do want to mention this because you talked about Collin County being proud of him as their hometown guy going to Austin and fighting these battles. He had sought, and we're talking about the

whistleblower allegations today, not the securities fraud case, but the securities fraud case was delayed for so many years because he wanted it to take place in Collin County. And I think that's one of the reasons for that is exactly what you mentioned. Angela and Ken Paxton have for so many years because he wanted it to take place in Collin County. And I think that's one of the reasons for that is exactly what you mentioned. Angela and Ken Paxton have done a very good job of building that as their home field. And he wanted to keep that case in Collin County for the home field advantage, just like the prosecutors wanted it moved to Houston, where they would have a better chance of getting him convicted. And to be fair, also, I do want to say, yes, he's very, very much known for opposing the Biden administration. But not that long ago, he was known as President Trump's guy in Texas,

him and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, however way you cut it, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick being his campaign chairman here in Texas, but Ken Paxton being somebody who very readily would go to bat for the president, whether it be the election results that were so controversial and contested in 2020, or a myriad of different lawsuits, he was very much willing to go to bat on behalf of the president as well. So somebody who in that way gained a lot of notoriety nationally as well. So much so that after the impeachment, Donald Trump felt the need to come to Ken Paxton's defense in relation to Governor Abbott. The morning of the impeachment. Right, because Governor Abbott hasn't said anything about this other than

deferring to the people involved. And when we asked Governor Abbott if he would comment on Angela Paxton's recusal. This was before the Senate rules discussion. Greg Abbott said that's her decision to make, and he moved on. And Donald Trump, after the impeachment took place, he said that Greg Abbott was missing in action on this. And of course, Governor Abbott doesn't need to comment on this publicly. He has every right to keep silent. He has no formal role in this process. But that goes to the alliance between Trump and Paxton and how Trump would not come forward and speak on Paxton's behalf that way if he didn't feel Paxton was an ally of his. So there is a strong loyalty there. And it further

shows that Paxton has sought a profile as a national conservative. Absolutely. So let's now pivot to October of 2020. I believe that's the timeline we're working here with now, the whistleblowers, the former members, former staff members of the Attorney General's office who came forward with allegations against their boss. Who are the whistleblowers? These individuals, and I'll call them former employees or whistleblowers, but

they worked for the OAG and these were not, well, I'll put it this way. They were high ranking people in the OAG. These were not just eight random people who showed up at the last minute. Some of them, as the House managers pointed out, were personally hired by Ken Paxton after crossing paths with him at various functions. And I'll say that this information came from exhibits that the House impeachment team has uploaded and filed to the Court of Impeachment's website. And I'll go down the list here. Ryan Bangert was the Deputy First Assistant Attorney General. James Brickman was the Deputy Attorney General for Policy and Strategic Initiatives. Lacey Mays was the Deputy Attorney General for Administration.

Jeffrey Mateer was the First Assistant Attorney General. David Maxwell was the Director of criminal law enforcement. Darren McCarty was the deputy attorney general for civil litigation. Mark Penley was the deputy attorney general for criminal justice. And Ryan Vassar was the deputy attorney general for legal counsel. And these are the eight employees who would ultimately bring their suspicions of misconduct to federal investigators. And let me provide a little bit of a timeline for what happened here so that people can get a general sense of how many years this has been taking place. And real fast before you do, I want to say that the securities fraud debacle had been in headlines before. So

Paxton certainly had dealt with his fair share of legal troubles in the past. There were arguments of how well founded they were. So a lot of conservative voters, his base had written off any legal trouble up until that point, for the most part, speaking very generally here, as something that was a political attack on the attorney general. Am I off there with that characterization? I would agree because it was not difficult before the whistleblowers or the former employers, however you'd like to characterize them, before they came forward with their allegations. Paxton could say this is a rogue criminal charge by prosecutors who have a vendetta against me. But when your own lieutenants go to the feds and say,

we fear that our boss is committing criminal misconduct, that's huge. Because these are people within Paxton's inner circle, and it becomes much more serious consequence. But politically speaking, the securities fraud charges, as you highlighted, are much easier to dismiss. But when Paxton's political world really started to crumble as he knew it, I think is when these employees came forward with these allegations. And many of them, and we'll get into that in a second, but just to outline the timeline here, they made these suspicions known to the federal government on or about October 1 of 2020. And then the timeline went something like this. On October 2, Mateer resigned. On Octoberth, the OAG fired Mays and Brickman. On October

26th, McCarty confirmed that he had resigned from the OAG. On October 28th, Bangert resigned from the OAG. On November 2nd, the OAG fired Maxwell and Penley, who had already been placed on leave. And then the last employee to work for the OAG, the last of those employees who complained was Ryan Bassar, who had been placed on leave in October, but he was finally fired on November 17 of 2020. So within weeks of them coming up with these allegations, all of those eight individuals were out the door. And that's when all of this started. And to your point, we will get into this, but these are members of the Attorney General's office who at the time joined a very prestigious legal team, right? These are in terms of conservative legalism in the United States.

This is a pretty top tier team to be a part of. This is Attorney General Ken Paxton with a pretty great record of going up against whoever it may be on any given day. But as the state's top lawyer, particularly for a state like Texas, this is an incredible team to work for. And Paxton hired conservatives from a myriad of different legal backgrounds to be on his team to help represent the state of Texas. And after a lot of these members did, in fact, leave their employer, they went back to organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF, or First Liberty, both of which are very prominent, conservative, even kind of evangelical organizations that aim to protect religious liberty or just fight generally conservative legal causes. So this is not like these were closet progressives in the Attorney General's office who turned on Paxton

because of his political will, per se. You would have to believe that these eight people somehow had a dramatic change of heart on their policy positions all at the same time, and then conspired together to forward some kind of political vendetta against Attorney General Paxton, and whether or not the allegations against Paxton should be sustained in the Senate, which is obviously not- Which that's the whole crux of the debate. Right. And that's obviously not for us to decide. That's not for the House to decide. The Senate Court of Impeachment will decide whether those articles of impeachment are justified. But as far as these individuals go, they believe, and I think that

the evidence points to their sincere belief that misconduct was going on. And as you mentioned, these were not people who went on to go be talking heads on MSNBC, they didn't go work for the ACLU or progressive organizations in Texas, they went to conservative organizations. And we'll, we'll talk about this later. But they went and and some of them went back to former employers, or at least one of them did. So you're absolutely correct that these were conservative individuals who were in Paxton's corner before all of this happened. So let's get into the accusations. There are a lot of, I think a lot of folks who are confused about what exactly these accusations were that were brought forth by these former staffers of Paxton? Well, it's important to remember that not every one of the employees who raised suspicions against Paxton would sue him. Only Brickman, Penley, Maxwell, and Vassar filed the so-called

whistleblower lawsuit and alleged that Paxton retaliated against them even though they made good faith reports of suspected misconduct to authorities. The so-called whistleblower lawsuit was filed on November 12. And remember, this was five days before Ryan Vassar, the last employee who complained to the feds, was ultimately fired by the OAG. And Paxton asserted that he fired them for reasons that were unrelated to their complaints and that he had other issues with them. They accused Paxton of firing them out of retaliation, as I mentioned, because they had said they believed Paxton was inappropriately using the OAG to benefit a campaign donor of his named Nateen or Nate Paul. Is his full name really Nateen?

It's N-A-T-I-N. I did not know that. Okay, that's fascinating. Nate is a nickname. Interesting. I had no clue. Yeah. But it was literally Nathan like most people.

And I've heard it pronounced Nateen. It could be Nateen or Nateen. I'm not quite sure about that, but most people just call him Nate Paul. Nate Paul's company in 2019 had been the subject of an FBI raid. And to make a long story short, Mr. Paul then went to the OAG and more or less tried to turn it around on the FBI and say the way that they executed these search warrants was procedurally flawed, and they also tampered with documents. And much of this evidence has been made public, but Paul went to the OAG and asked it to intervene in this situation to protect him from what he believed was the FBI improperly targeting him. And that happened in November of 2019. Excuse me, that

November 2019 is when the lawsuit alleges the OAG on Paxton's behest began to intervene in this situation. But the FBI raid took place a few months earlier than that. So the activity in question here went back to 2019 and this FBI raid, Paul asked the OAG to intervene. And it appears that these employees thought that they couldn't do much because this was mostly a federal jurisdictional issue. And they also said if there was some kind of criminal wrongdoing, that that would need to go to the Travis County District Attorney's Office as opposed to the OAG. But according to these allegations, Paxton began aggressively seeking to use the OAG to protect Paul somewhere around November of 2019 going forward. And he did that, according to the allegations, in a myriad of ways, including using the open records

process, trying to direct employees of his to give favorable opinions on legal matters that would protect Paul's companies. And Paxton allegedly used the OAG opinion process to protect Paul's businesses from foreclosure. And as a part of all of this, the House of Representatives accused Paxton of accepting bribes from Mr. Paul. But all of this, much of this is laid out in the whistleblower lawsuit, which seeks damages such as lost compensation and emotional distress and damages. And the lawsuit does mention that there are tens of thousands of open records requests that are filed every year for the OAG. But according to this lawsuit, Paxton only intimately involved himself with one of these requests and did so with the precise object of helping out Nate Paul, who had contributed $25,000 to his campaign in 2018.

And during all of this, Paxton is said to have been having an extramarital affair with Ms. Laura Olson, who is reportedly on the witness list for the Senate trial. And one of the bribes that Paxton is accused of accepting is a job offer for Ms. Olson, in part to help cover up what happened and to simply help out the woman with whom he was having this extramarital affair. So all of this goes into allegations, again, by four of those former employees, Brickman, Penley, Maxwell, and Vassar, who believe that Paxton really unjustly targeted them for doing what they believe was the right thing to do. And that's when I remember, again, October 2020, a lot of this had happened a year prior, but it didn't come

anywhere near the public eye until October 2020. And I remember like the waves of realization for us on the reporting end as information became public. It was a very slow roll where it was like, okay, are there all these rumblings about Paxton? Gosh, we're used to these kinds of things being in the news cycle and then nothing really happening. Oh, his former employees are a part of the equation here. Oh, there's an alleged affair that constitutes some sort of bribery. Okay. There are all these things that happened that led to basically the story just snowballed and got bigger and bigger and bigger than we could have even imagined. And as it came out, I know it was like months and months of, of just discovery of a lot of these different items.

And then it went not dormant, but it went a little bit quiet for quite some time. And this is probably the most it has seen headlines since late 2020, this whole impeachment ordeal and Paxton we're focusing on the whistleblower allegations here, but Paxton has had myriad legal troubles with people accusing him of wrongdoing. And for really random reasons, or not necessarily random, but for a variety of reasons that aren't necessarily connected, they've been delayed. And it has all culminated in this moment with the securities fraud case, and the bar complaints against him about the 2020 election, and the impeachment, all of it has

has ended up at this point, and it's happening all at once now, but this was just a flurry of activity that, like you said, put a spotlight on, on the complaints against him. And a lot more has come out to with the impending trial in the Senate. I mean, the house team who is at the forefront of the impeachment process and are actively seeking to impeach the attorney general.

They released thousands of documents of evidence of what they claim to be, you know, grounds for impeachment. And so we're finding out more and more about some of the details of these conversations. But let's pivot to a little bit of when and how these employees came forward with their concerns. We talked about this a little bit, but go into a little bit more detail about how this all actually rolled out. Well, I may have jumped the gun a little bit on the timeline, but we talked about this happening in late 2020. Let's put this in context politically. There have been two legislative sessions and two general elections since all of these allegations came forward. And the House of Representatives impeached Paxton in May after a months-long investigation that was held confidentially. The House interviewed all of these employees during its confidential

investigation, which took place beginning in February 2023. So this was two years and some change after all of these people resigned or were fired. And then the fired employees filed the whistleblower lawsuit. And one point hammered by the house general investigating committee is that almost everyone they interviewed expressed fear that Paxton would retaliate against them. And they were concerned about having professional repercussions if they stated their side of the story to the House General Investigating Committee, which I think highlights the stakes involved for everyone here. I think Ken Paxton's attorney, Dan Cogdell, said when he was at an appearance in the securities fraud case that if the Senate sustains any of these articles of

impeachment, which by the way, they only need to sustain one. But there will be individual votes on each article, correct? Yes. They only need to, they can, if if they and a few of them will be held in abeyance but if they if they acquit him on 19 charges and sustain one that removes him from office and then they can vote for whether to they can vote on whether to permanently exclude him from political life in texas andogdell said that the phrase he used is it would be a kill shot to his political career if they were to do that. So unless Ken Paxton wants to move to another state and run elsewhere, and I don't know how this works with federal offices, that's something that I need to explore more, but the Senate can debilitate him politically

moving forward and block him from running for office. So the stakes are high for him. The stakes are high for these whistleblowers who whistleblowers, former employees who believe that that they were unfairly targeted and that Paxton was acting inappropriately or criminally. Yeah. And it'd be so easy for me to jump the gun here and talk about what ended up happening with that initial whistleblower lawsuit, but we'll get into that next time. We want to leave a little bit for part two. So y'all have got to come back and we'll talk about the end result of all of this. That's exactly right. So let's talk about where these former employees are now

and will they be called to the stand? Well, the Dallas Morning News published an article indicating that someone had leaked the witness lists to them and the whistleblowers' names are on the witness list according to the Dallas paper. But the exhibits the House impeachment managers filed do not include current employment for all of them. Some of them may be retired, I'm not quite sure. But for instance, Vassar is the senior vice president for strategic initiative and advisor to the president at Alliance Defending

Freedom. Alliance Defending Freedom is a staunch conservative organization. It has been on the front legal lines of defending restrictions on abortion. anti-discrimination statutes against, for instance, same-sex relationships. Alliance Defending Freedom is a very socially conservative organization. And that goes back to what we were saying earlier about some of these whistleblowers being staunch conservatives. But Brickman, according to the exhibit, is now an advisor at the Cicero Institute in HVC. He is also a chief operating officer and head of public affairs at Lonsdale Enterprises. Mays is the chief deputy AG in the state of Tennessee. So she went to a different state

and now she's the chief deputy AG there. Mateer is the executive vice president and chief legal officer at First Liberty Institute, another conservative group. And I will say Mateer is, we talked a lot about Brent Webster and covered him a lot in the last year or so, who is the current first attorney general in the attorney general's office. Mateer would have been his, it's the same position, right? So he's Webster's predecessor is how this would actually work out is he's number one in the AG's office.

And Webster is one of the people who is accused in the whistleblower lawsuit of more or less badgering and belittling the people who raised some of these suspicions. So yes, McCarty evidently has his own law firm now. It listed him as being the, I believe the managing partner or the senior partner at McCarty Law PLLC. It's his namesake, so I'm presuming that that's his law firm. And Vassar is the current general counsel at the Cicero Institute, as I mentioned. I'm sorry, I may have confused my outline a bit because I have Vassar on here twice. So I may need to fact check myself on that.

On which one he actually is at this point. Yeah, let me go up. I'm sorry. I said earlier that Vassar was at the Alliance Defending Freedom. It's Ryan Bangert who's at the Alliance Defending Freedom. There we go. So a little correction there. Asterix there.

Right. But those are where these individuals are. And it's probably a little bit daunting for them personally to think of revisiting this chapter in their lives. Oh, my gosh. So how do these allegations fit in the impeachment proceedings against Paxton? Well, several of the articles of impeachment mention the whistleblower allegations, and they go into detail regarding Paxton's use of the OAG, according to the House of Representatives, to benefit Nate Paul. And the termination of the whistleblowers is alleged in Article 6. The lengthy report that the OAG published that purported to exonerate Paxton of these allegations is stated in Article 15. Paxton's accused of misusing the OAG to defend himself against this lawsuit as well by publishing this report. And the termination of the whistleblowers is also alleged to be an improper use of his

authority. And then there are more general articles of impeachment toward the end of the charging instrument here, which was House Res two, three, seven, seven, that, uh, accused him of dereliction of duty, abuse of office. And this is, these are broader charges that are said to summarize all of the,

the various, uh, allegations that are put forth here. And, but the more, the more specific, um, whistleblower allegations are listed.

And, uh, he, he is accused of abusing the open records process and using it to benefit Nate Paul. So the whistleblower allegations, a lot of them are incorporated into the articles of impeachment, and the whistleblower suit probably served as a— well, I won't go as far as saying that. I will say that many of the things that were alleged in the House impeachment articles were already alleged in the whistleblower lawsuit. So let's zoom out a little bit here and get a little bit high level. Why is this process such a significant development in Texas history? Well, we started by talking about Paxton's electoral history. And the timing here is important because all of this happened only a few months after Paxton defeated Democrat Rochelle Garza in the general election. And he had also emerged from a heated primary with George P. Bush and two other opponents, Louie Gohmert, the congressman for Congressional District 1, and former Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman. He defeated Guzman and Gohmert out of the

gate in the primary in March, but then proceeded to defeat George P. Bush pretty overwhelmingly by really a two to three margin, or excuse me, a two to one margin in the runoff for Attorney General. So it was not a close call for Paxton winning reelection here. I think the number of opponents he had, he had three opponents in the Republican primary. A runoff was not wildly out of the question. Gohmert's district spans East Texas. And if you look at the map for the primary in March, a lot of Gohmert's votes came from that East Texas. And Gohmert is beloved came from that East Texas and Gohmert is beloved by conservatives

in East Texas. So I think that was that contributed to it. Although he did make fourth place, I think he was a foil for the other other candidates to some degree. Guzman had held statewide office before so her her name was familiar to voters. And then of course, Bush has name recognition. And I think he was the choice of a lot of people who were, who believed the whistleblowers and did not want to see Paxton reelected. So perhaps politically differentiated himself from Paxton a little bit more than the other two opponents did. Right. And I recall that shortly before this, I don't know if it was before the runoff or the primary, but he had filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration on behalf of the land office, which he was the land

commissioner. And I think that was in part to position himself as someone who could take on Biden in court. But the anti-Paxton crowd had a lot of choices and i think that contributed to this going to a runoff but the runoff wasn't close and once uh that opposition was consolidated um it didn't fare well for opponents of paxton so the the political implication of this is this is a quite aggressive reversal of election results by the house of Representatives, even if it's justified. No one can deny that Paxton won an overwhelming victory. And the effect of this, justified or not, morally, legally, or in any other way, is the effect of the legislature thrusting him out of power, whether the voters like it or not,

because the voters get no say in this process. The governor gets no say in this process. And that's the significance of that politically is extreme. I can't think of, I've said this before, and I think it's appropriate. This is the political equivalent of capital punishment for an elected official. And Paxton's own attorney said it's a kill shot to his career. So there's that. Then there's the fact that this has never happened before. The legislature has never impeached an attorney general and has certainly never removed one. So the stakes couldn't be higher for Paxton's political career and the historical precedent is none. There is no historical precedent for this specific type of impeachment.

And the last time impeachment happened at all was the seventies. And the last time it happened to a statewide elected official was more than a hundred years ago. So this has major historical implications. And I think Texans are going to be watching with bated breath a lot of them. Many people probably don't know this is happening. But this is the most powerful attorney in the state of Texas who is on the precipice of possibly losing everything that he has worked for his entire career. And this is not just somebody I will add to your breakdown there of his electoral successes. This is not somebody who just fares well in Republican primaries and doesn't do well in the general elections. I think maybe in previous election cycles, he's done worse than he did in 2020 or excuse me, but in 2022 he was like

one percentage point behind governor abbott on a general election ballot versus another democrat so it's not something up until this point that we have actively seen uh voters in texas shy away from in terms of partisan politics this is somebody that was elected decisively um not just in the republican primary um well hayden thank you for breaking this all down this is going to be politics. This is somebody that was elected decisively, not just in the Republican primary. Well, Hayden, thank you for breaking this all down. This is going to be fascinating. Folks, we so appreciate you listening to the first episode of Inside the Impeachment. We'll be back with another episode in a couple of days, so stay tuned. Thanks for listening. Up next on Inside the Impeachment, Hayden and I will discuss the fallout of the whistleblower allegations as the senior assistants left the office of the attorney general and filed

a lawsuit against their former employer. The lawsuit gave the public more insight into the allegations and was followed with Paxton's office defending his actions, all amid a competitive primary election that featured another statewide elected official, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, and a former congressman. Be sure to visit thetexan.news for more information on the impeachment and Texas politics.