Nice, but I’m still not expecting there to be consequences for him. I will be delighted to be wrong about that.
Best mugshot ever
A Texas State Bar complaint against Attorney General Ken Paxton is moving forward and will be heard by either a district court judge or an administrative panel, the complainants said Tuesday.
The complaint was filed in July 2021 by the nonprofit Lawyers Defending American Democracy and 16 Texas lawyers, including four former presidents of the state Bar. It alleges that Paxton committed professional misconduct when he filed the December 2020 suit before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn the presidential election results in four battleground states. The complainants say the suit was frivolous, knowingly false and deceitful.
The deadline for a decision on whether there is just cause to move forward, prescribed by the Texas Rules of Disciplinary Procedure, was Sunday, and the complainants have not been notified of a dismissal.
“This is a big step because this rarely happens,” said Jim Harrington, one of the Texas lawyers who joined the complaint and a retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights. “I just know from being a lawyer for 50 years, this is very rare.”
[…]
Under the disciplinary rules, Paxton has 20 days to decide whether to request the case be heard by a district court, where proceedings are public, or by an evidentiary panel. If he chooses the evidentiary panel, the proceedings will be kept private unless public sanctions are imposed. Dismissals or private sanctions are not made public.
Harrington rejected the claim by Paxton that the complaint was guided by political bias.
“That’s the way he always is. Anyone who disagrees with him is on some sort of political witchhunt,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me what a person’s politics are … We lawyers, it’s very clear we have an ethical responsibility. It’s very clear we have to follow the rules.”
See here for some background on the July complaint against Paxton. There was a similar complaint filed in June, to which Paxton responded in July. I do not know what the status of that complaint is – you’d think it would be ahead of this one in the queue, but as noted I don’t know how this process works. Last month, there was another complaint filed over Paxton’s thuggish attempt to intimidate the Court of Criminal Appeals for its rejection of his attempt to become the supreme prosecutor of all voter fraud allegations.
Anyway. Harrington states in the article that he believes it would be appropriate for Paxton to lose his law license over this, which is the maximum penalty the Bar can levy. I agree with that, but please note that would not disqualify him from being the Attorney General. It would just be humiliating, if it’s possible for Ken Paxton to be humiliated. My guess is that he’ll choose the evidentiary panel to proceed, but we’ll know soon enough. The Trib has more.
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