Best mugshot ever
The Travis County district attorney’s office will not proceed with a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for refusing to release his communications around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Despite determining that the attorney general likely violated the state’s open records law, the district attorney’s office said it would not sue because journalists who had requested Paxton’s records declined to testify in court in order to protect their sources.
The district attorney’s office launched its investigation of Paxton’s office after editors at Texas’ largest newspapers filed a complaint earlier this year alleging that the attorney general was breaking the state’s open records law.
In a hand-delivered letter to Paxton on Jan. 14, Jackie Wood, the district attorney’s director of public integrity and complex crimes, stated her office concurred with the allegations in the editors’ complaint and gave Paxton four days to cure the violations or face a lawsuit.
“We were encouraged that the district attorney agreed that Paxton’s office violated the law,” said Maria Reeve, executive editor of the Houston Chronicle. “We hoped that those facts would be sufficient for a lawsuit to proceed — and that our reporters would not need to testify.”
Paxton’s general counsel, Austin Kinghorn, said the allegations were “meritless.”
Wood later asked the journalists if they’d be willing to testify in court about the roadblocks they encountered trying to obtain records from the attorney general’s office. The newspapers declined to do so over concerns that reporters could be forced to testify about their unnamed sources or newsgathering methods. If they refused to answer, they’d risk being found in contempt of court.
“Therefore, it is the decision of this office not to proceed to seek declaratory and injunctive relief in order to bring Attorney General Ken Paxton and the Office of the Attorney General into compliance with the public information requirements of the Texas Government Code,” Public Integrity Unit Team Leader Rob Drummond wrote in a July 1 letter to Reeve.
See here, here, and here for the background. On the one hand, I understand that the papers didn’t want to put any of their employees in legal jeopardy. On the other hand, I feel like they had some duty to pursue this to a conclusion, since they filed the complaint in the first place. Was there no way for a private citizen, someone who wouldn’t have sources to risk, to testify in their place? I don’t understand the legal subtleties of this. I’m just frustrated by the outcome.