Government

TX AG Ken Paxton Threatens To Sue State Bar For Witch Hunting Him With Rules Of Professional Ethics

If a tweet could be spittle-flecked...

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Ken Paxton

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has long ago used up all his nine professional lives. He’s been under indictment for securities fraud for years, and is facing whistleblower allegations from his own staff that he took bribes and abused his office. What’s one more bar complaint between old friends, right?

And yet Paxton isn’t shrugging off the 29-page nastygram (plus three pages for signatures from various luminaries and past presidents of the Texas bar) excoriating him for filing a frivolous suit, making false statements of fact and law to a tribunal, engaging in deceitful conduct, and failing to uphold the Constitution.

The complaint centers on the the ridiculous election suit Paxton filed in December of 2020 suing to invalidate electoral votes from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin because he didn’t like the way they ran their elections. He dropped this barely polished turd in the SCOTUS punchbowl claiming that he was totally on the guest list for their Christmas party thanks to the Court’s original jurisdiction over interstate lawsuits. But the Justices tossed him out without delay for lack of standing.

As in “don’t stand here with your idiotic LOLsuit which your own solicitor general wouldn’t even put his name on.” Well, more or less.

The Texas Tribune reported in March that the deadline for the Texas State Bar to dismiss the complaint had passed, which meant that it was actually investigating, a move Paxton attributed to an effort to tank his run-off election against George P. Bush.

“But I’m not worried,” he said at the time. “I take their partisan attacks as a mark I’m doing the right thing.”

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And he’s still saying it today.

 

“I stand by this lawsuit completely,” he huffed, accusing the bar of being a “liberal activist group masquerading as a neutral professional organization” and “waging a months-long partisan witch-hunt.”

“Texas Bar: I’ll see you and the leftists that control you in court,” he went on. Which is FACT CHECK TRUE, since attorney discipline actions in Texas go through the district courts. Just ask Sidney Powell.

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“I’ll never let you bully me, my staff, or the Texans I represent into backing down or going soft on defending the Rule of Law — something for which you have little knowledge,” he concluded. Which is big talk coming from someone who fired every one of the staff members connected to the whistleblower complaint against him.

Sylvia Borunda Firth, the current president of the State Bar of Texas, responded with her own statement. It is considerably less incendiary.

Sure, the Commission for Lawyer Discipline is made up of unpaid volunteers giving up countless hours to adjudicate ethics complaints. But that doesn’t mean they can’t engage in a little partisan witch hunt, too, right?

Who ya gonna believe? A panel of 12 unpaid attorneys who volunteer their time to ensure integrity of the profession in the state of Texas, or a guy under indictment whose own staff accuses him of exploiting his office to engage in an absolute orgy of corruption?

Yeah, it’s a tossup.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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