OAN’s Roy Francis
1:00 PM – Monday, August 1, 2023
Attorneys for Republican Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, filed a motion to dismiss most of the 20 impeachment charges against him on Monday.
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Paxton and his attorneys filed the motion with the Senate, where his impeachment trial is set for September 5th. They argued that state law prohibits the removal of elected officials for conduct that occurred before their most recent election. They further argued that voters knew of his alleged misconduct well before he was reelected to his current term, therefore he could not be removed from office.
“The Articles allege nothing that Texas voters have not heard from the Attorney General’s political opponents for years,” Paxton’s attorneys wrote. “Texas voters rendered their judgement by re-electing Attorney General Paxton to serve a third consecutive term. As a matter of both common sense and Texas law, that should be the end of the matter.”
Paxton has been serving as the Texas Attorney General since 2015, being elected to the post three times.
The team of attorneys said that the GOP controlled Texas House of Representatives wanted to oust Paxton because they were not able to unseat him by popular vote.
“Unable to defeat the Attorney General at the polls, the architects of the present impeachment caused the House to quickly file and pass twenty Articles of Impeachment—in a mere three days,” a spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The allegations making up the Articles contain unsupported, vague, and irrelevant assertions of non-impeachable conduct.”
The one article of impeachment, that his attorneys had excluded from the filing was the allegation that Paxton had settled a $3.3. million lawsuit with former employees from his office. The former employees had sued him for wrongful termination after they alleged that they were dismissed for being whistleblowers against him. The funds that were to be used in the settlement were supposed to be drawn from public funds, which state Legislators had refused to do.
The request for public funds to settle the suit had prompted the investigation into Paxton by the Texas House General Investigative Committee, which in turn led to the current impeachment proceedings.
According to the Texas Tribune, the team of attorneys had slammed the House impeachment managers as “aggressive, reckless and misleading,” they further accused them of having “little to no evidence” to support their allegations.
The impeachment process has attracted national attention due to the legal challenges that Paxton had brought against the Biden administration. Paxton had led the 2020 lawsuit, Texas v. Pennsylvania, which contested the results of the 2020 presidential election and was considered by the United States Supreme Court.
The presiding officer of the impeachment trial is Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who also serves as the president of the state Senate. The Republican-controlled Senate will consider the evidence of the case in the first impeachment trial of a statewide official since 1917.
Paxton was removed from office on May 27th, when the articles of impeachment were first approved.
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By: OAN
