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BREAKING: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a raging inferno of corruption and incompetence. Must credit Wonkette!
Okay, not really. Paxton is famously facing civil and criminal fraud charges, multiple whistleblowers from his own office alleging that he did favors for donors, and a Texas bar complaint arising out garbage election lawsuit he filed to overturn the 2020 presidential election — one of many, many garbage suits he’s dragged the state into as part of his neverending culture war election campaign. But the AP has a story on the tire fire that Paxton’s leadership has spawned in the Texas AG’s office, and it is HOLY SHIT so much worse than we could possibly have imagined.
The top line is that Paxton has prized loyalty above competence and driven out experienced prosecutors, with one of his deputies even convening a meeting before the March primary to solicit cases which might help Paxton’s electoral prospects.
One prosecutor said he quit in January after supervisors pressured him to withhold evidence in a murder case. Another attorney signed a resignation letter in March that warned of growing hostility toward LGBTQ employees. By August, records show the division over human trafficking cases — a major emphasis in Texas, where more than 50 migrants died in the back of a trailer in June — had a job vacancy rate of 40%.
Indeed, the rot has been to such a disastrous extent that major prosecutions are falling apart, including one called “Operation Fallen Angel,” wherein teenage girls were allegedly induced to “exchange sexual contact for crystal methamphetamine.”
“On Sept. 13, the attorney general’s staff wrote in court papers that they were dismissing three trafficking cases because a witness had recanted and dropping the other four because they were ‘unable to locate victim,'” the AP reports.
And because Paxton’s toxic leadership has driven away all the competent staff, the incompetent partisan hacks have run riot. To wit, one Tom Gleason, a former police officer and ice cream company owner whose father donated $50,000 to Paxton’s legal defense. Gleason was inexplicably given a job advising the AG on child exploitation, and Medicaid and vote fraud.
[Trigger Warning: Child exploitation.]
And that’s how they wound up screening kiddie porn in the AG’s office.
Gleason was fired less than two months into his new job as a law enforcement adviser. Paxton’s office has not disclosed why, but three people with knowledge of the matter said Gleason included child pornography in a work presentation at the agency’s Austin headquarters.
The people said Gleason displayed the video — which one of them described as showing a man raping a small child — in a misguided effort to underscore agency investigators difficult work. It was met with outrage and caused the meeting to quickly dissolve.
Afterward, Paxton’s top deputy, Brent Webster, told staff not to talk about what happened, according to one of the people.
What the everloving fuck? Kinda makes it look okay that a guy who graduated law school in 2017 got promoted to Deputy Attorney General for Legal Strategy three years later when the experienced lawyer holding the job blew the whistle on Paxton, right?
Anyway, apparently movie night is a regular thing at the Texas attorney general’s office, which hosted a screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s ridiculous 2,000 Mules film for the staff.
“General Paxton will be present, among others, and I think they would love to have a good showing from our office,” assistant attorney general Jonathan White wrote in an email making it clear that the invitation was only quasi-optional.
And still Paxton retains a clear lead over his Democratic opponent Rochelle Garza, a human rights lawyer facing exactly zero indictments or state bar complaints!
Wow, gross! Come on, Texas, early voting is underway. You’ve got the power to get rid of this gross, subpoena-ducking, piece of shit, if you’ll only use it.
OPEN THREAD!
[AP]
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