AUSTIN, Texas — The impeachment trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch anti-porn Republican culture warrior, began Tuesday in the state Senate, probing allegations of “bribery, unfitness for office and abuse of public trust.”
According to the Washington Post, which deemed Paxton’s impeachment “historic,” the first day of the trial involved “theatrics, a prayer and scores of witnesses called to appear for and against the conservative firebrand.”
The state House, the Post reported, “overwhelmingly voted to impeach the attorney general in May, temporarily forcing him from office without pay pending the trial that could lead to his permanent ouster.”
The report noted that Paxton has been an unwavering supporter of former president Trump and his MAGA faction, making it “all the more stunning” that his fellow Texas Republicans provided the determining votes to move his impeachment forward.
Before Paxton’s suspension, the Post noted, only two officials in the history of Texas had ever been impeached: a governor in 1917 and a district judge in 1975, both removed from office for “misuse of public funds.”
Among Paxton’s alleged misdeeds, the House listed instances of “misconduct, bribery, obstruction of justice and misappropriation of public resources stemming from his effort to obtain $3.3 million in state funding to settle a lawsuit by senior aides,” the Post reported.
Censoring Exxxotica and Crusading Against ‘Pornographers’
Paxton was sworn in as Texas attorney general in January 2015. A year later, he became enmeshed in the controversy over whether the Exxxotica adult expo should be allowed in Dallas.
In early 2016, seven members of the Dallas City Council backed Mayor Mike Rawlings’ resolution banning Exxxotica from returning to the venue that had hosted the event in August 2015. The expo organizers requested a preliminary injunction halting that resolution, but District Judge Sidney Fitzwater denied it, issuing a 32-page opinion that the council was “within its rights to ban a sex expo from returning to the city-owned convention center,” the Dallas Morning news reported at the time.
Although Fitzwater granted that “at least some of the content of the Exxxotica expo is protected under the First Amendment,” he ultimately ruled that the council could decide how to rent the venue for commercial purposes, as opposed to running “a public forum.”
The members of the council, however, explicitly condemned the show in virulently anti-porn terms. Echoing the then-popular strategy of framing porn as a “public health crisis,” council member Adam McGough declared, “The truth is pornography is not just a lie, it’s lethal,” while his colleague Rickey Callahan stated that he could not see the framers of the Constitution granting “the unbridled right of pornography to be displayed in a public facility.”
Paxton endorsed the campaign to censor Exxxotica in Dallas with gusto. He filed an amicus brief and announced it with the sensational headline “Attorney General Paxton Stands with Dallas Business Leaders against Pornography Convention.”
“It is vital that governmental entities have the ability to exclude sexually-oriented businesses from property that they own,” Paxton proclaimed. “The City of Dallas, through its democratically-elected officials, has rightfully decided that its convention center should not be home to an event where obscenity and criminal activity occurs. A federal court should not overturn that decision by elected officials.”
Paxton wrote his brief in tandem with the misleadingly named “Dallas Citizens Council,” a conservative, pro-business civic group.
In the brief itself, Paxton cannily steered clear of stating his notions about “obscenity” or “pornography,” narrowly focusing on the “public forum” debate alone. The brief offers only a brief mention of the controversial “secondary harms doctrine” typically used to restrict adult businesses to inconvenient, largely industrial areas, a circular-reasoning tactic developed to sidestep the First Amendment with a supposed “public safety” argument.
In 2017, when Fitzwater once again dismissed the complaints of the Exxxotica organizers, Paxton issued another press release doubling down on the inflammatory anti-porn rhetoric, calling the show “an illicit convention” organized by “pornographers.”
Paxton wrote a second amicus brief in March 2017 supporting the city’s motion to dismiss the case, then claimed credit for helping prevent Exxxotica Dallas from taking place.
“Attorney General Paxton is fighting pornography in Texas because of its demonstrated harm on children,” the press release asserted, before shifting to an unrelated discussion of protecting children from online predators — even including a link to a “CyberSafety” website as it conflated that issue with the topic of an adults-only in-person convention.
An AG Office 'Unmoored by Disarray'
Paxton was reelected as Texas AG in 2018 and campaigned for a third term in 2022.
In September 2022, the Associated Press’ Jake Bleiberg published an investigative report titled “Dysfunction in Texas AG’s Office as Paxton Seeks Third Term.”
Bleiberg reported that Paxton’s staff had “quietly dropped a series of human trafficking and child sexual assault cases after losing track of one of the victims, a stumble in open court emblematic of broader dysfunction inside one of America’s most prominent law offices.”
The report also characterized Paxton’s office as having “come unmoored by disarray behind the scenes, with seasoned lawyers quitting over practices they say aim to slant legal work, reward loyalists and drum out dissent.”
The investigation reported on how Paxton and his deputies “sought to turn cases to political advantage or push a broader political agenda, including staff screenings of a debunked film questioning the 2020 election. Adding to the unrest was the secretive firing of a Paxton supporter less than two months into his job as an agency advisor after he tried to make a point by displaying child pornography in a meeting.”
In fall 2020, according to the AP report, eight of Paxton’s top deputies accused him of “using the office to help a political donor who employed a woman with whom Paxton acknowledged having had an extramarital affair. The deputies all quit or were fired after going to the FBI, which opened an investigation.”
Paxton reportedly resorted to covering his office’s vacancies with a motley crew of questionably qualified supporters, including a former ice cream company owner named Tom Kelly Gleason, whose father was a big donor to the AG’s legal defense fund. Gleason had been a police officer in the 1970s, before his foray into the business of frozen desserts.
According to three people who spoke to AP, shortly after being appointed, Gleason “included child pornography in a work presentation at the agency’s Austin headquarters,” showing a horrifically graphic CSAM video “in a misguided effort to underscore agency investigators’ difficult work.”
The stunt, the report continued, “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.”
Gleason was dismissed less than two months after being appointed.
Policing 'Pornography' Amidst Personal Moral Failings
Paxton’s office also reportedly bungled a human trafficking investigation called “Operation Fallen Angel,” involving allegations against eight individuals said to be “involved in a scheme to force teenage girls to exchange sexual contact for crystal methamphetamine.”
As XBIZ reported, while Paxton was dealing with the chaotic collapse of morale and desertions in his office, he found time to file another amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to narrow radically the scope of Section 230 protection for websites.
Paxton claimed that the courts have “misinterpreted” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act “and allowed it to become a nearly all-encompassing blanket protection for certain companies, specifically internet and Big Tech companies.”
According to the Republican AG, “boundless legal protections for these companies due to their perceived status as ‘publishers’ has heretofore prevented states from holding Big Tech accountable for numerous legal violations, even those that are unrelated to the publication of user content.”
The brief referred to “pornography” several times, asserting that “Congress enacted Section 230 as part of a broader statutory scheme to limit children’s access to internet pornography. Section 230 does that by allowing internet platforms to remove pornography (and similar content) without risk of being called to account for the content they fail to remove.”
Paxton also alleged that “the statutory history of Section 230 confirms the congressional intent to encourage Internet platforms to remove pornography and similar content, not to grant platforms government-like immunity for their own conduct. Supplementing legislation that criminalized the sharing of pornography, Section 230 gave Internet companies telephone-like liability protections, which allowed them to voluntarily remove pornography even as they carried countless other forms of content.”
Paxton was reelected as Texas Attorney General on Nov. 8, and impeached with bipartisan approval six months later by a House vote of 121-23.
“At the heart of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recent troubles,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Monday, “is that he used his office to help a political donor — Austin real estate investor Nate Paul — in exchange for allegedly helping the attorney general remodel his home and giving Paxton’s mistress a job in his company.”
Paxton’s private and public actions, the impeachment resolution states, “indicate his unfitness for office.”
Paxton pleaded not guilty on Tuesday at the start of his Senate impeachment trial.