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Ken Paxton is dirty? NO FUCKING WAY!


Gil Bang

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1 minute ago, Beau Vine said:

Paxton, who would use his wife as a human shield, said the ruling upends about 70 years of practice and jeopardizes the prosecution of election law violations by leaving it to local prosecutors — including some who, he said, can't be trusted with the job.

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12 hours ago, Satchel said:

Was watching commentariat on TV earlier and they were laughing and shaking their heads at Texas voters. One guy said derisively that Texas voters just don’t care. He’s right.

Well the equine lobby certainly has a better sense of Texas politics than most other states.

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But as Paxton seeks to fend off legal troubles and win a third term as Texas’ top law enforcement official, his agency has 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.

This playbook sounds eerily familiar...

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Good lord...

 

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"(The) investigation found Paxton and his deputies have 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."

 

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Good lord...
 
"(The) investigation found Paxton and his deputies have 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."
 

Holy shit.
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So then Paxton says to the presenter, "I said to do this in XL, not XS.....amirite people?"

The man is literally running for his life right now.  When he is no longer a publicly elected official under state LEO protection, there is an open bounty on his head from some associates of his down south.  And those people are a lot of things, but impatient isn't one of them.  He can serve two more terms if he wants to, 8 years means nothing to them.  

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6 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

So then Paxton says to the presenter, "I said to do this in XL, not XS.....amirite people?"

The man is literally running for his life right now.  When he is no longer a publicly elected official under state LEO protection, there is an open bounty on his head from some associates of his down south.  And those people are a lot of things, but impatient isn't one of them.  He can serve two more terms if he wants to, 8 years means nothing to them.  

Wait, what?

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14 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Wait, what?

Dude, he was supposed to help launder money using real estate.  He fucked up on some of it.  I'll tell you about in person some time, you very well know some of the other people involved.  He took points on a deal that he didn't execute on.  He's walking dead.  Good news for him though he'll have plenty of time to make it right seeing as how there's no way anybody beats him in the next 8 years and he obviously gives zero fucks about breaking the law while in office.  But if he were to have lost to Bush, he'd have had a medication mishap in March.  

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I can understand that prosecutors or the AG office might need to possess and view child porn within the confines of their role. I’m sure that is a disgusting part of the job. But using that porn in an unnecessary method would seem to me to cross the line into personal use of child porn and should be viewed as a potential crime.

Any image should only be viewed as little as possible as part of a prosecution. Any other use should be criminal. The child is being victimized again even when others are unexpectedly forced to view it.

If the AG knew of a potential child porn crime, wouldn’t they be legally required to send information to the Travis (or wherever) county DA for investigation?

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6 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

^^^  This. I would think (hope?) the guy was throwing up images and saying "see how bad it is out there?" and not "this is one of my favorites."

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But maybe it was both.  

 

I assume it’s the former and not the latter but im unsure if good intentional use of child porn is much of an argument. Maybe it could matter in terms of punishment but not deciding whether a crime took place.

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Nothing to do with child porn, but the story caused me to remember the time in high school (catholic all-boys school in Dallas) when we were doing a project on capturing and keeping attention and we had to do a presentation on the projector. We bought printable transparencies and put pics of naked women on them with bullet points around them with whatever information we were trying to convey. The teacher saw what we were doing and instead of stopping us he just stood in front of the window in the door and let us finish. We definitely captured and maintained the room's attention. We got an A. 

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-04/texas-attorney-general-ordered-to-testify-in-abortion-case?sref=knoriXqz

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was ordered to give testimony in a legal battle over funding for abortions, after previously fleeing his home to avoid being served a subpoena in the case.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman said Tuesday that Paxton must provide testimony during a hearing or in a deposition to answer a central question in the case: Whether he plans to pursue criminal charges or civil penalties against organizations that fund out-of-state abortions for Texas residents.

Several of these organizations sought to compel Paxton’s testimony during a Sept. 27 hearing on their request for a preliminary injunction, which would allow them to resume funding travel for legal abortions without fear of prosecution.

The Republican official and his wife drove away from their home to avoid a person who arrived to deliver court documents. Paxton sought dismissal of the case, arguing that his office doesn’t have the authority to bring criminal prosecutions under the state’s restrictive abortion laws and that his office wasn’t given prior notice of the groups’ intentions to invite his testimony.

Pitman blocked the subpoena prior to the Sept. 27 hearing, but said he would reconsider the matter based on testimony given on the day and whether attorneys for the abortion funders could demonstrate the value of Paxton’s testimony in the case.

During the hearing, the groups highlighted numerous social media posts and media interviews where Paxton said he plans to target Texans who seek out-of-state abortions, but his language on the issue was fuzzy and his office has yet to issue official guidance on the matter. 

In his Tuesday order, Pitman said it’s clear that only Paxton can provide clarity on his position on out-of-state travel for legal abortions. 

“The court will not sanction a scheme where Paxton repeatedly labels his threats of prosecution as real for the purposes of deterrence and as hypothetical for the purposes of judicial review,” the judge wrote.

 

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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Hey-QAnon-Texas-had-an-actual-17492470.php

Some details on the ineptitude of Paxton and his office.

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So where’s QAnon when you need them? We’re talking about the secretive cult of conspiracy-mongering crazies who believe that Democrats are pedophiles prone to making meals of their victims at the behest of evil Hillary Clinton and who worship Donald Trump. We’ve noticed that the former president has taken to wearing a Q pin on his lapel, but in the interest of truth, justice and the American way, we ask, how can these folks stay anon when an actual elected official in the great state of Texas has, by his rank incompetence, abetted what would appear to be actual cases of child sex-trafficking?

It should come as no surprise that we’re talking about the state’s highest-ranking law-enforcement official, Attorney General Ken Paxton, now in the midst of campaigning for a third term while fending off reverberations from yet another in a long list of embarrassments.

Last year, the AG’s office proudly announced that the Human Trafficking Unit of the Criminal Investigations Division had arrested a group of people involved in a scheme in Coryell County, a rural county west of Waco, to ship teenage girls to Dallas and other Texas cities, where they were forced to “exchange sexual contact for crystal methamphetamine.” Paxton’s office dubbed its sex-trafficking investigation “Operation Fallen Angel.”

Now, thanks to a blockbuster investigative report by the Associated Press, we learn that Operation Fallen Angel has quietly fallen apart because of the AG’s bungling. Six of the people indicted are now free. One is being held in the Coryell County jail on other charges, while an eighth died in jail. The AP reports that Paxton’s attorneys were recently forced to drop four of the human trafficking and sexual assault cases — because they misplaced one of the victims.

“It’s absolutely broken. It’s just broken. You don’t do it this way,” Coryell County District Attorney Dusty Boyd told the AP.

Boyd, a Republican, had a five-lawyer team working on the cases before handing them off to Paxton’s office. “I made the mistake of trusting them that they would come in and do a good job,” he said.

The AP investigation confirmed what Texans already knew: It’s been broken since Jan. 5, 2015, the day Paxton raised his right hand and took the oath of office.

While Paxton’s office was falling apart — correct that: while our office, the people’s office, fell apart under his watch — the AG himself was gallivanting around the country filing absurd lawsuits claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen. When he wasn’t making a fool of himself in federal court, he was a warm-up act for Trump at the White House gathering of insurrectionists on January 6. Since then, he’s been fighting access to abortion and siccing state investigators on families with transgender children. Just a few days ago found him sneaking out of the garage entrance to his Collin County home trying to avoid a court process server. It’s little wonder that the everyday work of the attorney general’s office, vital work for the people of Texas, has been neglected or mishandled.

Paxton, who came into office under indictment for felony securities fraud (and after seven years still awaits trial), remains the subject of a federal investigation into accusations of other kinds of corruption, including bribery and abuse of office. A steady stream of disgusted attorneys, including some close aids turned whistle-blowers, has left the AG’s office.

One prosecutor told the AP he quit in January after supervisors pressured him to withhold evidence in a murder case. Another attorney resigned a few weeks later, leaving behind a letter that warned of growing hostility toward LGBTQ employees. That same employee, an assistant attorney general at the time of his resignation, accused new executives Paxton had hired of “directing prosecutors to prioritize political considerations.”

The AP investigation found that, as of August, the number of assistant attorneys general in the division that handles human trafficking cases was down by 40 percent. The number of assistant attorneys general in the criminal prosecutions division was down more than 25 percent from two years ago. The group that deals with financial and white-collar cases had been cut by more than half and has merged with another division.

“This is scary to me for the people of Texas,” said Linda Eads, who served as a deputy attorney general in the early 2000s. She told the AP it was rare for any division to have more than two or three vacancies.

Boyd said staff turnover in Paxton’s human trafficking unit contributed to the collapse of the cases in his county. In the last two years, Republican lawmakers have doubled the division’s budget to $3 million, but Boyd told the AP he has doubts about how Paxton has spent the money.

“For Pete’s sake, you’re the AG’s office. You can’t find the victim?” he said. “The culture is broken.”

Nothing new here, of course. Like Pigpen, the Peanuts cartoon character, a noxious cloud envelops our attorney general.

And not just him. Paxton has tainted the top law enforcement office in the state, and in the process, he’s apparently jeopardized a criminal investigation and endangered victims.

Paxton’s buffoonish adventures may read like a comic strip, but the harm he’s doing to this state is real. How long will his supporters stand by and let it happen?

 

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5 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

@TwiceHorn This means fuck all right?

Normally, Congress cannot force a sitting President to appear before it.  They don't even bother to attempt a subpoena or a contempt vote because this is a pretty settled policy.  It's pretty much period, paragraph, end of story.

Of course, Trump is no longer the sitting President.

But they want to question him about things he did as a sitting President.

So, like a lot of this shit, it's a grey area.

Most of those arguments are, indeed, bullshit.  But, he has an argument no one else yet subpoenae'd can make that is untested.

Can a former President be compelled to testify before congress about matters that occurred while he was President?

A lot of the separation  of powers arguments are out the window, because he is no longer the executive.  And that may mean that the courts will entertain it as not a "political question."  And, of course the matters at issue are outside the normal gambit of executive concerns and tilt pretty far into the realm of personal concerns not unique to the executive office.

We have heard from the courts that a former president retains some interest in confidentiality of actions taking place in office, but we don't know where that ends.  We have also heard from the courts that the need for evidence in the 1/6 matter "trumps" any claim of executive privilege, at least with respect to documents.

Where the answer lies, no one knows.

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