Defense Gears to Paint Paxton as Target
of Vendetta from Powerful Forces in GOP
Capitol Inside
September 3, 2023
Attorney General Ken Paxton appears poised to portray himself as the victim of a vendetta that political opponents in the GOP engineered based on the witnesses that the defense expects to call when he's tried in the Texas Senate on impeachment charges.
The Dallas Morning News obtained a confidential copy of the list of witnesses that both sides plan to present after the trial gets under way on Tuesday.
The list of witnesses who Paxton attorneys have submitted features a handful of prominent names that are associated with the Texans for Lawsuit Reform - a powerhouse political committee that spent millions of dollars trying to beat Paxton at the primary polls in 2022.
But the impeachment defense conspiracy reaches close to Governor Greg Abbott with former top aide Daniel Hodge on the list of witnesses that Paxton lawyers have identified. The defense appears prepared to allege that Hodge help set him up with a role that he ostensibly played in the hiring of Blake Brickman as an assistant AG who turned against Paxton.
Brickman is one of eight whistleblowers who are listed as witnesses. Paxton's team expects to depict as Hodge and Brickman as close friends and co-conspirators in a scheme crafted to bring him down. The inclusion of Hodge as a witness for the defense gives the impeachment saga an added dose of intrigue in light of his close association with Abbott and the influence that he's had with him. Hodge, who's an attorney and lobbyist, served as chief of staff for Abbott in the attorney general's office and after his election as governor as well.
Abbott has remained mum on the Paxton case with no apparent plans to acknowledge it unless he was forced to do so at some point.
The list of witnesses that Paxton submitted includes Bryan Hughes - a Republican state senator who will have one of the 30 votes that will decide the AG's fate. Hughes has acknowledged that he sought an attorney general opinion as a personal favor to Paxton when his friend Nate Paul, an Austin developer who's a central character in the impeachment saga, needed a committee chair to make the formal request. Hughes and Paxton have been longtime allies. He could have the rare opportunity of testifying as a witness in the historic event before he plays the part of juror with a vote on whether Paxton gets his job back.
But the defense could be showing its hand with the listing of TLR's two longtime leaders - Dick Trabulsi and Dick Weekley - and Jordan Berry as a consultant and strategist for the group.
The list includes Eva Guzman - a former Texas Supreme Court judge who challenged Paxton in the primary election in 2022 in a campaign that TLR bankrolled. Guzman was eliminated from the race in round one when George P. Bush advanced to a runoff with the incumbent. Bush is the on the Paxton lawyers' witness list as well.
House prosecutors will characterize the political plotting theory as a red herring to distract from the case that they've built up to now in thousands of pages of documents that are filed with the Court of Impeachment.
more to come ... |
