How a Trump DOJ could bring an end to the yearslong investigation of a notorious ally

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18 January

Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024.

When President Donald Trump appeared in a New York courtroom last spring to face a slew of criminal charges, he was joined by a rotating cadre of lawyers, campaign aides, his family — and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton had traveled to be with Trump for what he described on social media as a “sham of a trial” and a “travesty of justice.” Trump was facing 34 counts of falsifying records in the case, which focused on hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her from disclosing their sexual relationship.

“It’s just sad that we’re at this place in our country where the left uses the court system not to promote justice, not to enforce the rule of law, but to try to take out political opponents, and that’s exactly what they’re doing to him,” Paxton said on a conservative podcast at the time.

“They’ve done it to me.”

A year earlier, the Republican-led Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach Paxton over allegations, made by senior officials in his office, that he had misused his position to help a political donor. Trump was not physically by Paxton’s side but weighed in repeatedly on social media, calling the process unfair and warning lawmakers that they would have to contend with him if they persisted.

When the Texas Senate in September 2023 acquitted Paxton of the impeachment charges against him, Trump claimed credit. “Yes, it is true that my intervention through TRUTH SOCIAL saved Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from going down at the hands of Democrats and some Republicans …” Trump posted on the social media platform he founded.

The acquittal, however, did not wholly absolve Paxton of the allegations brought by his former employees. The FBI has been investigating the same accusations since at least November 2020. And come Monday, when Trump is inaugurated for his second term, that investigation will be in the hands of his Department of Justice.

Paxton and Trump have forged a friendship over the years, one that has been cemented in their shared political and legal struggles and their willingness to come to each other’s aid at times of upheaval. Both have been the subjects of federal investigations, have been impeached by lawmakers and have faced lawsuits related to questions about their conduct.

“If there’s one thing both guys share in common, people have been after them for a while in a big way. They’ve been under the gun. They’ve shared duress in a political setting,” said Bill Miller, a longtime Austin lobbyist and Paxton friend. “They’ve both been through the wringer, if you will. And I think there’s a kinship there.”

Neither Trump nor Paxton responded to requests for comment or to written questions. Both men have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, claiming that they have been the targets of witch hunts by their political enemies, including fellow Republicans.

Their relationship is so cozy that Trump said he’d consider naming Paxton as his U.S. attorney general pick. He ultimately chose another political ally, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Although Trump did not select Paxton, the two men will get yet another opportunity to have each other’s backs now that he has returned to office, both when it comes to the federal investigation into Paxton and pushing forward the president’s agenda.

Before and during Trump’s first term, Paxton filed multiple lawsuits challenging policies passed under former President Barack Obama. He then aggressively pursued cases against President Joe Biden’s administration after Trump lost reelection. Such lawsuits included efforts to stop vaccine mandates, to expedite the deportation of migrants and to block federal protections for transgender workers.

Trump has supported Paxton over and over, not only as the Texas politician sought reelection but also as he faced various political and legal scandals. The president-elect’s promises to exert more control over the Justice Department, which has traditionally operated with greater independence from the White House, could mark an end to the long-running investigation into Paxton, several attorneys said.

Justice Department and FBI officials declined to comment on the story and the status of the investigation, but as recently as August, a former attorney general staffer testified before a grand jury about the case, Bloomberg Law reported. Paxton also referenced the FBI’s four-year investigation of him during a speech in late December without mentioning any resolution on the case. The fact that Paxton hasn’t been indicted could signal that investigators don’t have a smoking gun, one political science professor told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, but a former federal prosecutor said cases can take years and still result in charges being filed.

“As far as I’m aware, this is pretty unprecedented, this level of alliance and association between those two figures,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“Don’t Count Me Out”

In 2020, when then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr found no evidence to support Trump’s claims that voter fraud turned the election results in his opponent’s favor, Paxton emerged to take up the argument.

He became the first state attorney general to challenge Biden’s win in court, claiming in a December 2020 lawsuit that the increased use of mail ballots in four battleground states had resulted in voter fraud and cost Trump the election.

Trump eagerly supported the move on social media, writing, “We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case, ruling that Texas had no legal interest in how other states conduct their elections. Trump, however, didn’t forget Paxton’s loyalty.

He offered Paxton his full-throated endorsement during the 2022 primary race for attorney general against then-Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush. His decision to back Paxton, who was under federal criminal investigation at the time and had been indicted on state securities fraud charges, was a major blow to Bush, the grandson and nephew of two former Republican presidents. Bush had endorsed Trump for president even though Trump defeated his father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in the Republican primary and repeatedly disparaged his family.

Trump properties in Florida and New Jersey served as locations for at least two Paxton campaign fundraisers over the course of that campaign. And at a rally in Robstown in South Texas, Trump repeated debunked claims that the election was stolen and said he wished Paxton had been with him at the White House at the time. “He would’ve figured out that voter fraud in two minutes,” Trump said.

While Paxton pursued reelection, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an investigation into how his administration handled thousands of government documents, many of them classified. Paxton led 10 other Republican state attorneys general in intervening in court on Trump’s behalf, arguing in a legal filing that the Biden administration could not be trusted to act properly in the case.

Paxton won another term in office in November 2022, but the celebration was short-lived. Six months later, the Texas House of Representatives considered impeaching him over misconduct allegations including bribery, abuse of office and obstruction related to his dealings with Nate Paul, a real estate developer and political donor. Paxton has denied any wrongdoing.

Hours before the House voted on whether to impeach Paxton, Trump weighed in on social media.

“I love Texas, won it twice in landslides, and watched as many other friends, including Ken Paxton, came along with me,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Hopefully Republicans in the Texas House will agree that this is a very unfair process that should not be allowed to happen or proceed — I will fight you if it does. It is the Radical Left Democrats, RINOS, and Criminals that never stop. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! Free Ken Paxton, let them wait for the next election!”

Despite Trump’s threat, the House voted 121-23 in May 2023 to impeach Paxton. The Senate then held a trial that September to determine Paxton’s fate. “Who would replace Paxton, one of the TOUGHEST & BEST Attorney Generals in the Country?” Trump posted before the Senate acquitted Paxton.

Trump is among the few people who understand what it’s like to be under the kind of scrutiny Paxton has faced and how to survive it, Miller said.

“There is that quality [they share] of, ‘Don’t count me out,’” he said. “‘If you’re counting me out, you’re making a mistake.’”

On Monday, Trump will become the first president also to be a convicted felon. A jury found Trump guilty on all counts of falsifying records in the hush money case. A judge, however, ruled that he will not serve jail time in light of his election to the nation’s highest office.

Trump has repeatedly decried the case, as well as the Justice Department’s investigations that resulted in him being charged in June 2023 with withholding classified documents and later with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election by knowingly pushing lies that the race was stolen. Jack Smith, the special counsel who led the DOJ investigations, dropped both cases after Trump’s reelection. A Justice Department policy forbids prosecutions against sitting presidents, but in a DOJ report about the 2020 election released days before the inauguration, Smith asserted that his investigators had enough evidence to convict Trump had the case gone to trial.

Not only have Paxton and Trump supported each other through turmoil that could have affected their political ambitions, they have taken similar tacks against those who have crossed them.

After surviving his impeachment trial in 2023, Paxton promised revenge against Republicans who did not stand by him. He had help from Trump, who last year endorsed a challenger to Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, calling Paxton’s impeachment “fraudulent” and an “absolute embarrassment.” Phelan, who has defended the House’s decision to impeach Paxton, won reelection but resigned from his speaker post.

For his part, Trump has tried a legal strategy that Paxton has employed many times, using consumer protection laws to go after perceived political adversaries. In October, Trump sued CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying the news organization’s edits “misled” the public. Instead of accusing CBS of defamation, which is harder to prove, his lawsuit argues that the media company violated Texas’ consumer protection act, which is supposed to protect people from fraud. The case is ongoing. In moving to dismiss the case, CBS’ attorneys have said the Texas law was designed to safeguard people from deceptive business practices, “not to police editorial decisions made by news organizations with which one disagrees.” (Marc Fuller, one of the CBS attorneys, is representing ProPublica and the Tribune in an unrelated business disparagement case.)

The move indicates a broader, more aggressive approach that the Justice Department may pursue under the Trump administration, said Paul Nolette, director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University, who researches attorneys general.

“It’s a signal to me that, yes, the federal DOJ is going to follow the path of Paxton, and perhaps some other like-minded Republican AGs who have been using their office to also go after perceived enemies,” Nolette said.

Cleaning House

On Dec. 21, six weeks after Trump won reelection, Paxton stepped onstage in a Phoenix convention center at the AmericaFest conference, hosted by the conservative organization Turning Point USA.

The event followed Trump’s comeback win. It also represented a triumphant moment for Paxton: He’d not only survived impeachment, but prosecutors agreed earlier in the year to drop long-standing state securities fraud charges against him if he paid about $270,000 in restitution and performed community service.

But Paxton spent much of his 15-minute speech ticking off the grievances about what he claimed had been attacks on him throughout his career, including impeachment by “supposed Republicans” and the FBI case.

He praised Trump’s selection of Bondi to run the DOJ. It was time to clean house in a federal agency that had become focused on “political witch hunts and taking out people that they disagree with,” Paxton said.

Before taking office, Trump threatened to fire and punish those within the Justice Department who were involved in investigations that targeted him. FBI director Christopher Wray, a Republican whom Trump appointed during his first term in office, announced in December that he would resign after the president-elect signaled that he planned to fire him. After facing similar threats, Smith, the special prosecutor who led the DOJ investigations, stepped down this month.

In his speech, Paxton made no mention of the agency’s investigations into Trump, nor did he connect the DOJ to his own case. But a Justice Department that Trump oversees with a heavy-handed approach could benefit the embattled attorney general, several attorneys told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Trump could choose to pardon Paxton before the case is officially concluded. He used pardons during his first presidency, including issuing one to his longtime strategist Steve Bannon and to Charles Kushner, his son-in-law’s father. He’s been vocal about his plans to pardon many of the Jan. 6 rioters on his first day in office.

More concerning, however, is if Trump takes the unusual approach of personally intervening in the federal investigation, something presidents have historically avoided because it is not a political branch of government, said Mike Golden, who directs the Advocacy Program at the University of Texas School of Law.

Any Trump involvement would be more problematic because it would happen behind closed doors, while a pardon is public, Golden said.

“If the president pressures the Department of Justice to drop an investigation, a meritorious investigation against a political ally, that weakens the overall strength of the system of justice in the way a one-off pardon really doesn’t,” Golden said.

Michael McCrum, a former federal prosecutor in Texas who did not work on the Paxton case, said “we’d be fools to think that Mr. Paxton’s relationship with the Trump folks and Mr. Trump personally wouldn’t play some factor in it.”

“I think that the case is going to die on the vine,” McCrum said.

Miller, Paxton’s friend, agreed.

“I would expect his troubles are behind him.”

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