Texas panel files articles of impeachment against state attorney aeneral

A Republican-led committee of the Texas House of Representatives recommended Thursday that the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, be impeached for a range of abuses of his office that the committee’s investigators said may have been crimes.

The recommendation thrust the state Capitol and its Republican leadership into uncharted political territory in the waning days of the legislative session, setting the stage for the House to hold a vote on impeachment, its first in decades and one of the few conducted in the state’s history.

If impeached, Paxton, who has been under a separate criminal indictment since 2015, would be required to step down from his post temporarily while he faces trial in the state Senate.

“There’s really no precedent — we’ve really only had two impeachments under the constitution of 1876,” said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University. They include the governor in 1917, who resigned the day before the Senate convicted him, and a district judge who was convicted and removed in the 1970s.

Before the vote, the committee met in an executive session, outside public view.

“Overturning elections begins behind closed doors,” Paxton said in a post on Twitter that included video of a lawyer from his office arguing against impeachment to reporters in a nearly empty committee room, while the committee’s deliberations were underway.

After the vote, the committee filed 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton, charging him with a litany of abuses including taking bribes, disregarding his official duty, obstructing justice in a separate securities fraud case pending against him, making false statements on official documents and reports, and abusing the public trust.

Many of the charges related to the various ways Paxton had used his office to benefit a particular donor, the committee said, and then fire those in the office who spoke up against his actions.

As the articles were being handed out around the House chamber late Thursday, Andrew Murr, chair of the committee and a Republican, said that they described “grave offenses” and that he intended to bring them up for a vote by the House.

The extraordinary developments were likely to test the Republican Party in Texas in new and unpredictable ways, at a time when divisions in the party have increasingly been exposed.

The Texas House is led by Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican representing Beaumont who is seen as a traditional conservative. In contrast, Paxton has been allied with the most strident Republican legislators in Texas and with former President Donald Trump, in a camp that also includes the lieutenant governor and leader of the state Senate, Dan Patrick.

The House investigations committee, made up of three Republicans and two Democrats, voted unanimously to go forward with impeachment proceedings during a brief public session. “The chair moves that the committee adopt the articles of impeachment against Warren Kenneth Paxton, attorney general of the state of Texas,” Murr said. .

It was not immediately clear when the House would take up the articles of impeachment and conduct a floor vote, although several members said they expected it would occur before the session ended Monday. If not, lawmakers could call themselves back into a special session at any point to deliberate.

Asked by a House member about the timing of an impeachment vote, Phelan said Thursday night that Murr would determine when to bring up the matter for a vote. He did not provide a timetable.

For much of Thursday, House members were preparing for what had already started to feel inevitable.

At least one lawmaker could be found researching the impeachment process in the Capitol’s library. “I’m trying to figure out what impeachment is all about,” said the lawmaker, Rep. John Smithee, a Republican from the conservative Texas Panhandle. Speaking before the committee’s vote, he said that it was too early to cast judgment on the matter and that he believed officials might be rushing into impeachment.

“I would like to hear additional evidence instead of just a report,” Smithee said, “and his side of the story if he’s willing to tell it.”

The vote by the House committee came a day after hours of detailed testimony Wednesday from a team of investigators — former prosecutors who were hired by the committee to look into corruption allegations against Paxton.

The investigators described how Paxton had abused and misused his office to help an Austin real estate developer and donor who also hired a woman with whom Paxton was having a relationship, and how Paxton had created a climate of fear within the office of the attorney general.

The misdeeds that Paxton was accused of committing rose to the level of possible criminality, the investigators said, including instances of retaliation against people who spoke up.