HOUSTON (CN) — Texas’ most powerful law enforcement official had his long-awaited felony trial set for April 2024 at a hearing Monday.
Surrounded by his attorneys, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton left out a side door without speaking to reporters after a 10-minute hearing in which Harris County 185th District Court Judge Andrea Beall set his trial for April 15.
A hard-right Republican and acolyte of President Donald Trump, Paxton was elected to a third term last November.
In July 2015, less than six months into his tenure as attorney general, a Collin County grand jury indicted him on two counts of securities fraud and one count of failing to register with state securities regulators.
He is accused of selling $840,000 worth of shares in software firm Servergy Inc. in 2011, when he was a Texas state representative, without disclosing that in return the company was compensating him with 100,000 shares of stock.
If convicted, Paxton could be sentenced to 99 years in prison and would be disqualified from holding holding state office.
He has pleaded not guilty. He claims he did nothing wrong and the charges are politically motivated.
Special prosecutors Brian Wice and Kent Schaffer told journalists after Monday's hearing that unlike Paxton's recent impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, he will be required to be present for all the proceedings in his criminal trial.
The case has been delayed for years amid disputes over the venue and the special prosecutors’ pay.
Paxton wanted to keep the case in his native Collin County. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in June overturned lower courts’ rulings and ordered that the case be moved to Harris County, whose seat is Houston.
Before trial, Judge Beall must resolve a conflict over the special prosecutors’ pay.
Schaffer and Wice said they were promised fees of $300 an hour, much less than what they charge in private practice. But they have not been paid for their pretrial work on the case since January 2016, when the Collin County Commissioners Court approved their first $242,000 bill.
Collin County is paying the fees because that is where the acts Paxton is accused of happened.
Yet the county’s Republican commissioners, some of whom are Paxton’s allies, refused to pay the prosecutors’ second bill of $199,000 in January 2017 and challenged the tab in court — this after Jeff Blackard, a North Texas real estate developer and Paxton political donor, sued to try and block the payment, only to drop his lawsuit.
Siding with the county commissioners, the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas vacated an order directing the county to make the payment and ruled the prosecutors should only be paid “a fixed fee of $1,000 for pretrial preparation, and a fixed fee of $500 for each one-half day of trial” for felony cases, as set out in Collin County’s fee schedule.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals then refused to issue an order allowing the special prosecutors to collect the $199,000 bill.
Beall set a pretrial hearing for February but did not say when she would resolve the payment dispute.
While Wice said he’s “not going anywhere,” Schaffer said he might withdraw from the case depending on Beall’s decision on the back pay.
“We’ve spent more time defending our fees than we have prosecuting the case,” Schaffer said, “because of all the motions, the objections. We’ve been sued multiple times, trying to block payment. Because their thought is: ‘If we cut off your payment, you’ll withdraw. If you withdraw, the case is over.’ So, it’s Mr. Paxton’s way of trying to escape justice.”
On Sept. 16, the Texas Senate rejected 16 articles of impeachment against Paxton, including articles for abuse of office, constitutional bribery, making false statements in official records, conspiracy and abuse of the public trust.
The vote was largely on party lines in the Republican-majority chamber, which includes Paxton’s wife, Republican State Senator Angela Paxton — though she was not allowed to vote in the impeachment trial. All but two GOP state senators voted to exonerate Paxton, leaving the number far below the 21 votes needed on any of the articles to remove him from office.
Paxton’s impeachment trial focused on charges from several of his former top aides in the attorney general's office. They reported him to the FBI in October 2020, saying he was using his office to help his friend and political donor Nate Paul, an Austin real estate developer, with criminal and civil legal problems.
The Texas House voted 121-23 in May to impeach Paxton after it launched a secret investigation into the attorney general, a probe that started after he asked the state to use taxpayers’ funds to pay a $3.3 million settlement to four of the whistleblowers who sued him after they were fired.
Four of the 20 impeachment articles adopted by the Texas House involved Paxton’s securities fraud charges, but the Texas Senate elected not to hear those articles in the impeachment trial and later dismissed them.
In addition to his upcoming criminal trial, Paxton is under investigation by the FBI and a federal grand jury in the Western District of Texas over his ties to Paul.
Calling Paxton’s impeachment trial a farce, Wice said the criminal trial will be much different.
“In this courtroom, this building,” Wice said, “truth matters, evidence matters and the law matters. And I guarantee that it’s not going to be like it was in the impeachment debacle.”
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