Though the dispute is continuing, an appeals court in Texas allowed this week for the continuance of a disciplinary case against state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who the case challenges over his involvement in targeting the 2020 presidential election outcome, meaning eventual President Joe Biden’s victory.
Paxton was infamously behind a failed lawsuit at the U.S. Supreme Court that targeted Biden’s wins in four states (other than Texas, where Donald Trump won in 2020). Paxton is now being challenged by a committee associated with the State Bar of Texas, whose pursuit mirrors similar disciplinary cases brought against other Trump allies including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Jeffrey Clark for somewhat similar reasons after they too advanced Trump’s post-2020 election efforts in some manner. Giuliani has, at this point, long been suspended from practicing law in New York and Washington, D.C., in connection to disciplinary proceedings.
And Clark, a former official at the federal Justice Department who Trump considered making the department’s leader in the closing periods of his term, was recently dealt an initial decision against him in his disciplinary case, though that dispute continues. When still in the federal government, Clark promoted a draft of a letter that would have advanced unsupported suggestions of systematic election fraud… a letter behind which his team still stood amid recent disciplinary proceedings.
In general — and this applies in Paxton’s disciplinary case as well, possible consequences reach all the way up to disbarment. The Associated Press explained that a two-judge majority from the three-judge panel that heard the latest arguments over his disciplinary case concluded that the matter could advance because of its argued focus on Paxton’s own conduct, separate from state matters. “The focus of the Commission’s allegations is squarely on Paxton’s alleged misconduct — not that of the State,” one judge said, as highlighted by that outlet.
