A leading ally for President Trump in the battle over his immigration ban defeated securities fraud charges on Thursday, which he told the Washington Examiner were an act of revenge waged by his political opponents.
A district court judge granted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s motion to dismiss the charges on Thursday afternoon. Paxton spoke with the Washington Examiner this week while preparing to stand trial in less than two months on the charges: two counts of first-degree securities fraud and one count of failure to register with the state securities board.
“When I win, I can talk about this, you’ll hear a lot more about what really happened and it will be irrefutable evidence of some things going on that shouldn’t have been going on,” Paxton said before the charges were dropped, while he attended the Republican Attorneys General Association winter meetings this week in Washington. “I’m very confident, all you have to do is look at when I go speak, I still get the same number of people coming out. I have the same support. You look at my fundraising, I raised almost $3 million last year. I don’t know many AGs that have raised $3 million in a year. I don’t know if there’s one. So I’m still getting support from the people I need to get support from in Texas.”
Paxton is up for re-election in 2018, and Democrats had been looking to capitalize on the charges as political leverage to take out one of Trump’s top allies. When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals kept the blockade of Trump’s travel ban, Texas was the first state to rush to Trump’s defense and file a friend of the court brief.
“Trump is, in my opinion, helping us with the very issue we were most concerned about and so we were pleased to see the policy but even more pleased that we felt like he had the statutory authority from Congress, which what more can you ask for?” Paxton said. “We just wanted the court to know, here’s the law, you guys got this due process right, which is never heard of before for nonresident aliens, how about actually looking at what Congress said about this?”
Despite the favorable outcome for Paxton, the issue is likely to dog his re-election bid in 2018. Former Republican Gov. Rick Perry’s failed 2016 presidential campaign was hampered by legal trouble that may foreshadow what could remain ahead for Paxton. While the abuse-of-power charges against Perry were dismissed, the damage to Perry’s presidential aspirations was already done.
Tony Buzbee, Perry’s lawyer, told the Washington Examiner he did not notice any similarities between Perry and Paxton’s situations. Buzbee said in an email before the charges were dismissed that the charges against Paxton “are serious, he has serious lawyers, and the longer they pend the worse it is for him.”
The timing of the dismissal benefits Paxton’s re-election efforts. But his skill at easily explaining the details of his case to Texans could prove crucial to his political future. The Texas Tribune reports Paxton was surviving politically at home before the court dismissal Thursday.
