Paxton’s tale

Bribery probe is just the latest chapter in legal drama starring attorney general.

Suppose you learn a business may have cheated you out of a lot of money. Suppose your lawyer goes after the company and he strikes a deal to settle the case. What would you think if you later you discovered this curious fact: Before he negotiated the settlement, your lawyer took a $100,000 cash gift from the head of the company?

That’s not the kind of behavior you would expect from an honest attorney who’s above reproach. In fact, it’s the sort of shady and convoluted conduct you might read about in a John Grisham thriller. But it’s what we’ve come to expect from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and it’s one more reason our state needs a new attorney general.

If you haven’t followed the plot of this legal drama, here’s a synopsis. While he served as a state legislator, Paxton persuaded some people he knew to invest money in a business called Severgy Inc. The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation, saying Paxton broke the law because he failed to reveal he was getting paid by the company he was pressuring people to invest in.

All of this was public knowledge when Paxton ran for attorney general, but he won the nomination anyway. Tea party voters apparently didn’t know or didn’t care that he was under investigation in a case that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. And since most Texas voters blindly cast their November ballots for any politician with an “R” next to his name, Paxton became attorney general.

Sure enough, less than three months after his inauguration, Paxton was indicted. Since then, he has raised more than $500,000 for his legal defense fund. And it turns out his fund’s biggest contributor has been James Webb, the CEO of a company called Preferred Imaging.

That’s significant, because the Texas Civil Medicaid Fraud Division under Paxton’s command and the U.S. Justice Department had been conducting an investigation into Webb’s company, which a whistleblower accused of violating Medicaid billing rules. A year after Webb gave Paxton’s legal defense fund $100,000, his company reached a settlement in which it agreed to pay $3.5 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

In fairness, Paxton may have had no direct role in the settlement negotiations. Nonetheless, anyone who serves as a state attorney general should know better than to accept cash from somebody his office investigated.

Now Webb’s $100,000 gift is under scrutiny by the Kaufman County district attorney’s office, which will decide in the coming weeks whether it will charge Paxton with violating the state’s bribery and corrupt influence laws. So Texas taxpayers could end up with an attorney general simultaneously facing bribery and securities fraud charges.

The bribery issue is just one more reason Paxton needs to step down from his office. The people of Texas deserve an attorney general who can devote all of his time to his official duties. Instead, one of our state’s top elected leaders is fighting to keep himself out of prison for violating the same sort of white-collar crime his own office prosecutes.

But if Paxton won’t do the right thing and leave office, the leadership of our state’s political parties need to find good candidates to replace him. Republican primary voters, many of whom talk a good game about cleaning house, need to get this embarrassing politician off the public payroll. Meanwhile, Democrats need to field a viable alternative, not only for voters in their own party but also for Republicans who are getting fed up with the quality of the GOP’s candidates for statewide office.

The idea is pretty simple. If you discover you’ve got a bad lawyer, the smart thing to do is fire him and hire somebody else.

The bribery issue is just one more reason Paxton needs to step down from his office.