Paxton whistleblower defends reporting him to FBI: ‘I was a witness to criminal activity’
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial ended its first week with more testimony digging into why his whistleblowing deputies reported their embattled leader to federal law enforcement.
Paxton attorney Mitch Little gave a fiery cross examination of Ryan Vassar, a former deputy attorney general who was the first of the whistleblowers who sued for retaliation to testify. Others who didn’t sue testified earlier in the week.
Little has tried to raise questions about the whistleblowers’ motives and blame news media for Paxton’s troubles. Paxton denies wrongdoing.
“A self-licking ice cream cone is when a bunch of employees at the Attorney General’s Office begin to suspect their boss,” Little said Thursday. “They read it in the media. They believe what the media says. They report it to the FBI and then the media reports that you went to the FBI.”
Paxton is accused of misusing his office to benefit Nate Paul, an Austin real estate investor and political donor, and then retaliating against employees who reported him to the FBI in 2020. Paxton gave Paul special legal attention and help while accepting home renovations and a job for a women with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
Little on Thursday pressed Vassar about whether they had evidence that Paxton committed a crime when he and other former deputies went to the FBI.
Vassar said the whistleblowers had “formed a belief in good faith that the attorney general was involved in criminal activity.”
Little countered that they didn’t know Paxton was engaged in illegal activity.
“That’s the point of the good-faith belief, is we had no evidence that we could point to, but we had reasonable conclusions that we could draw,” Vassar said.
Little continued to press that they went to the FBI “without any evidence.”
“That’s right, we took no evidence,” Vassar said.
As the back-and-forth continued, Vassar again stressed they had a good-faith belief a crime had occurred. He said they went to the FBI as witnesses, not as investigators to collect evidence.
Vassar, who now works as general counsel at the Cicero Institute, clarified his remarks while on the stand Friday. He testified he’d taken evidence as meaning documents, which he hadn’t taken to federal authorities.
“My opinion was that our experiences were evidence, but we did not conduct our own investigation to provide documentary evidence of what we had come to learn,” Vassar said.
He later added, “I believe that I was a witness to criminal activity that had occurred by General Paxton.”
Vassar was also asked whether he wished he’d called Paxton to give him a heads up before going to federal authorities.
“I wouldn’t do anything else differently,” Vassar said.
Much of the questioning centered on an informal opinion issued by the Attorney General’s Office related to foreclosures during the COVID-19 pandemic and the retention of outside counsel to investigate claims by Paul.
Paxton’s attorney asked Vassar about group text messages among the whistleblowers. The messages included a text that called Paxton a “pathological liar” and another where Vassar wrote that employees in the office would “need to start using smaller words in their pleadings.” Vassar said it was a group thread between friends.
At one point during his testimony, Vassar revealed that the office had a “blacklist” of reporters who were handled differently than other reporters. A spokesperson for the office disputed this claim in a statement first reported by the Austin American-Statesman.
“The Office of the Attorney General does not keep a media ‘blacklist’ or anything resembling such a thing,” said director of communications Paige Willey in an email.
David Maxwell, the attorney general’s former director of law enforcement, took the stand Friday afternoon. He is among the former staff to file the whistleblower lawsuit.
Maxwell described warning Paxton about getting involved with Paul. He told his boss that Paul was a criminal and that Paxton would put himself into criminal jeopardy.
“I told him that Nate Paul was a criminal,” Maxwell said. “He was running a Ponzi scheme that would rival Billie Sol Estes and that if he didn’t get away from this individual and stop doing what he was doing, he was going to get himself indicted.’
Maxwell, who met with Paul and his attorney, described how he refused to investigate the real estate investor’s allegations related to what Paul took to be improper search warrant execution — claims Maxwell saw as a “conspiracy theory” by Paul that didn’t warrant further probing. Maxwell said he reviewed documents provided by Paul, including providing them to forensic experts, but there was nothing there.
“I knew that he was probably going to fire me and hire someone who would do it,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell said he saw following through on the desired probe as obstruction of justice and interfering with a federal investigation. Dan Cogdell, one of Paxton’s attorney’s, disputed the idea that the investigation would have been a crime through his questioning.
Cogdell also asked why Maxwell didn’t investigate Paul’s claims further.
“And you never had any intention of conducting an objective, fair, reasonable, thorough investigation, did you?” Cogdell said.
“There was no investigation to be done,” Maxwell replied, the last word obscured by a sustained objection that he was being non-responsive.
Maxwell was out of town when the other whistleblowers decided to go to the FBI, but was in contact with them and said he would contact an official with the Texas Department of Public Safety and “also tell him what was going on and that we were going to request an investigation.”
Maxwell said he was placed on investigative leave and a month later, on Nov. 2, 2020, was fired from the attorney general’s office.
This story was originally published September 8, 2023 at 9:47 AM.
