A Ken Paxton whistleblower testified Tuesday that Paxton took an unusually intense interest in Nate Paul’s litigation against a charity in 2020, leading the whistleblower to believe Paxton had “turned over” his office to Paul.
The whistleblower, Darren McCarty, said he ultimately found the office’s involvement in the lawsuit to be “unethical, against our statutes, and, I highly suspected, corrupt.”
McCarty was the deputy attorney general for civil litigation at the time.
Paul, an Austin real estate investor and Paxton campaign donor, was locked in a contentious dispute with the Mitte Foundation, an Austin-based nonprofit that had sued Paul for fraud. McCarty testified that Paxton asked him to intervene in the lawsuit, saying the litigation had gone on for too long.
McCarty said he was struck by how interested Paxton became in the case, describing an “urgency and anxiety” from the attorney general. Paxton wanted updates on any new developments, McCarty said, and even pulled McCarty out of an “important teleconference” to talk about it one day.
Paul was “vigorously complaining” to the office throughout, demanding to know why it was not making more progress in the lawsuit intervention, according to McCarty’s testimony. The whistleblower said he found Paul’s tone “wholly inappropriate” because the office is supposed to be working in the public interest of the charity, not in the interest of a litigant against the charity.
McCarty said Paxton had asked him to appear in Travis County District Court in a hearing on the lawsuit, but he resisted. Paxton said he himself would go, but McCarty said he talked Paxton out of it, calling it a “terrible thing for him to do” and that it would have sent a “very odd message.”
“He was the attorney general of Texas,” McCarty said. “He never appeared in court. Not once. Not a single time.”
McCarty testified that he later connected the dots when he saw Brandon Cammack, an outside lawyer that Paxton hired, issued a grand-jury subpoena “clearly seeking information” that would help Paul against the foundation. McCarty called his reaction “stunned.”
“I believed that the attorney general’s office had been … turned over by [Paxton] to a private citizen to do his bidding, and it was acting against the interests of the state of Texas,” McCarty said.
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