Ken Paxton Whistleblower: “Senior staff had no choice but to report him to FBI

Ryan Bangert, a former top official under the attorney general, said Paxton allowed a friend and political donor to hijack the state agency, diverting it from its mission to help all Texans.

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Ryan Bangert did not want to report his boss, Attorney General Ken Paxton, to the FBI.

A bona fide ultraconservative and former Paxton donor, the former deputy first assistant to the attorney general believed in Paxton and thought he made the Texas attorney general’s office a national “beacon” of the conservative legal movement.

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But, as Bangert detailed in crisp, riveting testimony during Thursday’s impeachment trial proceedings, he reluctantly concluded that Paxton’s repeated and escalating use of the office to help his friend and political donor Nate Paul left him and other senior staffwith no option but to report the behavior to the FBI.

“It was not a mutiny,” he said, rejecting prior characterizations by Paxon’s lawyers that his top staffers were trying to stage a coup in the attorney general’s office.

Instead, Bangert said, he and other whistleblowers concluded that Paxton was misusing the agency’s power to help one private individual, Paul, violating the agency’s responsibility to work on the public’s behalf.

“We were protecting the interests of the state and ultimately, I believe, protecting the interests of the attorney general and, in my view, signing our professional death warrant. We understood the gravity of that act,” Bangert testified.

Over two days of testimony, Bangert walked senators through nine months of Paxton’s “alarming” behavior in 2020, saying he repeatedly expressed concerns with Paxton over his demands to aid work on Paul’s behalf.

Paxton, Bangert testified, directed him and other members of the attorney general’s leadership team to take three actions that he described as “concerning” and “bizarre.”

• Paxton asked Bangert to overrule two previous decisions by the office of the attorney general that denied Paul access to documents related to a law enforcement investigation into Paul’s businesses.
• Shortly after, Paxton directed Bangert and staff to quickly whip together a legal opinion that would prohibit public foreclosure sales from continuing due to COVID-19 restrictions — a decision that would’ve benefitted Paul, who had dozens of properties facing foreclosure days later.
• Despite objections from senior staff, Paxton hired an outside lawyer to investigate Paul’s claim that his home and businesses were improperly searched by law enforcement in 2019.

“We were devoting far more resources to Nate Paul than we ever should have,” Bangert said.

As Paxton made his demands, Bangert said, the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, local jurisdictions were clamoring for guidance on how to respond, and the office was consumed with a massive legal case against Google. Even so, he said, Paxton’s main focus continued to be Paul’s affairs.

“I was deeply concerned that the name, authority and power of our office had been, in my view, hijacked to serve the interests of an individual against the interests of the broader public,” Bangert testified. “It was unconscionable.”

Ultimately, Bangert and six other top staffers reported Paxton to the FBI on Sept. 30, 2020, alleging bribery and abuse of office. He resigned about a month later as Paxton publicly denied the allegations, saying they were made by “rogue employees.”

During cross examination, Paxton’s lawyer sought to attack the credibility of Bangert’s claims — specifically those regarding the foreclosure opinion that Paul used to stave off auctions of some of his properties.

At one point, Paxton lawyer Anthony Osso downplayed the benefit that Paul received from the foreclosure opinion. After Bangert said he had voted for former President Donald Trump, Osso asked him if he was aware of Trump’s executive order that similarly delayed foreclosures.

And, as with Wednesday’s cross examination of Jeff Mateer, former first assistant general counsel, Osso accused Bangert of rushing to report Paxton to law enforcement without adequately addressing his concerns with his boss.

Bangert said he first became aware of Paul in early 2020 when he was serving as deputy attorney general for legal counsel.

Paxton asked Bangert to evaluate if it was possible to overrule a previous decision by the attorney general’s office to withhold law enforcement documents from Paul regarding an FBI raid on his house and businesses. Releasing the documents would go against long-standing precedent designed to protect information crucial to law enforcement investigations, Bangert said.

“That immediately sends up red flags to disclose law enforcement materials to someone who is under an active and very far-reaching investigation,” he said.

Bangert said Paxton’s requests then “metastasized to a new section within the attorney general’s office” when Paxton asked Bangert to find a way to intervene in a lawsuit between Paul and the Mitte Foundation. The charity had invested in Paul’s businesses but sued Paul, alleging he refused to provide them with financial information about their investment.

Bangert testified that he believed intervention from the attorney general’s office directly benefited Paul and his main company, World Class Holdings. Initially, he tried to unsuccessfully mediate between the two sides. Bangert then said Paxton ordered him to file a motion to halt the legal proceedings. Bangert said he was uncomfortable doing that and was ultimately removed from the case.

Paxton approached Bangert again a few months later with another order: evaluate whether foreclosure sales could be allowed to continue given the current state of the governor’s COVID orders. Bangert testified that Paxton rejected his initial advice that foreclosure sales should be allowed to continue.

Procedurally, the attorney general’s office needed to find someone authorized to submit a formal request for an opinion from the attorney general’s office. Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, ultimately stepped in. But Bangert testified that there was no evidence Hughes knew this request was made to benefit a specific individual.

Bangert and another whistleblower, Ryan Vassar, worked through the weekend on an opinion stating that foreclosure sales should be allowed to continue, which was consistent with the agency’s efforts to reopen Texas several months into the pandemic. When Bangert emailed the draft early Sunday morning, Paxton rejected it, telling Bangert it needed to be reworked — quickly — so COVID-safety rules applied to foreclosure sales.

“It was bizarre,” Bangert said. “He was acting like a man with a gun to his head. Anxious, desperate, urging me to get this out as quickly as humanly possible.”

When the Paxton-ordered opinion was finished, Bangert said he signed it, making sure his name was on the order instead of his younger colleague, Vassar.

“If something broke bad with this, I didn’t want it to tarnish his career,” he said.

Ultimately, Bangert said, he realized that issuing an opinion to stop foreclosure sales would benefit Paul, who had dozens of properties facing foreclosure.

On another matter, Bangert recalled, he and Paxton met Paul at his downtown Austin office, got in Paul’s car and drove to a nearby Mexican restaurant. There, Paul shared a laundry list of grievances related to his belief that he was being unfairly targeted by the Mitte Foundation and by federal and state law enforcement.

Bangert walked the jury through the summer and fall, as he and other senior staff learned Paxton hired an outside lawyer to investigate law enforcement who had an open investigation into Paul’s businesses. Bangert said he and other senior staff pushed back against the idea to hire outside counsel, Houston lawyer Brandon Cammack, but were unsuccessful.

Bangert called the evidence supporting Paul’s accusations against law enforcement as “frivolous at best,” an opinion he and others repeatedly shared with Paxton, only to learn that Paxton had hired Cammack anyway.

Bangert testified that while he and his direct boss, Mateer, were at a conference in Atlanta, they received a call from Paxton where he expressed frustration at the opposition to hiring Cammack.

The two were about to have an important meeting about the state’s lawsuit against Google, but Paxton only wanted to talk about hiring an outside lawyer.

“We were about to move into a very intense phase of Google litigation, and the attorney general’s focus was on Nate Paul, not on the Google case,” Bangert stated.

Shortly after, Bangert said, senior staff learned Cammack had been hired when a bank reported that it had received a grand jury subpoena related to the investigation.

“It became clear to me that there was nothing more I could do, that the attorney general was determined to harness the power of our office and to fulfill the interests of a single individual against the interests of the state,” Bangert testified.

Seven employees went to the FBI, where they were interviewed collectively for hours, Bangert testified. The following day, they alerted Paxton via text message they had made the complaint.

House impeachment lawyer Rusty Hardin posed to Bangert many of the arguments that Paxton lawyer Tony Buzbee used the previous day in effort to poke holes in Mateer’s testimony, such as why the whistleblowers didn’t go directly to Paxton to express their concerns about his behavior. But Bangert said there was “no question that he was well aware of our objections,” saying they had been lodged “repeatedly” and “in various ways” for months.

“We had stepped into the void at that point. There was no road map to follow,” Bangert said.

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Kate McGee and Robert Downen

This article in this post was originally published on the Texas Tribune website and parts of it are republished here, with permission under Creative Commons.