Here’s how The Dallas Morning News busted Texas AG Ken Paxton for deleting records
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is denying open records requests to turn over his communications during the fatal January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Paxton was one of the leading proponents of the "Big Lie" of election fraud that incited the insurrection and had traveled to DC to rally Trump supporters seeking to overturn the election results.
On MSNBC on Friday, Lauren McGaughy of The Dallas Morning News detailed the newspaper's efforts to obtain the documents.
"Do you have any reason to believe he might have deleted the messages, or do you know those messages actually exist?" MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin asked.
"That's a concern of ours," McGaughy replied.
"You know, the agency, Ken Paxton's agency controls the public records releasing for the entire state," she explained. "So everything from police departments to the governor's office, if they want to withhold a record from the public, they have to go to Ken Paxton's agency and ask."
"And because we have received some concerning information releases from that office -- this isn't just about his records. it's about the public's access to records across the board -- we did try a test balloon to see whether we believed we could prove that there might be some deletion of records by Paxton. We actually texted his personal cell phone and then we filed a records request for that text and we were told there were no records responsive. And when we followed up and said, 'But we know there's a text message that -- since we sent one ourselves,' the agency said that unsolicited and unwanted messages were not subject to the records retention schedule, which was very concerning to us."
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