Joe Biden

Paxton’s allies are singling out a half dozen senators for lobbying. A mysterious entity is airing TV ads targeting certain senators. And an influential establishment group is urging senators to oppose efforts to effectively stop the trial before it starts.

“Anyone that votes against Ken Paxton in this impeachment is risking their entire political career and we will make sure that is the case,” Jonathan Stickland, who runs the pro-Paxton Defend Texas Liberty PAC, said Thursday in a media appearance.

The high-stakes trial of Texas’ top legal official is scheduled to start Sept. 5. It comes after the House impeached Paxton in May, accusing him of a yearslong pattern of misconduct and lawbreaking centered on his relationship with Nate Paul, an Austin real-estate investor and Paxton campaign donor. Paxton, a Republican in his third term, was immediately suspended from office, and the trial will determine whether he will be permanently removed.

His fate lies in the hands of the 30 senators who can vote in the trial. (His wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, is recused.) Removal requires a two-thirds vote, meaning that if all 12 Democrats vote to convict Paxton, nine of the 18 remaining Republicans would have to cross over to force him out. Furthermore, only a majority vote is required for senators to grant a pretrial motion to dismiss, which would come before any opening statements. While that would require 16 of the 18 voting Republicans – assuming all Democrats oppose it — it may be a tempting option for GOP senators who do not want to go through with a weeks-long trial where the spotlight on them will burn even brighter.

Paxton’s supporters have touted him as the tip of the spear in Texas’ battles against President Joe Biden’s administration. The impeachment, they argue, is a plot by the Republican establishment to take him out after failing to defeat him in his reelection campaign last year.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is presiding over the trial, imposed a strict gag order on senators that largely prohibits them from commenting on the case publicly. Shortly after Paxton’s impeachment in May, several GOP senators issued identical or similar statements telling constituents they could not discuss the case but welcomed their feedback.

Paxton’s allies have gotten more aggressive in recent days. On Tuesday, Dallas County GOP activist Lauren Davis went on the show of Steve Bannon, the former Donald Trump strategist, and urged viewers to apply pressure to six GOP senators: Kelly Hancock of North Richland Hills, Bryan Hughes of Mineola, Charles Schwertner of Georgetown, Charles Perry of Lubbock, Drew Springer of Muenster and Mayes Middleton of Galveston. She said Middleton was especially important to lobby given that he was a top donor to Paxton’s primary challengers in 2022.

"We're gonna make all these six famous in the days ahead," Bannon said.

Earlier in the week, Davis used her group, Moms Love Freedom, to launch a petition asking the Senate to dismiss the articles of impeachment “with prejudice.”

Davis was the 2022 Republican nominee for Dallas County judge and is currently running for Dallas County GOP chair, challenging an incumbent. She shares a political consultant, Axiom Strategies, with Paxton.

The pressure ramped up more Wednesday, when a new group began airing TV ads targeting certain senators before the Republican presidential primary debate on Fox News. One commercial targets Schwertner and asks viewers to call him and “tell him to stand up to the left and stop the impeachment of our attorney general.”

The group, San Jacinto 2023, ran $31,000 in ads Wednesday and was set to air another $6,000 on Thursday, all on Fox News, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. While it was not immediately clear which senators they all targeted, the ad buy was in the Abilene, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Waco and San Antonio markets.

San Jacinto 2023 is a Virginia-based corporation that was formed June 28, according to records in the state. Other records show the group uses a media buyer, Ax Media, that is part of Axiom Strategies, Paxton’s political consulting firm. Those records list the group’s treasurer as Nancy Rennaker, an employee at The Gober Group, an Austin-based law firm that Paxton has used.

Rennaker did not respond to a request for comment.

Then on Thursday, the deep-pocketed GOP group Texans for Lawsuit Reform issued a rare public statement on the impeachment process. The group, which heavily funded one of Paxton’s primary challengers in 2022, reiterated it “had nothing to do with” his impeachment, a day after the Dallas Morning News reported that Paxton’s lawyers planned to call TLR founder Richard Weekley as a witness.

But what came next was more notable. The group, which was sitting on a $33 million warchest as of June 30, made clear it expected senators to oppose the pretrial motions to dismiss — or anything else that could derail a full-blown trial.

“There is an ongoing effort underway to intimidate the Senators into abandoning their constitutional obligations and acquitting Paxton before the trial even begins and the evidence has been presented,” the statement said. “These efforts are disrespectful of the constitutional impeachment process and insulting to the integrity of the Texas Senate.”

“TLR expects the Senate will conduct a fair, open and thorough trial and that each Senator will make her or his decision solely on the evidence presented,” the statement added, putting an emphasis on “solely.”

The statement was only attributed to Texans for Lawsuit Reform and not any specific representative of the group.

Such an intervention is likely to further inflame tension with Paxton and his allies, who have long theorized the impeachment was initiated by a GOP establishment that failed to defeat him at the ballot box last year.

That became clearer when Davis returned to Bannon’s show Thursday and elaborated on why she named those six. She said four of them — Hughes, Middleton, Perry and Springer — may be listening to political consultants who have “vendettas” against Paxton and noted all four share a consultant who previously worked for Paxton.

Davis’ appeared to be a reference to Jordan Berry, an Austin-based consultant who resigned from Paxton’s campaign in 2020 after senior officials in his office asked federal law enforcement to probe Paxton’s relationship with Paul. Berry declined to comment.

Davis appeared on the show jointly with Stickland, a former state representative whose PAC has been a top defender of Paxton. It has already put up billboards and sent out text messages attacking House Republicans who supported Paxton’s impeachment.

“We’re spending millions of dollars,” Stickland said. “We think this is a huge fight.”

Russia on Thursday extended by three months the detention of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, defying pleas for the release of the reporter arrested on the job in March.

Gershkovich, unlike many Western reporters, had continued to report from Russia during Moscow's offensive in Ukraine.

Rudy Giuliani lashed out at President Joe Biden and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over his prosecution for alleged election interference in Georgia.

During an appearance on Steve Bannon's War Room program on Thursday, Giuliani accused Biden of "100 incidents of violations of people's constitutional rights."

A “senior Republican lawmaker” warned members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight committees that “nobody is paying attention” to GOP efforts to divert attention from President Donald Trump’s legal woes “other than the people who are obsessed with Trump,” CNN reports.

According to reporters Annie Grayer and Melanie Zanona, the unnamed lawmaker made the remark in response to tactics by Republican-led committees in the House “to defend the former president and offer up some counter programming amid his mounting legal battles.”

Per CNN:

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is expected to open a congressional investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as soon as Thursday, a source tells CNN – the same day former President Donald Trump is slated to surrender at the county jail after being charged for participating in schemes to meddle with Georgia’s 2020 election results.

The committee is expected to ask Willis whether she was coordinating with the Justice Department, which has indicted Trump twice in two separate cases, or used federal dollars to complete her investigation that culminated in the fourth indictment of Trump, the source added.

Following the first GOP primary debate of the cycle, former Vice President Pence appeared on CNN for an interview — and became evasive when anchor Victor Blackwell asked him why his own criticism of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy doesn't apply to the ticket he ran on in 2016.

"I want to play a bit of your criticism of him and then ask about it on the other side," said Blackwell, playing a clip of Pence saying, "Now is not the time for on-the-job training. We don't need to bring in a rookie, people without experience." "You say he is a rookie, on-the-job training. Your last boss was a rookie. He had on-the-job training, a businessman who had never been elected, had no foreign policy experience. Why is it disqualifying for Vivek Ramaswamy and not for Donald Trump in 2016?"

Deep blue Dane County went for Gov. Tony Evers in 2022 with more than 78% of the vote and Joe Biden with more than 75% of the vote in 2020, but Republicans here know they don’t need to get to 50 plus one to sway one of Wisconsin’s notoriously close elections, they need to push those numbers up above 30% to take a healthy enough chunk out of the Dane County Democratic advantage to give the more Republican parts of the state a chance to catch up.

These are voters who talk about using their vote strategically, understanding where they fit into the political landscape and have an incentive to find candidates who might be palatable to the convincible Democrats and independents in the county.

If Wednesday's US Republican debate was judged on applause alone, Vivek Ramaswamy won hands down, with Nikki Haley emerging as a pleasant "surprise" -- at least at one Atlanta bar, where a group of young voters was trying to pick a candidate to back.

Gathered at a bar in the city's trendy Buckhead district, more than a hundred people, including young Republicans, watched eight of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination with interest.

A former U.S. Department of Justice official and another high-ranking aide to former President Donald Trump suffered legal setbacks in their challenges to the Fulton County 2020 presidential election interference case Wednesday.

Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s top environmental lawyer who provided advice that encouraged states to appoint an alternate slate of 2020 electors, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, both fought to stave off their Fulton County prosecution on Wednesday.