Meanwhile, Back In Austin...

Ken Paxton aspires to be Donald Trump.  The ETTD Donald Trump:

Brandon Cammack, the Houston attorney that Ken Paxton hired to investigate Nate Paul’s adversaries, testified that Paul’s lawyer provided him with a list of people to subpoena and that, after he received two cease and desist letters, he was told by the Attorney General’s Office that he’d have to “eat” a $14,000 invoice for his work.

Cammack’s testimony outlined the direct role that Paul’s lawyer, Michael Wynne, played in the attempts to investigate Paul’s adversaries in September 2020. Wynne, Cammack said, insisted that he be with Cammack as he issued subpoenas for phone and other records to some of Paul’s adversaries.

At one point, Cammack said he spoke with the spouse of a deceased clerk for the court that issued the search warrants for Paul’s businesses. He said Wynne and Paul suggested that the clerk had potentially died from “foul play” — insinuating that she was the victim of the same cabal that they claimed was targeting Paul.

Cammack said he became increasingly concerned that he was being misled about why he had been hired after he was visited by U.S. marshals, and felt like he’d “gotten the rug pulled out from me.”

He was asked to drive at the last minute from Houston to Austin for a meeting at Paul’s home. Paxton was there wearing running shorts, but spent most of the time talking on the phone outside. Cammack said he received little new information about what was expected of him, why U.S. marshals had contacted him or why he hadn’t been paid yet.

Later, Cammack said he was again called from Houston to Austin for a meeting with Paxton and Brent Webster, who played a direct role in firing whistleblowers who reported Paxton to the FBI. The two took him to a Starbucks for a 15-minute meeting during which Cammack said Paxton barely spoke. He said Webster told him that his contract was “not any good,” that he would need to “eat” the $14,000 in work he’d done and that the two almost left him without giving him a ride back to his car.

“It was offensive,” he said.

Cammack also lamented Paxton’s decision to involve him in the Paul matter, saying his name was dragged through the mud, that it hurt him professionally and that the only thing he received in return were two cease and desist letters.

“I had a whole entire life before all of this,” he said. 

Cammack said he worked directly for Paxton, and was doing the investigation Paxton's deputies refused to do (confirming their earlier testimony). 

Cammack said he expected to have meetings with top agency deputies such as Mark Penley, the former deputy attorney general for criminal justice who testified Monday that he thought Paul was dishonest. Cammack said he asked Paxton when he could meet with Penley, but was always told that Penley was on vacation and the case file was on his desk.

Cammack also said that Paxton asked him to communicate with him through encrypted communications services such as Signal and ProtonMail, and that the first time he saw Paxton’s official email address, it was when he received a cease-and-desist letter from top agency deputies.

I wish I'd heard the cross-examination where Buzbee accused Cammack of being yet another disloyal employee who turned on poor Captain Queeg.  I mean, Ken Paxton. Actually, that's an unfair comparison; Queeg was a more sympathetic figure than Paxton.

And I still expect those U.S. Marshals to pay Ken Paxton a visit sometime before October....