With Jared Yates Sexton off today, Nick Hauselman focused on the Ken Paxton Impeachment trial and his subsequent acquittal despite massive bipartisan support for his removal in the Texas House. Brad Johnson, senior reporter for The Texan, and Ryan Chandler, statewide capitol correspondent for NBC Austin, join Nick to discuss in detail how Paxton survived accusations of corruption, abuse of office, and fraud, with a side of an extramarital affair thrown in for good measure.
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Hey everybody, my name is Nick Hauselmann and welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
My co-host Jared Yates-Sexton is out for today, so I have a chance to have the run of the place.
And I decided, let's look at the Ken Paxton affair.
Because if you missed it, he was able to avoid being impeached as Attorney General of Texas.
And Texas is a very fascinating place.
Obviously, they have an independent streak.
And they pride themselves on that.
That said, the local house was able to get the impeachment process going in a very bipartisan manner, and everyone seemed to be on board with getting Ken Paxton out of there.
Normally you'd think that the Attorney General of all people would stick to the law pretty closely, but the facts of these cases and of the issues they had with him were pretty much not disputed that much.
It was really just a question of whether they felt it rose to the level of impeachment and getting him out of there.
And what happened from the House, what seemed like a slam dunk impeachment, no problem, let's move on, turns into a Senate that does not vote to impeach and he gets off.
I brought in two local reporters from Texas who are on the ground covering this every day to give us a lot more insight and details because I feel like you might have missed some of these things and it's truly fascinating with lots of intrigue and a little bit of risque behavior as well thrown in there which always makes for some good coverage.
Stay tuned as we bring this up.
I'll have two really great interviews coming up.
And don't forget, on Fridays we release our Weekender episode, which is on our Patreon.
You can get 10 or 12 minutes of that for free here on wherever you get your podcasts.
But don't forget, it's a great show.
It's about an hour, if not longer.
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Ken Paxton will be looming large as we move into 2024.
You might have forgotten he was part of the legal case against 2020, trying to prove that it was a rigged election.
That didn't go that well, but you have to imagine that Trump and his cronies will ultimately be more organized and be well prepared for 2024.
So you've got to keep your eye on what this guy is doing.
And the fact that he wasn't impeached was truly a fascinating development that certainly he'll be happy and smiling about.
So let's get right to it.
Here are my interviews I have on the Ken Paxton situation.
And we're back and I'm pleased to bring on to the show Brad Johnson, who is a senior reporter for the Texan and certainly someone who's on the ground and has all the info we're going to need to discuss what's going on with Attorney General Ken Paxton.
So, Brad, thanks for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for having me.
It's been a wild few weeks, but now the dust is finally starting to settle.
Wild is a good word that my audience is extremely familiar with, and so let's get into this a little bit because it seems to me that Ken Paxton is some sort of a lightning rod in Texas.
He's got a lot of supporters and a lot of people who are against him, so can you just give us a little bit of an overview of how the House began this process, a Republican-controlled House, to oust a Republican Attorney General?
So, for a long time, the House General Investigating Committee had been investigating this, quote, Matter A, since March, I believe.
Nobody really knew what it was.
There was another issue in the state where a state rep was expelled for the first time in almost 100 years for having an improper relationship with one of his staffers.
And so the reason that ties in here is there was another allegation against a member that that happened before that one.
And so everyone thought matter a. Was this totally unrelated situation turns out at the, in the last week of session.
It was unveiled that the matter of the whole time was this committee looking into Attorney General Ken Paxton's request for $3.3 million to pay for this ongoing whistleblower settlement.
And so that's what got the ball rolling.
The House itself has never been friendly with Paxton.
Broadly speaking, many of the Republicans in the House are just from a different faction of the Republican Party in Texas.
And, you know, there's not, I wouldn't even say there's two factions.
There's multiple factions in this.
But Paxton and the Texas House have never been really friendly.
The Speaker, especially, is not a big fan of the Attorney General.
And that goes the other way, too.
He's not a big fan of the Speaker.
So, when the end of session was nearing, the General Investigating Committee announced subpoenas in Matter A, including to members of the Office of the Attorney General.
And that's when everyone really fully realized what was going on.
Various statements were put out.
Attorney General Paxton called for Speaker Dave Phelan to resign.
There was a viral clip the previous weekend where the Speaker slurred his words on the dais, convening the House.
Mr. Campbell, the Senate amendment is acceptable to the author.
Is there objection to the opposite amendment?
The chair hears none.
The amendment is adopted.
That ignited a lot of questions.
The Speaker still hasn't really addressed that one way or the other.
But in his statement, Attorney General Paxton called for the Speaker to resign because he was allegedly drunk on the job.
That, however, was issued to preempt this coming meeting in which the General Investigating Committee announced they would recommend impeachment, articles of impeachment, against the Attorney General.
So, this really behind-the-scenes PR fight was going on, but ultimately, Two days before Sine Die, which is the end of the session, they had a vote, and it was a very long proceeding.
Members from both camps made their arguments about whether he should be impeached, whether the process was done correctly.
Ultimately, he was impeached.
I think it was 121 to 23, and then two abstentions.
And now I'm here to welcome on to the show Ryan Chandler, who is a statewide Capitol correspondent for NBC Austin.
And Ryan, thanks so much for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
Hey Nick, I appreciate you having me.
Well, I thought we can get right to it because I'm kind of curious if you could paint the picture a little bit deeper in terms of the scene of what was happening in the office of Ken Paxton when so many of his underlings, people that worked for him, decided to turn against him, basically become whistleblowers and report on some misdeeds that they saw happening.
So can you give us some insight into what that, how that all played out?
Yeah, so the core of this impeachment trial centered around a man named Nate Paul.
He's a wealthy Austin area real estate developer and investor and a campaign donor to Ken Paxton.
Both Nate and Ken have faced a long pattern of legal troubles dating back years, and that's really where the relationship between Nate Paul and Ken Paxton began.
Nate Paul was facing a federal investigation for some white-collar financial crimes, and he went to the Attorney General and asked Ken Paxton's office to kind of look into the investigation.
He thought that they executed an illegal search warrant against him, that his rights were being violated by the FBI.
This was back during the Trump administration.
And so he wanted some help from the Attorney General's office within his own private legal troubles.
When Ken Paxton takes that request to his his top deputies, they are initially skeptical to use the Attorney General's office to help out Nate Paul.
They thought that this was his private matter that the state did not have any business getting involved in.
And it would be better for Ken Paxton to distance himself from both a legal and ethical and optics standpoint.
This could look like giving special legal favors to a donor.
And they refuse to help Ken Paxton do this.
At that point, Paxton hires an outside attorney by the name of Brandon Kamek, who is listed by name in the impeachment articles because the House says that this was using the power of the office to hire an unqualified attorney to essentially do the private deeds of the Attorney General at the expense of the people of Texas and for the benefit of a donor.
The whistleblowers believe that the the level of treatments towards Nate Paul and the favors that they believe Ken Paxton was giving him were unethical and they go to the FBI with these complaints.
This is the impetus of the impeachment because Ken Paxton fires them shortly after they make this complaint to the FBI.
They sue the Attorney General's office for wrongful termination and Ken Paxton ends up settling with them out of court for $3.3 million.
Paxton asks the state to pay that bill with taxpayer dollars.
And that's when the House of Representatives launches this inquiry into, hold on a second.
Why are you asking the state to pay all of this money for your own private legal troubles?
We're going to look into this and see if this is an appropriate use of taxpayer money.
And they turn over a lot more than they thought they would in that investigation and end up impeaching him for charges relating to bribery, abuse of office, for a wide range of charges mostly centered around Paxton's relationship with Nate Paul.
That is a long but honestly abridged version of events that brought us here today.
I mean, it sounds, I mean, if you can't see my face, my eyebrow continues to rise, one of them, as you describe all these things.
And so it sounds a little bit like Ken Paxton wanted to be Napal's personal attorney, right?
But it also sounded to me like Napal is a very wealthy man who could have hired an attorney to do these things.
So what about Ken Paxton, you know, appointing this person to look into the FBI, gives Napal, I guess, an advantage in his case?
Yeah, that's a good question.
And, you know, I think he wanted the power and the influence of the attorney general's office on his side.
You know, Paxton is is a very effective attorney general when it comes to conservative causes, especially when it comes to, you know, fighting with the federal government, the FBI, the Biden administration.
Now, this all happened during the Trump administration, funny enough, but.
You know, I think having a conservative figure and a state official like Paxton on Paul's side, I don't know what was in his mind, but he thought that it could give him an advantage against the FBI there.
Fair enough.
I mean, certainly it sounds like it when you have an attorney general looking into it, there might be some avenues they can get to that you wouldn't as a normal attorney.
So clearly that gets into this ethical issue, I suppose.
Do you get the sense that during this trial that the Republicans who were having to decide in the Senate, did they feel like The defense of Paxton was good enough that they were convinced none of this actually happened?
Or are they simply saying it didn't rise to the level of impeachment?
Yeah, that's a good point.
The defense spent considerable time making the argument that the evidence is simply not there for such a grave political punishment.
Not necessarily that everything Paxton did was Right, not that he did not do all that he is accused of, but simply that the evidence is is based on whistleblower testimony and hearsay and does not rise to the highest level of legal burden that was on the prosecutors, which they had to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.
That was the burden of proof, the same burden of proof that is in a criminal death penalty case.
So very, very Serious charges require serious evidence.
And their argument was it simply was not there.
And, you know, I think the senators obviously ended up agreeing with that.
With the whistleblower case specifically, were there moments where this seemed like it might go away and maybe the impeachment wouldn't have happened at all if that had been settled?
The House Speaker said, if Ken Paxton did not ask us to pay that $3.3 million, we would not be here today.
That is the impetus for the impeachment.
If that had been, you know, allowed to go to court, or if Paxton had paid that settlement out of personal funds, he could have avoided this whole issue.
That is fascinating.
So basically, the people that were fired from his office for, you know, whistleblowing on him about, you know, the egregious use of, or misuse of his office, they were willing to settle.
They were going to take money and be able to move on with their lives as a settlement.
Now, why did that settlement not, was there any reason why that didn't actually go through?
I guess, was it Paxson decided he simply wasn't going to pay that money out of his own pocket?
Yeah, I think the way that the law actually works is that if you're sued in your official capacity as Attorney General, you're not allowed to pay that personally.
That's a state issue, it has to come from state funds, so I'm not sure actually how much Fascinating.
I think from the outside, looking in, we tend to assume that the Republican Party as a whole acts in lockstep.
So, it seems a little bit to me like, you know, when I picture Texas, we think about, I don't know, the O.K.
Corral and sort of like a very iconoclastic past in a way.
Is it safe to say that the inter-workings of the Republican Party there have the similar kind of factions like you mentioned?
Is it that deep-seated in the sort of independence of Texas since the founding?
I yeah, it's certainly a very Texan thing.
I think also Republicans have controlled basically the entirety of government of state government for two decades.
And so when that happens, you're fighting internally.
You're not fighting against the second major party because that party they haven't won.
Democrats have not won a statewide race since, I think, 1992 or 94.
They have not controlled Either chamber of the legislature since, I think, 2002.
So, this is internal fighting.
This is an intra-party squabble over how forcefully conservative policy is pushed, and which conservative policies are advanced.
The legislature only meets for 5 months every 2 years, unless special sessions are called.
There is a limited amount of things that can get done in that time.
They're not constantly in session, and so there's a limit to the political capital on certain things.
One side argues that conservative policy is not being prioritized enough.
The other side argues that it is.
It's an endless debate.
So did anything else, there's a number of articles of impeachment brought against Ken Paxton.
Did anything else stand out in your mind as these were revealed and we realized the extent of what they were accusing him of?
So the other star figure, if you will, in this impeachment trial is a woman by the name of Laura Olsen, who is the woman with whom Ken Paxton had an extramarital affair.
Now, usually that would not be an impeachable offense, right?
That's a personal concern, but prosecutors made the argument that this rose from the level of personal to illegal when he allegedly used Nate Paul's favors and state money and state time as a way to facilitate that affair.
Um, we heard a lot of testimony from his former chief of staff in the Attorney General's office who said that this was really impacting office morale.
They all knew about this affair and were worried about the possibility of blackmail.
They say that his security detail and his travel aides were being asked to put in extra hours and work.
odd hours to facilitate this affair.
And Nate Paul even hired this woman to come from San Antonio, where she was living to Austin.
Prosecutors made the argument that that was as a favor to Ken Paxton to make that relationship a little easier on him.
Well, you know, there was I'm old enough to remember a time where that would probably have gotten someone just to resign.
Right.
Right.
So Paxton did not resign after the details of this affair became public.
In fact, his staff recounted the day when he stood with his wife in front of the Attorney General's staff and confessed to this affair and apologized and said that it will not continue.
We now know that it ended up continuing sometime later, and what is truly astonishing about this whole affair is that his wife, that I just mentioned, is State Senator Angela Paxton, who was on the jury that heard this entire trial.
Now, she was not allowed to vote.
Senators deemed that a conflict of interest, but she still had to be in the audience listening to these details about how his affair played out.
I believe the term is awkward.
Yes.
It was very awkward at times.
I'm curious about the recusal of her.
Was there a fight at all on her end to say, no, no, no, I deserve to be a voter in this trial?
Or did she try to fight that?
Or did they simply bow out and say she understood?
Yeah, she ended up voting against the rules package that disqualified her from voting because she said that, look, I'm a duly elected state senator and you are denying my constituents of their voice in this trial, regardless of my relationship to the defendant.
Now, in fairness to her, she is not the only one who has a relationship with the defendant that would disqualify her from a real jury.
I mean, every state senator in this trial would be disqualified from a jury if this was a real court of law.
They all know the defendant.
A lot of them are old friends.
Some of them work together side by side.
When Paxton was a senator himself, Some of them have donated to his campaigns or to his opponent's campaigns, mind you.
So there is a long history here of conflicts of interest that made this a political process at the end of the day.
This was not a criminal or civil trial.
This was a political proceeding and you simply cannot get past all the complicated web of connections here.
One of the articles of impeachment is of note.
I think we can go through a couple that might be stood out in your mind.
But obviously, one of them is regarding an affair that Paxton had, which would probably violate, I would imagine, the conservative values they're talking about.
And am I correct in saying that that affair is actually even had been acknowledged, like Ken Paxton says he had it?
Yes, now he wasn't being impeached for the affair.
He was being impeached for allegedly, one of them was using, one of the articles was using OAG staff to facilitate the affair.
Sorry for laughing.
I don't think even the House would not have impeached Paxton if the only allegation was that he had an affair.
So there's that.
The affair, though, ties into this alleged relationship Alleged improper relationship with this businessman named Paul and then, you know, favors that were done, priority given to Paul and other legal issues.
The affair itself, one of the big contentions was that Paul, in exchange for getting help from the OAG and Paxton, gave Paxton's mistress a job.
So she was, and I believe still is, employed by Paul.
But the defense contended that she got the job honestly.
She was hired by Merit and still is kept on employment today.
So the affair was kind of window dressing, though it was part of some of these abusive office allegations.
Now, there are 20 articles, right?
You can go through them all, and it's kind of a laundry list of things, and they're related, a lot of them are related.
So, are there any other articles in there that you might want to highlight that kind of stood out in your mind as something that, you know, was newsworthy and then thought it was interesting?
Well, the two that I thought that had the best chance of conviction One was Article 17, which dealt with what I mentioned about the affair and staffers allegedly helping facilitate that.
There was testimony by the former Chief of Staff that people in the Office of the Attorney General were getting calls from Paxton's wife, Senator Angela Paxton.
And she insinuated that they had to lie about where he was because they didn't know.
Ultimately, that was not approved.
The Senate did not approve that one.
Another one that I thought had a good shot going into this, into the vote, was Article 5, which centered on the hiring of this special prosecutor to investigate Allegations made by Nate Paul that the FBI, in another proceeding, abridged its authority or acted improperly.
And so Paul had asked the Attorney General's Office to look into this, to evaluate whether the FBI violated, defrauded a search warrant, acted improperly in various other ways.
And this Houston attorney named Brandon Kamak, Was hired to look into that.
He issued 30 subpoenas throughout the process.
The whistleblowers, the staffers found that to be improper and kind of a, in their words, a sham investigation.
The word sham has been thrown around a lot in this situation here in both directions, but.
These staffers, in their observations, determined that this was an improper use of OHE resources and time.
And they actually, before the special prosecutor was even hired, they objected to doing this investigation themselves, because they saw it as kind of fatuous.
I think there were definitely political considerations being made among the jury because, you know, they, at the end of the day, are elected officials themselves who have to answer to their constituents and we know that there was a lot of pressure put on these senators from grassroots conservatives and pro-Paxton PACs.
And donors.
We know, in fact, there was a pro-Paxton political action committee by the name of Defend Texas Liberty who donated $3 million to Dan Patrick, the presiding judge of this trial, just before it convened.
So this, at the end of the day, is a trial that was not purely about the evidence and the accusations.
You cannot separate the politics from all of this.
I mean, and I agree, and I think that Ken Paxson's experience or what we've already known about him from the outside, looking at Texas, would indicate that yes, the political process would have ruled in this because we've seen him.
I mean, you know, I think he was part of the case to try and overturn the 2020 election in the legal system, right?
Right, right.
And it's funny, we saw former President Trump tweet or Post on Truth Social even today saying, I vindicated Ken Paxton, I saved him from this because he put out a statement calling this a, you know, attack from the rhinos and the establishment against, you know, my old buddy Ken Paxton who, you're right, was one of the only ones to stick his neck out for Trump when he was challenging the 2020 election.
So this has a national political implications as well.
This is all just extremely fascinating, lots of twists and turns, and I feel like, you know, people from the outside looking in, it's harder to, you know, you need someone on the ground like you to give us some, you know, all the details because it can get murky.
Very murky, I know.
Are there any other articles that were of interest to you that were able to, he was able to get off and return to his duties on?
Yeah, so one interesting thing is the Senate didn't even consider all of the articles of impeachment.
They voted on 16 and acquitted him on all of those.
But there were four separate articles that they chose to put off and ultimately dismissed without considering at all.
Those four related to his securities fraud indictments.
Which he still has to answer for in a real court of law.
He has been under federal felony indictment for securities fraud for eight years now, dating back for the entire time he's been Attorney General.
And it is just now coming to a head where they're planning to go to trial on this in federal court in Harris County next year.
And that could have real legal implications for Paxton, including prison time.
So the Senate said, essentially, maybe, you know, that's above our pay grade or that will be hashed out in federal court later.
So the verdict is still out on those very serious charges.
You know, it seems interesting to me because the defense approach doesn't seem to be refuting the facts as they're laid out in terms of what they're accusing him of.
Does it sound more like the Senators and the state senators were just simply feeling like it didn't rise to the level of impeachment even though all these things happened?
Well the defense did try and poke holes in certain things and they did successfully poke holes in like smaller minor details and I think that was a big reason why they were so successful.
You know there was one clip where that went pretty viral.
One of the witnesses said that they went when they went to the FBI and the whistleblowers, they did it with without evidence.
Now he then later kind of walked that back and said, you know, our observations were evidence.
When we went to the FBI, we went as witnesses, not investigators.
But the defense got got their viral clip in it.
And it was pretty successful, I think overall.
I think the.
The amount of evidence that had before the trial prosecution.
To when at a press conference said something to along the lines of, you know, the, the evidence is 10 times worse than what.
We all know what had been put out in the newspapers.
Put out in public already and I think that kind of.
Among the senators, it undermined their case.
It made it oversold what the evidence was they had to offer.
And it opened them up to this vulnerability that, you know, they didn't get anything.
Fascinating stuff.
You know, why is Ken Paxton, like, it seems like he came into office right from the very beginning as a problematic figure, and I'm wondering if there was just some pre-existing condition related to him that just was going to inevitably lead to this impeachment trial.
When he first came in, he had a bit of a tiff with his first assistant attorney general, who is now a congressman, Chip Roy, over public credit.
He thought Roy was getting too much credit in terms of what the Office of the Attorney General was doing, and those two personalities just butted heads.
Then we saw these allegations of security fraud that still haven't been proven or disproven in court.
That's that's been bouncing around in courts for years.
And I think we do have a hearing date set finally on that for early next year.
And then you saw these conservative whistleblowers.
Disapprove of the way he was handling the office in certain aspects.
Overall, Paxton is a difficult figure to nail down.
He's very headstrong, I should say, and I think that has rubbed some elbows the wrong way.
We've seen him increasingly align himself with Trump in the Republican Party.
So there's a whole segment of Republicans that do not like Trump.
So there you have natural enemies there.
He has definitely been a controversial figure.
That is absolutely true.
And he's not really shied away from that.
He's out there, you know, suing the Biden administration, which is something Governor Greg Abbott did and made his name on, but he's also filing things like That's election 2020 election case to challenge the results in four other states and notably, you know, he's the basis of that lawsuit was that the governor's there changed election law without consent of the legislature.
And that's something governor Abbott did in Texas here.
Texas wasn't named in that suit.
So.
Yeah, he's been controversial for a while, but he has a lot of backers that, as we've seen in the last few months, will go to the mat for him.
And he came out unscathed, relatively.
Very impressive.
Now, the fraud case, I think, was folded into the impeachment trial.
Is that correct, with some of those articles?
And what was the result of that?
It was not folded into the impeachment trial itself.
It was part of the 20 that you mentioned that passed by the House, but they were held in abeyance during the trial.
They were not discussed because of the fact that things finally seemed to be moving in actual court on them.
Now, at the very end, the Senate Offered a motion to dismiss those, and that passed as well.
So, right now, there are no articles of impeachment against Attorney General Ken Paxton, still before the Senate, with that dismissal.
Now, with the tally of the Senate voting on the impeachment and acquitting him, how accurate is that count in reality when we knew how the Senators truly felt, I suppose, about the trial?
It seems that the numbers were a lot closer to the 21 vote threshold needed than we saw.
You know, I think that it was 14 votes to convict.
That was the most that any article got.
That's the entire Democratic caucus, 12 in the Senate, plus two Republicans, Senator Kelly Hancock and Senator Robert Nichols.
Which they got 14?
That was most of them.
Most of the votes on these 16 articles that were actually voted on came out to 14 to 16, I believe, yeah.
There was one that went down by a lot, 2 to 28, even almost all the Democrats voted against that one.
But most of the votes were that 14-16 total.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm not asking you if you like being covering other attorney generals in other states, but it seems like it would be considered an anomaly to have an attorney general of all positions to be embroiled in so many legal issues like this.
Is that safe to say?
You know, it's safe to say, you know, what the prosecution has said is this is the state's top law enforcement official, the top cop.
So if anybody, you would expect that official to be above bar to really, you know, have a squeaky clean legal record.
So that that's notable for sure.
But, you know, we we've seen similar scandals with top officials all around the country.
It's just Interesting that this one has lasted for so long and two ended in a way where we're back where we were before these charges came out at all.
And he presumably returned to the office today.
Well, you know, for full disclosure, we tend, over at the Muckrake Podcast, to look at people like Ken Paxton and the Governor and Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor, with, you know, with a little bit of skepticism, I suppose.
Healthy skepticism.
So, I suppose the system is working.
They ran it through the gauntlet.
He was able to come out on top.
What has been the reaction across Texas from him getting acquitted?
Well, from Paxton's supporters and the most conservative, you know, grassroots figures in the state, they are vindicated and they say this should never have happened at all.
In fact, even Dan Patrick, after spending months presiding over this trial as an impartial judge, ostensibly, You know, a lot of these people have to be up for re-election next year.
said, this process was so wrong and should never have happened.
And we are going to make changes to the Constitution to make sure that the House can never ram through an impeachment like this again.
You know, a lot of these people have to be up for reelection next year.
And so it is going to be, it would be very difficult to face, you know, Republican voters if they do, if they had voted for this and drew a primary to say, well, we voted for this even though it did not we voted for this even though it did not reach the threshold.
So it's kind of human nature, right?
I mean, I don't think it's very surprising the way it came out.
Fair enough.
Well, Brad, I can't thank you enough for coming on and breaking this down for us and giving us some more insight.
It's a fascinating case, and again, it's clear that it's not over for him just yet, right?
He's got the trial to deal with with the fraud that's from 2011.
I think it's a long time coming.
So, other than that, though, he's clear as an AG, he's free to do his job, right?
Yeah, and I'm sure he will go back to... Actually, today, he's going to be on Tucker Carlson's Show on Twitter, I believe.
And then he will be back in Austin, I'm sure, doing the job.
It's unclear what is going to happen with this whistleblower lawsuit because they agreed to settle, and then all of a sudden that was reneged because the whistleblowers, A, couldn't get the money that they agreed to settle on, and B, the Attorney General
Did not do did not adhere to the other terms that they had agreed upon in this and so what the future of that is I really don't know it but it's kind of in limbo and it may come back to it may surface again that's certainly possible But it was not a partisan battle in the House.
To your point, 70% of House Republicans voted to convict the Republican Attorney General.
When it got over to the Senate, only 11% of Senate Republicans voted to convict.
Fascinating.
Well, Ryan, I can't thank you enough for giving us that kind of insight and depth.
It really helps me and the audience figure out exactly what's going on.
Well, thank you so much, Brad.
I can't wait to see more of your reporting on it, and we'll keep an eye out for the rest of your coverage.
