Tucker Carlson - Ep. 25 Liberals like Karl Rove just tried to annihilate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. It didn't work. Paxton just joined us for his first interview since his acquittal.
Ken Paxton, Texas AG, reveals how Democrats, Karl Rove, and Texans for Lawsuit Reform orchestrated his politically motivated impeachment—using two Biden DOJ lawyers—to silence his 77% successful lawsuits against the administration. Acquitted after a rigged process with no due process, he exposes Texas House Republicans’ control by 65 Democrats, Speaker Phelan’s alleged drunkenness, and voter fraud suppression via mail-in ballots, citing Texas’s 2020 election as proof. Paxton blames Soros-funded DAs for ignoring crimes, calls Cornyn a Rove puppet, and warns Texas could flip blue without conservative unity. Now back in office, he’ll resume legal wars against Big Pharma, tech giants, and Biden—framing his fight as the last line of defense against a collapsing conservative stronghold. [Automatically generated summary]
But it's just interesting because your fans and your detractors, I think, would both acknowledge that you're the most aggressive legal opponent of the Biden administration in the United States.
You're a Republican elected with a big margin in a Republican state, but it was Republicans who tried to take you out.
All he has to do then is find 10 Republicans because he's got his own vote.
And usually you can find 10 Republicans who are either his friends or who he gives big- Committee summits to, like appropriations or state affairs or something big.
They started in March, is what they said, like March 1st.
And they investigated secretly, behind closed doors, with no one knowing.
Even the House Investigating Committee, not all of them knew.
I know for sure that one of the Republicans had no idea until they got to that day that it was me.
And he was told to vote for impeachment without knowing anything about the case and actually disagreeing with doing it.
But he was told his career would be affected if he didn't vote for impeachment.
So those five members had an investigation for one day.
They did a four-hour hearing.
Less than 48 hours from that, I was impeached on Saturday, Memorial weekend, without an opportunity to present my side, without an opportunity to have any sworn testimony, which is required by law.
They are required to have witnesses sworn in under oath.
No one was sworn in under oath.
They didn't even have witnesses.
They brought in investigators who had talked to witnesses, which is obviously hearsay and wrong.
Then there's a group called Texans for Lawsuit Reform.
They spent a lot of money to bring in another candidate, Eva Guzman, who was on the Supreme Court, to be part of running against me.
And they thought that if they got enough people running against me, they could take me out of a primary or run me out of money by putting me into a runoff.
And this group has spent a lot of money, and they were certainly not only part of trying to get me defeated, but they were also very much a part of this effort.
We have emails where they've written articles, and they send them to Karl Rove, and then Karl Rove gets them published in the Wall Street Journal, whereas we couldn't get anything published in the Wall Street Journal.
Even before they got recorded, we were turned down for our editorial by the Wall Street Journal, because we had a guy that tried to submit one.
They said, we can't do yours, and then the next day they did Karl Rove.
The numbers, it's, you know, I think my numbers in the primary show.
I got 68 percent.
George P got 32. He has some influence with that 32%, but not so much with that 68%.
But they thought if they buried me in negativity, of course, you remember, I can't speak, and I'm trying to just raise enough money to have some type of legal offense.
They felt like they had all the advantages, so he just starts pounding me with bad stories.
The only thing I can think of, you know, you look at guys like Dick Weakley, who's a home builder, and he's one of the leaders of TLR. I mean, I think they think illegal immigration is a good thing.
It helps their business.
And obviously, I don't agree with that.
I think it's devastating to my state.
And if we want to have a program where we're going to bring workers in from other countries, let's get some legislation to do it the right way instead of just opening our borders to who knows who.
And I can't think of a single thing he's accomplished for our state or even for the country, let alone the fact that we have a massive invasion into our state.
And he doesn't speak out against it.
I've never seen him propose legislation that significantly affects it or at least push hard for it.
And in fact, if you were to go through every public statement John Cornyn has made in the last two years, And compare the amount of time he spent talking about the invasion of his own state by the rest of the world with the time he spent talking about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, he's far more concerned about what's happening in Ukraine.
Now that I've been through this and I've seen how guys like John Cornyn have represented the state of Texas and not represented us.
I think it's time somebody needs to step up and run against this guy that will do the job and do it the right way and represent us and worry about what's going on at the border.
So sincere question, I don't think if you were to do public opinion polling in Texas, particularly of Republican voters, you would see that Cornyn has the same views that they have.
And so Cornyn did it judicially, I think completely illegally, and turned our schools into very mediocre prospects because it took the rich school district, took their money and put it with the state, and then the state was supposed to give that to the poor school district.
The problem is it made all of them mediocre instead of letting the good school districts be good.
And focusing on the ones that needed more help, John Cornyn created a socialistic network.
They made sure he was AG of Texas for one term and then a U.S. senator.
So he got paid off.
And now, whenever they ask him to speak, criticize me when I'm running against George P. Bush or criticize me when I had this happen, he does what they ask him to do.
So is there, if you're not living in Texas and you just look at Texas and see these trends going on, particularly the immigration trends, it feels like Texas is going to be a democratic state pretty soon.
I think that's why it's so important that we fix things like the Texas House and we have a message that resonates with the voter, which we do have that message.
But when you have this civil war inside the party that Dade Phelan and Karl Rove have created because they don't control it, I think it leads us down a very bad path.
And we also have a voter fraud issue because we now can't prosecute voter fraud in Texas because the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas struck down a statute from 1951 that directed the Attorney General—I wasn't there in 1951—but we would prosecute voter fraud because these local DAs who were controlled by Soros in the big counties like Travis, which is Austin, or Harris, which is Houston, or Bayer, which is San Antonio, they are not going to prosecute.
So we were doing it.
We had 900 cases, so this whole idea there's no voter fraud, complete fabrication, we were prosecuting.
One lawyer, when I started to prosecute this, I got the legislature to give me more.
We were fully busy prosecuting voter fraud.
And then suddenly the Court of Criminal Appeals, all Republicans, said, nope.
That's unconstitutional for the Attorney General to be in court because he's in the executive branch.
Not a lot, because they said that was a judicial function, so I no longer could be in court.
Now, they're right.
The Court of Criminal Appeals, they're the final court in our state on criminal matters.
So they're like the Supreme Court in that.
The Supreme Court is the final say on civil matters.
So they were able to strike down one area of law for us.
If they're right, the Supreme Court should tell me that no, I shouldn't be allowed to be in court on civil cases either because I'm in the executive branch.
And if that was right, every attorney general in the country should no longer be allowed to go to court.
It's one of the things that I'm told to do four things in the Texas Constitution.
And one of those things is such things as are required by law.
Who makes the laws?
The Texas legislature.
The legislature passed a law in 51 that directed the attorney general to prosecute voter fraud, largely because I think that they didn't trust the local DAs to get that done because it's very political.
We don't have time to reauthorize that statute so that I can go back and start prosecuting voter fraud and go change the makeup of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
I was told by the Speaker, we don't have time for that.
In my opinion, the most important issue we have, because every other issue falls on whether we can elect the right people.
And if you think about it, if we lose the state, the laws are going to change.
All the voter laws are going to change.
You're going to go to California where you can just mail-in ballots.
And what I know from mail-in ballot, having fought this for the last election, winning 12 cases on mail-in ballots that unfortunately other states like Georgia did not fight.
I know that mail-in ballots are completely unreliable.
If you just mail them out to everybody, you have no idea who's sending them back.
There's no verification.
When they say you can't prove voter fraud, they are right.
Because normally what you have to do, if you're going to mail in ballot, you have to satisfy the laws under certain categories.
You're over 65, you're out of state, you're disabled.
You satisfy, you sign an affidavit, and you send it in with your application that this is my signature.
And then when you send your ballot back, they send you a ballot and an envelope, you sign that envelope.
With your signature, stick the ballot, and they verify the signatures.
Not the best, not as good as photo ID that we have for all other voting, but it still is something.
But when you change it to mailing it out to everybody, we have no idea.
We have no signature verification.
We have no idea who's voting.
So when they say, you can't prove voter fraud, that's the system that they like because we can't prove voter fraud if we set up a system that's completely open.
Most of us thought it was a kind of conservative state became one of the most left-wing states in the country, you believe, because of mail-in ballots.
I told the president in, I think it was May, I said, Mr. President, I have 12 lawsuits in the most liberal counties.
I'm losing in every county because they sued in liberal counties where all the judges are liberal.
Court of Appeals are liberal.
I'm going to have to find a way to get to the Supreme Court or the Fifth Circuit before it's too late, before they mail those ballots out, or you won't win Texas.
I guarantee you.
If Harris County can send out 2.7 million ballots.
You won Texas by 600,000.
You will not win.
And if we have multiple counties doing that, they'll just figure out how many votes they need.
We won every single lawsuit, all 12. And I told him, we lose one, you're done.
He didn't believe me.
And I said, you've got to watch this in other states because if this is happening in Texas, which it looks like it's a national program, I can only focus on Texas.
You better make sure this doesn't happen in other states.
And sure enough, Georgia, which had the same margin of victory for Trump.
Four years prior.
They don't stop it.
The governor, the AG, they just sign a consent decree and they have mail-in ballots with no signature verification.
They have drop-off boxes.
And they allow all these mail-in ballots.
And guess what?
Now Georgia, that had the same margin of victory for Trump, now suddenly we have an 8% or 9% win for Trump by protecting the ballot box.
In Georgia, he loses by what?
14,000?
I don't know.
It was a small amount.
And I knew when they stopped counting votes on election night, I'm sitting there watching, I'm going, This is what they would have done in Texas.
Well, so if you're Carl and you're taking all this money from billionaires, some of whom I know who are nice people, and I think they think it's helping, or Carl's convinced them that he's helping somehow, why wouldn't preventing voter fraud, mail-in ballots, which you bet voter fraud, be your number one priority?
I think for any- Anybody that cares about democracy, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, that that should be the number one thing.
And for the media to constantly shut down the conversation about this, and for social media companies, technology companies to shut down the conversation tells me that there's a reason they don't want us talking about it.
It's insane how you get treated for even bringing it up, when in reality, I don't think there's a more important issue, even than immigration, anything, because all those other issues...
We'll be affected by whether we have real elections that we can trust.
So what these registrars do, these people that control the election offices, election administrators in each of these counties, so they decided because of COVID. So they got around a lot.
In Texas, we have a lot that says you can only mail-in ballot if you're out of state at the time of the election, or you have a disability, or you're over 65, or you're in jail, but you're not a felon.
That's it.
That's fairly broad.
I don't even like that broad because it still opens up voter fraud.
But that's what the legislature said, so that's the rules.
Well, so what they said, these judges, these local administrators, were going to send out millions of ballots.
I would have guessed seven or eight million ballots going out in Texas to everyone, just everybody that's in the county.
Well, so if the election administrator is colluding and telling people where those ballots are, they just pick them up, fill them out, sign them, and then mail them back in, you would have no idea.
And if you have a program for that...
There's no way to know.
I can't ever prosecute this because I don't know who signed the ballot.
I can't prove it wasn't real.
It becomes nearly impossible.
And that's what I think they were trying to accomplish in Texas.
And then when I saw it happen in these other states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan.
It affected our elections because guess what?
We all vote for president.
We all have national elections that relate to the Senate and Congress.
And that's why I sued.
I sued because I said, wait a minute, these states are required by the Constitution to follow their own laws.
And they didn't follow their own laws.
I can't prove voter fraud.
Even they probably can't prove voter fraud because of the way it was done.
But I did argue that they didn't follow their own laws and they are required to.
In the Supreme Court, we lost 7-2.
I think they should have heard our case.
And that's what the state bar said.
That was a frivolous lawsuit.
And even though two Supreme Court justices agree with you, you should be punished for filing that case.
I've been thinking about what I want to do when I get back since the day I left.
And so I'm re-energized to do the things that I think the voters sent me to do.
I ran again because I was in the middle of so many big things.
I mean, our Google lawsuit, our antitrust lawsuit is the...
I think the largest the world's ever seen.
And it will have an impact on whether we have free speech on the Internet, whether they can control all advertising on the Internet by one company.
The things that I was working on, like this big pharma stuff, and the fact that we're trying to stop the Biden administration from ignoring the Constitution and just ramrodding things through outside of the legislative process, these are all things that fundamentally affect, and the voter fraud issue, fundamentally affect whether we are going to be a free country.
And so, I mean, that excites me to go fight for that.
Even if they keep taking shots at me, which I assume Karl Rove and that group, they'll continue to do it.
But to me, it's worth it.
Because if we don't fight now, we're going to lose our freedom.
Because he wanted people that wouldn't prosecute real crime and focus on political crimes.
Instead of going after shoplifters and drugs and all the things that you'd expect a prosecutor to go after, George Soros and voter fraud, they're not going to do it.
I wish Karl Rove cared about some of these things, but I've never seen him concerned about the things that I'm talking about, things that dramatically affect the future of Texas and the future of our country, which I have said are linked.
I've never seen Karl Rove ever step forward to do that.
I've seen him attack Republicans, conservative Republicans, who are trying to do that, like me.
But I've never seen him help us.
I've seen him work with the other side, but I've never seen him help us.
Obviously, as time is going on, we should be able to get more and more of those statistics.
We already have probably at least a year or two's worth to look at.
And that's something I'm going to be super interested in talking about as I go around the state because I'm going to be going around the state talking about all these issues over the next couple of years.