So where’s QAnon when you need them? We’re talking about the secretive cult of conspiracy-mongering crazies who believe that Democrats are pedophiles prone to making meals of their victims at the behest of evil Hillary Clinton and who worship Donald Trump. We’ve noticed that the former president has taken to wearing a Q pin on his lapel, but in the interest of truth, justice and the American way, we ask, how can these folks stay anon when an actual elected official in the great state of Texas has, by his rank incompetence, abetted what would appear to be actual cases of child sex-trafficking?
It should come as no surprise that we’re talking about the state’s highest-ranking law-enforcement official, Attorney General Ken Paxton, now in the midst of campaigning for a third term while fending off reverberations from yet another in a long list of embarrassments.
Last year, the AG’s office proudly announced that the Human Trafficking Unit of the Criminal Investigations Division had arrested a group of people involved in a scheme in Coryell County, a rural county west of Waco, to ship teenage girls to Dallas and other Texas cities, where they were forced to “exchange sexual contact for crystal methamphetamine.” Paxton’s office dubbed its sex-trafficking investigation “Operation Fallen Angel.”
Now, thanks to a blockbuster investigative report by the Associated Press, we learn that Operation Fallen Angel has quietly fallen apart because of the AG’s bungling. Six of the people indicted are now free. One is being held in the Coryell County jail on other charges, while an eighth died in jail. The AP reports that Paxton’s attorneys were recently forced to drop four of the human trafficking and sexual assault cases — because they misplaced one of the victims.
“It’s absolutely broken. It’s just broken. You don’t do it this way,” Coryell County District Attorney Dusty Boyd told the AP.
Boyd, a Republican, had a five-lawyer team working on the cases before handing them off to Paxton’s office. “I made the mistake of trusting them that they would come in and do a good job,” he said.
The AP investigation confirmed what Texans already knew: It’s been broken since Jan. 5, 2015, the day Paxton raised his right hand and took the oath of office.
While Paxton’s office was falling apart — correct that: while our office, the people’s office, fell apart under his watch — the AG himself was gallivanting around the country filing absurd lawsuits claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen. When he wasn’t making a fool of himself in federal court, he was a warm-up act for Trump at the White House gathering of insurrectionists on January 6. Since then, he’s been fighting access to abortion and siccing state investigators on families with transgender children. Just recently he sneaked out of the garage entrance to his Collin County home trying to avoid a court process server. It’s little wonder that the everyday work of the attorney general’s office, vital work for the people of Texas, has been neglected or mishandled.
Paxton, who came into office under indictment for felony securities fraud (and after seven years still awaits trial), remains the subject of a federal investigation into accusations of other kinds of corruption, including bribery and abuse of office. A steady stream of disgusted attorneys, including some close aids turned whistle-blowers, has left the AG’s office.
One prosecutor told the AP he quit in January after supervisors pressured him to withhold evidence in a murder case. Another attorney resigned a few weeks later, leaving behind a letter that warned of growing hostility toward LGBTQ employees. That same employee, an assistant attorney general at the time of his resignation, accused new executives Paxton had hired of “directing prosecutors to prioritize political considerations.”
The AP investigation found that, as of August, the number of assistant attorneys general in the division that handles human trafficking cases was down by 40 percent. The number of assistant attorneys general in the criminal prosecutions division was down more than 25 percent from two years ago. The group that deals with financial and white-collar cases had been cut by more than half and has merged with another division.
“This is scary to me for the people of Texas,” said Linda Eads, who served as a deputy attorney general in the early 2000s. She told the AP it was rare for any division to have more than two or three vacancies.
Boyd said staff turnover in Paxton’s human trafficking unit contributed to the collapse of the cases in his county. In the last two years, Republican lawmakers have doubled the division’s budget to $3 million, but Boyd told the AP he has doubts about how Paxton has spent the money.
“For Pete’s sake, you’re the AG’s office. You can’t find the victim?” he said. “The culture is broken.”
Nothing new here, of course. Like Pigpen, the Peanuts cartoon character, a noxious cloud envelops our attorney general.
And not just him. Paxton has tainted the top law enforcement office in the state, and in the process, he’s apparently jeopardized a criminal investigation and endangered victims.
Houston Chronicle
