Following the Senate’s acquittal of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on all impeachment charges last month, the House Board of Impeachment Managers have released a batch of documents to the public – including documents revealing the Paxton family’s personal address.
The documents were released as “additional evidence” on Monday night despite the trial being long over. The managers claimed they did not use the documents during the trial because of time limits, issues with timely responses to subpoenas, witnesses choosing to plead the Fifth Amendment, as well as “multiple procedural decisions made during the course of the impeachment trial.”
The managers maintained that “overwhelming and uncontroverted testimony and evidence was presented during the impeachment trial in support of the Articles of Impeachment against Attorney General Ken Paxton.”
As part of this evidence, however, were multiple references to Paxton’s address in Austin: once as part of correspondence concerning work done on the house and another as part of Uber records complete with GPS coordinates.
On Tuesday morning, as word began to spread about the doxxing, the webpage was suddenly taken down. Partially redacted versions of the documents were later posted, but still showed the GPS coordinates of the Paxton home.
“This is just the latest outrageous abuse of legislative process by the House Board of Managers in a long string of outrageous abuses,” said Mitch Little, one of the lawyers who represented Paxton in the impeachment trial, in an interview with Texas Scorecard. “What they have done is made it clear that they will do whatever is necessary to harm the Attorney General and Senator Paxton and turn their lives upside down. You lost. It’s over. Stop.”
Matt Rinaldi, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, noted a new law that went into effect last month makes it a class B misdemeanor to maliciously post the address or phone number of an individual on the internet, and could be punishable by up to six months in jail.
“The DA should just assume a crime occurred and charge the House managers, since it’s the job of the trial court to consider the evidence,” said Rinaldi.
The House Impeachment Board of Managers includes the following members:
Andrew Murr (R–Junction) CHAIR
Ann Johnson (D–Houston) VICE CHAIR
Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth)
Joe Moody (D–El Paso)
Jeff Leach (R–Plano)
Terry Canales (D–Edinburg)
Oscar Longoria (D–Mission)
Morgan Meyer (R–Dallas)
Briscoe Cain (R–Deer Park)
Cody Vasut (R–Angleton)
David Spiller (R–Jacksboro)
Erin Gamez (D–Brownsville)
Notably, one of the files uploaded as part of the “additional evidence” dump has metadata showing it was last modified by Margo Cardwell, Speaker Dade Phelan’s director of policy. Metadata searches on the files containing Paxton’s address are inconclusive.
As of publishing, neither Phelan’s office nor any of the House impeachment managers have responded to Texas Scorecard’s inquiries on the release.
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