AUSTIN, Texas — The defense lawyer for Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the impeached official's former top aide of stabbing his boss in the back by going to the FBI with concerns before adequately confronting Paxton.
Tony Buzbee, the Houston attorney leading Paxton's defense team, sought to paint Jeff Mateer, the former first assistant attorney general and top deputy, as disloyal and wrong to assume Paxton was at fault during a cross-examination on Wednesday.
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"You told us Ken Paxton was your friend," Buzbee said.
"He became my friend, yes," Mateer said.
Buzbee rhetorically asked Mateer if he had been "trying to protect" Paxton when he and a group of other employees in the attorney general's office approached the FBI to report suspicious behavior that Paxton was involved in.
"Did you, after your meeting, talk to Ken Paxton?" the lawyer asked.
"I did not talk to him," Mateer said.
"OK. So in order to help your friend. a guy that had really given you a really plum of a job, instead of asking him some questions, you instead circled up and decided to go to the FBI. That's what happened, right?" Buzbee said.
Mateer said he did have a conversation with Paxton before the meeting but not after it.
The events in question all came to a head in late September when Mateer was called out of an office meeting for an urgent message from a sender who was not disclosed during questioning. Mateer was informed that Paxton had gone against his team's advice and hired an outside lawyer, Brandon Cammack, to investigate a complaint that Austin real estate investor Nate Paul had personally made to Paxton about being under federal investigation after this home was raided by the FBI in 2019.
The revelation of Paxton hiring Cammack became more concerning to Mateer when he learned that Cammack had been identifying himself in legal proceedings as a representative of the attorney's general office as he subpoenaed banks involved in the Paul case since Cammack did not work in his office.
Mateer held an urgent meeting with the deputies to discuss what to do with the new information.
"We considered it a crisis moment," Mateer said. "Everything involving Mr. Paul was coming to a head."
"So you rally the troops together and had a meeting?" Buzbee said. "That's how you protected your friend?"
Mateer and the deputies went to the FBI on Sept. 30, 2020. Not only had Paxton hired Cammack to get involved in legal proceedings unrelated to anything in his office, but Paxton had intervened in a lawsuit that involved Paul and a nonprofit organization, as well as halted a foreclosure sale of one of Paul's properties despite issuing pandemic-related guidance that would have gone against the foreclosure move, he alleged on the stand.
Mateer learned in the same period that Paul had hired a woman who was a former mistress to Paxton and presumed that the new hire meant the extramarital affair between the two had started back up.
"I concluded that Mr. Paxton was engaged in conduct that was immoral, unethical, and I had a good faith belief that it was illegal," Mateer said. "When we found out that this woman that he’d had the affair with from years ago had moved up to Austin and was now employed by Mr. Paul and that he was taking these unusual actions, it just did not make sense to me. ... I made some reasonable assumptions."
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Mateer resigned on Oct. 2, 2020. He was one of the attorney general employees who filed a whistleblower complaint against Paxton. Paxton later attempted to clear a $3.3 million compensation package to the whistleblowers but triggered an investigation in the House, which led to the Republican-controlled lower chamber filing 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton for these and other related actions.
Paxton attended the first day of the trial Tuesday and pleaded not guilty on each of the 16 articles of impeachment. However, Paxton was not on site for the second day of the proceedings.