Texas AG Ken Paxton fled home with his wife to avoid subpoena in abortion case, court filing says

According to court documents, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton left his home on Monday to avoid being served with a subpoena in a federal lawsuit filed by groups that want to help Texans get abortions outside of the state. According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Austin on Monday, Paxton refused to take the papers from the process server and left his garage in McKinney, Texas, in a truck driven by his wife, state senator Angela Paxton.

In the signed statement, process server Ernesto Martin Herrera said that the Paxtons left the papers on the ground near the house and then drove away without taking them. Tuesday, Federal Judge Robert Pitman threw out the order for Paxton to testify. Paxton said that the subpoena wasn’t right because “none of the requirements for issuing, let alone enforcing, such a demand had been met.” Paxton later said in a statement that the server had threatened him by coming at him and yelling “incomprehensibly.” After saying that many Texans keep guns for protection, the AG said that Herrera is lucky that the situation didn’t get worse or need force.

The subpoena told Paxton, a Republican, that he had to go to a hearing on Tuesday morning. The hearing was part of a civil case in which several non-profit groups from Texas want to help pregnant Texans get abortions in other states. This includes paying for abortion clinics in other states, giving money to women who want abortions, and paying for clinics to travel between states.

The NGOs say that they stopped doing things to support abortions right before the Supreme Court voted 5-4 in June to keep upholding the federal right to abortion, which it had been doing for years. After its decision in Dobbs, the Supreme Court threw out Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two cases that had basically upheld the Roe right to abortion. Paxton said in two late-night tweets that he was thinking of his family and that he didn’t think the affidavit was true, but he criticised the media for covering it. Paxton responded to a Texas Tribune story by tweeting, “This is a ridiculous waste of time, and the media should be ashamed of themselves.”

According to his tweet, “conservatives have been threatened all over the country, and the mainstream media hasn’t covered or criticised many of these incidents.” In a second tweet, he said, “It’s clear that the media wants to stir up another controversy about my job as Attorney General, so they’re blaming me for having the nerve to keep a stranger from hanging out outside my house and showing concern for the safety and well-being of my family.” Herrera’s affidavit says that when he went to Paxton’s house on Monday at 8:28 a.m., a woman named Angela met him at the door and told him her name. She told him that the attorney general was on the phone when he said he was trying to get subpoenas served on Ken Paxton.