Travis County Clerk alleges Texas AG ‘threatened’ and tried ‘to intimidate’ her

Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir has alleged that the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton threatened her over her handling of the 2020 election.

“I don’t take kindly to being threatened and (feeling like) I can’t speak back,” DeBeauvoir told me last week. DeBeauvoir said that Paxton’s attempts did not work.

Earlier this year, Paxton’s office tried to indict DeBeauvoir on a charge of unlawfully obstructing a poll watcher, a Class A misdemeanor that could bring up to a year in jail. A grand jury there returned a “no bill” in April.

“There was nothing I could do to defend myself except to go hire me, personally and go hire private attorneys. That was $75,000 to me,” DeBeauvoir said.

Travis County commissioners voted in August to reimburse her. Had the case gone to trial, she said, her legal costs would have reached hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Of course, part of the AG’s purpose in doing that was to intimidate me and financially bankrupt me,” she said. “It was a deliberate thing.”