Josh Shapiro messes with Texas
The 2020 presidential election is over. The legal and political battles born of that struggle continue.
MAR 12, 2021 | REPUBLISHED BY LIT: MAR 14, 2021
The 2020 presidential election is over. The legal and political battles born of that struggle continue.
And Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is clearly itching for payback for lawyers who filed a raft of unsuccessful lawsuits about how the state conducted its election and tallied the votes.
He seems especially eager to mess with Texas.
Shapiro on Wednesday praised Michigan’s attorney general for seeking to have four lawyers disbarred for filing similar lawsuits and said his office is exploring the use of similar sanctions.
“We can’t let that become the norm, where the courts are used as a way to spread this misinformation,” Shapiro said during an appearance at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Security in Politics.
Shapiro called out Rudy Giuliani, who served as attorney for President Donald Trump, knocking the former New York mayor and his coterie of conspiracy theorists as “nutballs.”
Janet Napolitano, a former homeland security secretary and now a Berkeley professor who moderated the discussion, agreed. “As a lawyer it was embarrassing actually to see fellow members of the bar” spread misinformation in court, she said.
That prompted Shapiro to wonder aloud if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton can be “sanctioned or disbarred” for what he called “an act of sedition.”
“He is absolutely unfit to serve, and certainly violated his oath in an attempt to merely suck up to a corrupt president,” Shapiro said.
Paxton in December asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out Pennsylvania’s election results in a lawsuit chock-full of inaccurate claims and conspiracy theories. Trump and 17 other state attorneys general joined that effort.
The Supreme Court took four days to reject Paxton.
Paxton’s office did not respond to Clout’s request for comment.