SEC charges Paxton with stock fraud

Civil charges (which means a fine), not criminal, as with the state jail felonies he's been facing.  In fact there's only a few new details to add to this embarrassment.

U.S. regulators charged Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday for his alleged role in a stock scam that defrauded investors in a Texas-based technology company called Servergy Inc.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the company and former Chief Executive Officer William Mapp of selling private stock while misleading investors about the energy efficiency of its sole product, and accused Paxton of working to raise investor funds for the company without disclosing his commissions.

The SEC's civil case followed a related criminal case against Paxton for securities fraud. Last year, a Texas state grand jury indicted Paxton for his alleged role in a scheme to mislead investors.

Let's skip over to the Chron for this:

The complaint alleges that Paxton told the SEC that he intended to pay for the shares and even offered to pay $100,000 to Mapp during a meeting at a Dairy Queen in McKinney, Texas.

According to Paxton, Mapp then said, "I can't take your money. God doesn't want me to take your money." So Paxton took the shares as a gift.

The Lord's name invoked over BeltBusters, fries, and shakes at DQ as the dirty deal went down.  That's what I like about Texas.  More from the Houston Press:

Paxton's connection to Servergy has been one of the most intriguing details about the AG's current legal woes. Before his indictment on state securities fraud charges last summer, the SEC had already accused Servergy of lying to investors by falsely claiming its data servers had already been sold to huge companies, like Amazon and Freescale. The SEC claims Servergy even lied to investors about the very servers the company was selling, falsely claiming the machines required 80 percent less cooling, energy and space than others on the market.

According to a press release announcing federal charges against Paxton and others, the SEC claims former Servergy CEO William Mapp sold millions of dollars in company stock by exaggerating his product's merits. As for Amazon's supposed interest in the company's servers, the press release states: "In reality, an Amazon employee had merely contacted Servergy because he wanted to test the product in his free time for personal use."

And last, this.

Bill Miller, a longtime Austin consultant who has represented politicians under investigation and facing criminal charges, said he expects Monday's federal charges will only make Paxton "lock down for the long haul. He will not step down."

"The feds are straight-up business in cases like this," Miller said. "They don't care whether he's attorney general or not, and they're going to press ahead with their case – and you can expect him to fight it," he said. "In a case like this, once you're there – like he is now – he's going to tough it out to the end."

Paxton is relying on the same Lone Star justice that saw Rick Perry skate on his indictments, which is that the courts in Texas are overwhelmingly Republican-elected and thus deliver their own unique interpretations of the law.  Republican voters picked Paxton in the runoff two springs ago over Dan Branch -- who was endorsed by W Bush -- despite his having already confessed to his crimes, mostly because (and here I have to make an educated guess about the rationale formed in the mind of the typical Republican primary runoff voter) of Paxton's personal relationship with Ted Cruz Jesus Christ.

After all, if you're only accountable for your sins on the day you stand before your god, who is the GOP base to judge you?