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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been scandal-plagued for years. Paxton’s most recent slate of scandals include his impeachment in May of 2023 – which resulted in his removal from office for more than three months – due to alleged bribe-taking and Paxton’s questionable relationship to Texas GOP mega-donor Nate Paul. Paxton was ultimately acquitted by the Texas State Senate, after his billionaire backers threatened to primary anyone who voted against him, leading to none of his impeachment articles receiving the 21 votes required to convict. Relatedly, Paxton was also previously accused of retaliatory firings relating to FBI whistleblowers, and the resulting $3.3 million settlement from that inquiry (a number that Paxton wanted Texas taxpayers to foot for him) is what triggered the impeachment inquiry in the first place. That money has not yet been approved by the Texas legislature, and its withholding re-sparked whistleblowers’ lawsuit against Paxton to continue in November 2023. 

In October of 2021, the Federal Reserve was embroiled in scandal. The heads of the Boston and Dallas Feds resigned following personal trading scandals that raised concerns about conflicts of interest and lax ethics guidelines. Further reports of potentially inappropriate trading by Chair Jerome Powell and Vice Chair Clarida rocketed across the business media due to these officials’ immense access to sensitive financial information and influence on monetary policy. Despite their decidedly questionable profiteering off pandemic panic, Powell and Clarida have since had their reputations effectively laundered by the media in a whitewashing effort that has attempted to clear them of all wrongdoing. To make matters worse, the Fed’s FOIA office is doing everything in its power to prevent internal documents relating to the scandals from reaching the light of day.

Soon after Biden renominated Powell, the ostensibly dovish Fed chair embarked on the most intense and sustained series of rate hikes in decades. We were told that this wouldn’t happen!

The FTC has won its lawsuit against Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive infamous for jacking up the price of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 overnight in 2015 and later using his ill-gotten fortune to buy an exclusive Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million. Shkreli is the quintessential corporate ghoul, having already racked up convictions for securities fraud—which resulted in an indefinite ban from the securities industries—and failure to pay $1.26 million in New York state taxes. Now, his price gouging has finally caught up with him, as the FTC successfully argued that he spearheaded an anti-competitive scheme to monopolize the drug. The presiding judge found Shkreli’s conduct to be “egregious, deliberate, repetitive, long-running, and ultimately dangerous,” issuing a $64.6 million fine and imposing a lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry. 

The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) is a national organization dedicated to electing and reelecting state-level Republican Attorneys General. It is a partisan political  organization, but it also functions as a dark money influence machine selling access to AGs, their staff, and their offices. 

Learning about the federal government’s budget process can be daunting. Here are a few key terms to help better understand of the federal budget process as of late.

This summer saw an extremely slow rate of independent agency nominations coming from the White House, and witnessed also a similarly glacial pace of confirmations emerging from the Senate. While this trend got slightly better over the course of the fall, with the Senate finally making significant movement on the nominations already presented before it, few new nominations have emerged from the White House since July 18, 2023.  

How the Grinchmaster General stole Christmas (and how to get it back).

Dissenting Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero, meanwhile, warned that the agency’s approval of a vertically integrated crypto market threatens to open a Pandora’s box.

Ever wonder who’s behind gross smear campaigns to sink qualified Biden administration nominees? Look no further than the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a little-known rightwing opposition research organization housed under the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) umbrella. The oppo shop was founded in 2021 with a simple goal: “to take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration.” Since then, AAF has targeted over twenty nominees with slanderous, bad-faith attacks. The strategy has been relatively successful thus far, especially in derailing racial and ethnic minority and female nominees, including Saule Omarova, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Carlton Waterhouse, and Gigi Sohn.   

“It pales in comparison to the millions of deaths he was responsible for,” progressive foreign policy expert Matt Duss observed Thursday, “but Kissinger was also a pioneer in the normalization of corruption.”