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(CN) — A federal judge on Thursday blasted Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s “well-known history of filing retaliatory lawsuits” when blocking his fraud case against Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue.
In a scathing 15-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns granted ActBlue a preliminary injunction barring Paxton from continuing to litigate the case.
Stearns suggested the probe was merely brought to kneecap Paxton’s political opponents — specifically Democratic state representative James Talarico, who is running against Paxton to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate and has raised record-breaking sums in doing so.
“The truth is plain and captured in Paxton’s own declarations: The lawsuit was filed in retaliation for (and in an attempt to suppress) ActBlue’s efforts to fund Talarico’s campaign,” Stearns ruled.
At the behest of President Donald Trump, Paxton opened a probe into ActBlue in 2023 to determine whether it had run afoul of state law by enabling donor fraud. He formally filed suit in Texas’ state court in April, claiming the platform allowed potentially shadowy international donors to make fraudulent contributions through gift cards and prepaid debit cards.
ActBlue, a Massachusetts-based company, filed suit in Boston’s federal court to stop Paxton. It claimed Paxton’s complaint was “rife with false and inflammatory allegations” and was filed in the wake of a huge $2 million funding day for Talarico.
Stearns, a Bill Clinton appointee in the District of Massachusetts, ruled that ActBlue was likely to succeed in proving that Paxton’s lawsuit violated free speech protections of the First Amendment. The judge called Paxton’s bad faith “overwhelming,” citing the attorney general’s own statements in numerous interviews since the case was filed.
“Paxton’s public statements in the wake of filing the case against ActBlue reveal his true motivation,” Stearns wrote. “While a prosecutor is entitled to a large degree of prosecutorial discretion and has a right to make a considered public accounting of his actions, Paxton did not hesitate in drawing a connection between the lawsuit and his candidacy for Senate.”
In a fundraising email sent after the lawsuit was filed, Paxton called ActBlue “the Democrats’ shadowy digital fundraising network” and noted that it had raised “eye-popping sums online” for his opponent in Talarico.
Stearns also didn’t buy Paxton’s accusation that ActBlue was misrepresenting itself to consumers.
“The platform does nothing more than facilitate political donations from private donors, who seek out its convenience, anonymity and aggregation of the benefit bestowed on chosen political candidates," he ruled.
The judge compared Paxton’s ActBlue probe to his investigation into progressive media watchdog Media Matters. That probe, too, was shut down after a D.C. Circuit panel found there was “uncontested evidence” that Paxton subpoenaed Media Matters in retaliation for the watchdog’s critical reporting of Elon Musk and X.
The Republican-led attacks on ActBlue have prompted Democratic lawmakers to threaten similar action against the GOP’s comparable platform, WinRed.
On Wednesday, top Democrats on the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees sent a letter demanding WinRed’s CEO Ryan Lyk sit for an interview about the platform’s fraud prevention policies.
“The committees have reason to believe that WinRed may have allowed bad actors to make fraudulent or otherwise illegal contributions to American political campaigns,” the Democrats wrote in the letter.
That same day, Republican lawmakers peppered ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones with questions of their own on the same topic.
Wallace-Jones repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment right, which she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed was “the only reasonable response to a proceeding that from the beginning has been about harassing a political opponent’s fundraising platform, not genuine oversight.”
As it stands, Paxton’s case against ActBlue has been ground to a halt. And in addition to those proceedings being frozen, Stearns also barred Paxton from “bringing any new state civil enforcement action premised on the same conduct.”
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