Congress
Paxton secures $20M ad buy
Ken Paxton, the Republican Texas Senate nominee, announced a new $20 million ad buy in the state ahead of November’s crucial election.
The ad — which will begin running Friday in Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio before expanding statewide — is one of the largest-ever single media investments in a Texas Senate race.
“This major media buy is about one thing: making sure every Texan in every corner of this state knows exactly what’s at stake in this race,” said Nick Maddux, senior strategist for the Paxton campaign, in a statement. “We built this campaign to go up early, stay up, and never go dark, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
The Senate race between Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico is quickly becoming one of the most expensive races in the history of the Lone Star state. Earlier this month, AdImpact found collective spending on advertising by the two campaigns and supporting groups totaled more than $153 million.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a top GOP super PAC closely aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has committed millions to Paxton. Meanwhile, Senate Majority PAC, aligned with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, announced only Tuesday it would begin running ads hitting Paxton, though the PAC did not provide a figure for the campaign.
Still, Talarico has garnered support through other means. He raised a record-breaking $30 million from April to June.
The race remains tight. Recent polls show Talarico up by anywhere from 1 to 6 percentage points over Paxton.
GOP Sen. Jim Justice said Wednesday that he’ll decide whether to run for West Virginia governor before the end of the year but likely not until after the midterms.
“The timeline is short, because I don’t want to jerk you around,” Justice said. “I don’t want to jerk people around.”
Justice said he initially wanted to make a decision before the Nov. 3 elections, “but, you know, what’s happened is, we’ve been so busy, time just gets away, and now, you know. it may very well be best to wait and go after.”
Blue Light News first reported earlier this month that Justice was considering another governor bid and was viewed as likely to run.
Justice added he was hearing from Republican Party leaders in the state “in only one way, and that’s, please run for governor.”
Justice said he hasn’t spoken to President Donald Trump about whether or not he should run or stay in the Senate. He said he also hasn’t spoken to the sitting Republican governor, Patrick Morrisey.
A close Capitol Hill ally of President Donald Trump is suing the Justice Department and former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining her phone logs in the course of his investigation into Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) filed suit a day after Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee — on which Blackburn sits — and defended his office’s investigation, including its effort to obtain the records of Blackburn and dozens of other GOP lawmakers who spoke with Trump and his advisers during a four-day period in January 2021.
Blackburn argues that Smith committed a “gross abuse of power” and violated constitutional protections for members of Congress when he subpoenaed her phone logs from Verizon and secured a court order to prevent the company from alerting her. She’s asking a federal judge to declare Smith’s entire probe, as well as his effort to obtain her phone records, was illegal. She’s also asking that the judge order Smith and the Justice Department destroy or return any of her materials.
Smith contended that he sought the phone logs — which don’t include the content of calls or text messages — as part of his probe into Trump’s bid to overturn the election results, even as a mob of his supporters were ransacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump and his aides continued to work the phones that night and encourage lawmakers to derail the transfer of power to Joe Biden.
Smith insisted that his effort to obtain lawmakers’ phone records was cleared by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section and complied with all department regulations.
But senators said his effort to obtain those call records ran afoul of the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, which provides blanket immunity for lawmakers from being scrutinized by prosecutors for their official business.
Stan Brand, former counsel to the House of Representatives under former Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), said Blackburn may have a worthy case to test whether members of Congress can win legal relief for violations of the speech or debate clause. That issue is more commonly litigated during criminal cases and before investigators can access members’ records. But in this case, Brand said, the purported violation had already occurred without her knowledge.
“How do you remedy that after the fact?” Brand said. “I think it’s worthy of consideration.”
Blackburn’s lawsuit could put the Justice Department in a bind. Though Trump himself has attacked Smith’s investigation as unconstitutional — and U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon concluded Smith’s appointment was illegal — the Justice Department has never conceded that point. And DOJ has long defended its practice of obtaining secrecy orders from federal courts to prevent telecom companies from disclosing subpoenas to their subscribers.
In 2023, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for Smith’s team to access a subset of records it seized from Rep. Scott Perry’s (R-Pa.) phone, though it ruled that courts had to conduct a “fact-specific” inquiry to determine whether some records were “legislative” in nature and therefore off-limits to investigators.
Sen. Eric Schmitt expressed no remorse Wednesday for falsely accusing Jack Smith of lying to Congress about attending a basketball game as a guise to investigate President Donald Trump — and for creating a viral moment that critics have seized on to undercut the GOP’s case against the former special counsel.
“He has lied before to Congress,” Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, said in an interview about whether he regretted calling Smith a liar for denying he was at an event he never attended.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday morning, Schmitt was gearing up to deal what he thought would be a crushing blow to Smith, a longtime GOP target for his handling of two criminal prosecutions against Trump during the Biden administration.
Armed with an elaborate poster displaying text messages where Smith and a colleague discussed seating arrangements for a basketball game, Schmitt was attempting to prove that Smith secretly traveled to Atlanta to watch a home game between the Hawks and the Golden State Warriors as a guise to conspire with Fani Willis — a disgraced local prosecutor who was also pursuing criminal charges against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Smith was flummoxed by the accusation, with Schmitt saying he would give the witness “a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”
But the attempt backfired when Smith soon realized he had in fact gone to a basketball game the night of Feb. 3, 2024, but not an NBA game in Atlanta, rather a women’s game in College Park between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
“It’s because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play,” said Smith of the star women’s basketball player who was then playing for the Iowa team.
Schmitt said in an interview Wednesday that the mix-up was due to the fact that there were no other NBA games that same night with a 7:30 p.m. starting time.
“Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt said, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
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