Thread by @ViannaDavila

For a long time, I’ve been curious how TX AG Ken Paxton’s legal
troubles — his impeachment, his securities fraud case, the whistleblower case against him — might have affected staffing at the state agency.

So I made a spreadsheet of resignations in 2023. One unit stood out. 🧵

2/The state’s Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has gone toe to toe with some of the biggest pharma companies in the world and won, helping to recover around $1 billion for TX taxpayers.

But nearly 2/3 of the employees in the unit on Jan. 1, 2023, had quit by the end of the year.

3/This is the smallest the Civil Medicaid Fraud unit has EVER been since Paxton took office in 2015 — by a lot.

As of the beginning of this year, there were 19 attys in CMF. Since 2015, the unit has hovered between roughly 30 and 40 attorneys.

4/To put it another way, 19 attorneys quit the division in 2023.

By comparison, 7 left the unit in 2022. And one of them just moved units within the agency. We get into more details here: propublica.org/article/ken-pa…

5/So what happened?

Numerous attorneys from the unit told me the exodus started after the team’s beloved division chief Raymond Winter was pushed out of his job in late 2022.

I obtained an email from the AG’s office laying out the choices he was given:

6/However, a second attorney told me Winter was given another choice: If he didn’t take a demotion or retire, he’d be fired.

Just a few months earlier, he’d gotten a one-time bonus and glowing review.

7/Winter chose to resign and retire.

Winter did not respond for comment. Gov. Greg Abbott recently appointed him the state’s inspector general.

The AG’s office did not respond to multiple interview requests or extensive questions we sent them.

8/Attys said the exodus in the office is a sign of AG Paxton’s office being at a crisis point.

Last year colleague @jessica_priest & I wrote about how his office repeatedly refused to represent state agencies in court.

propublica.org/article/docume…

@jessica_priest 9/Other attorneys told me attitudes toward Winter & the team started to change after Paxton began his second term.

Their work started to get more scrutiny.

“We had to start justifying things more,” said Susan Miller, who led the division’s investigative unit from 2007-2020.

@jessica_priest 10/David Maxwell Jr. is one of the 4 former AG employees who filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Paxton after he fired them in 2020. He said Winter became a target after Winter refused to get involved in a case the AG had involving Maxwell.

@jessica_priest 11/Maxwell’s whistleblower case is ongoing. He declined to comment for this story.

Paxton recently moved to settle the whistleblower lawsuit. He is fighting to get out of sitting for a deposition in the case.

@jessica_priest 12/In 2022, Winter’s team was also asked to work on a high-profile lawsuit against Planned Parenthood.

2 attys told me there were disagreements between Winter & AG execs about what legal approach to take on the case.

Months later, Winter was pushed out.

@jessica_priest 13/It’s to be seen what will happen to the unit next or how the resignations will affect the AG’s bottom line.

CMF is one of the few units that makes money for the state.

In FY 2023, the team helped bring in $14 million for the AG, 3X the team's budget.

@jessica_priest 14/Read more about what happened to this unit and the kind of work its attys did in my latest for @propublica & the @TexasTribune
propublica.org/article/ken-pa…