(The Center Square) – “Hey, I’m Tony Busby. How are you sir? Nice to see you,” Tony Buzbee said while greeting voters as they streamed in and out of a busy polling location in the Spring Branch area of Houston, Texas, on Tuesday.
The well-known trial attorney has represented high profile clients and won a trial of his lifetime as the lead attorney representing Attorney General Ken Paxton after he was impeached in May and acquitted in September.
Buzbee spoke with The Center Square briefly as he greeted voters on Election Day about why he was running for Houston City Council and what it was like to represent Paxton.
“I’m running for Houston City Council,” he said, because “I’m tired of this city being broken. It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. The 311 system doesn’t work. We never see a police officer. The roads are worse than Mexico and people are pretty fed up.”
As people arrive to vote, he said, “What I’ve been seeing is, you can see the people coming in here are really frustrated with the city. They’re also very scared about [Democratic U.S. Rep.] Sheila Jackson Lee, perhaps being the mayor of this town. So that’s really generating a lot of excitement for my campaign because I guess the thought is if she does win, who can fight her?”
Lee and state Sen. John Whitmire are in a tight race to replace outgoing Democratic mayor Sylvester Turner. Buzbee tried to unseat Turner in the last election in 2019 and lost.
When asked what’s at stake for Houstonians, Buzbee listed the same issues identified by most voters: high crime, the city’s revolving bail door, increasing property taxes, failing infrastructure, among others.
“Property taxes continue to go up every single time, every budget cycle,” he told The Center Square. “We have to pay more in taxes. Nobody’s saying a word about it. We had fewer police on the street than we had 25 years ago. The roads are probably 25 years behind in road maintenance. We had 950 broken water mains across the city of Houston with no plan to fix some. I mean, I can keep going and going, and then yet the revenue has went up a billion dollars. So it’s just ridiculous.
“New leadership can hopefully turn that around.”
Buzbee, a Marine Corps veteran, began his legal career in Houston and launched his own firm in 2000. He rose to fame “as one of the most successful trial lawyers in Texas,” according to the New York Times, for his role in suing BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Recent high-profile cases include Buzbee representing multiple women in a sexual harassment/assault case against a former NFL quarterback and 120 victims of the Astroworld Festival crowd crush.
Buzbee first ran for office in a state House race in 2002 and lost. He then ran in 2019 against Turner and lost. As voters arrived on Tuesday, some said they wished Buzbee had defeated Sylvester and that they’d voted for him. Voters have complained about Houston’s failing infrastructure, increasing crime, failing public education system, and other quality of life issues.
About his role in defending Paxton, Buzbee said, “It was kind of the Super Bowl of trials. It was high drama. We never knew if they [the House managers and their legal team] had something that we weren’t expecting. I was always expecting them to have some sort of surprise up their sleeve. They never actually did. Every afternoon during the trial, they would produce about 10 boxes of documents,” he said, even though the cut off to produce documentation had passed but was allowed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presided over the trial.
Buzbee’s team reviewed documents “24/7,” he said, and “in the mornings they would say whether there was something new or exciting in the documents, and usually there wasn’t. But every now and then there was something new.”
Another challenge was “we didn’t know who they were going to call as witnesses. I think they had 160 or so people on their witness list.”
When asked if it was normal, in his experience as a trial lawyer, to not know who the witnesses being called were, he replied, “It’s not usually, you’re supposed to, at least. The problem was is that their witness list was 160 people, and they were supposed to tell us 24 hours in advance who they were going to call, but they were playing games with that.”
Ultimately, he said, “I was happy who they called, obviously we did very well with their witnesses, and I think their witnesses made our case for us. … But we just had to be ready for anything.”
Buzbee cross examined former staffer Jeff Mateer, who testified that he approved a memo for which Paxton was impeached and had no evidence that Paxton committed a crime. Other key witnesses contradicted impeachment article allegations. Ryan Vassar testified they had “no evidence” when they went to the FBI. Mark Penley testified he only had circumstantial evidence. David Maxwell testified Paxton didn’t ask him to commit a crime and he was pretending not to hear when Paxton’s attorney Dan Cogdell questioned him. Another key witness testified Paxton hadn’t been bribed.
The impeachment trial “hadn’t happened, not in my professional career, hadn’t happened in a hundred years, and we were kind of all of us feeling our way trying to figure out how to do this,” Buzbee said. “It worked in our favor that we were able to think on our feet because it wasn’t all set in stone about the way things would be.”
In his closing arguments, Buzbee told the House Managers “they should be ashamed of themselves” for bringing “this case in this chamber with no evidence.” He also said if Paxton could be impeached under these circumstances, “it can happen to anyone.”
