Ever since footage of him outside of the U.S. Capitol went viral on the day of the Jan. 6th siege, Texas-based lawyer Paul M. Davis has embarked upon a self-styled quest of J.R.R. Tolkien-esque proportions. Davis filed a federal lawsuit asking nothing less than the wholesale replacement of two branches of the U.S. federal government. He said the FBI visited his home to ask him for his statement, and a federal judge referred him to the Disciplinary Committee for the Western District of Texas.
After Law&Crime obtained his once-confidential disciplinary inquiry through an anonymous source, Davis granted what he described as his first interview to the press since he went to Washington.
“I’ve gotten so many requests in the media, and I haven’t responded to a single one because I’ve been so focused on the case,” Davis said in a phone interview, referring to his embattled lawsuit asking a judge for an injunction that would block his arrest and topple every 2020 federal election as, he asserted, deficient under the Help America Vote Act.
The hourlong interview touched upon various aspects of the well-publicized fallout of Davis’s trip to the nation’s capital a little more than a month ago. He lost his job after the video of him seen by millions tagged his former employer, Goosehead Insurance. That led him to write “fired for peacefully protesting” on the signature line of a lawsuit which referred to former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial as “null and void” and the “entire 117th Congress” as illegitimate.
Simultaneously playing defense and offense, Davis has litigated that lawsuit and fought for his ability to practice law in the same jurisdiction where the case is unfolding.
“Gondor Has No King”
Though a motion of his lawsuit quoted the The Lord of the Rings in declaring that “Gondor has no King,” Davis objected to the press coverage and downplayed the line as a literary reference common in legal briefings.
“It states that throughout there is nothing, nothing in that lawsuit that seeks to reinstall Donald Trump as president of the United States,” Davis said in the interview. “That is preposterous, completely fake news.”
However, as Law&Crime previously reported, one of Davis’s demands was for a federal judge to install former members of Trump’s cabinet as “stewards” — Davis borrowed that Tolkien term for Denethor II — to buffer the official acts of President Joe Biden. These “stewards,” Davis wrote, should work from the White House while Biden was exiled by federal agents to another property while still remaining the nominal president of the United States.
The lead plaintiffs on his case are groups called Latinos for Trump and Blacks for Trump, but Davis claimed that the “Return of the King” in his analogy referred not to Trump but to a return of a “legitimate form of government,” which he disputes the United States currently has.
“The idea is that both Republicans and Democrats colluded and were involved in a willful conspiracy to essentially deprive the American people of their legal right to cast a vote in this election and to have that vote legally counted and to, you know, have the guarantee that their vote was not diluted by lots of mail-in ballots,” Davis said, claiming those ballots are inherently vulnerable to fraud.
Pressed repeatedly on the issue, Davis said voter fraud evidence “may” be available, but he did not provide an example of it, as he asserts it is not needed to prove his case.
“This is not a fraud case,” Davis asserted in a line matching the concessions of Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Kory Langhofer, verbatim.
Davis walked back some of those admissions in a follow-up email pointing to paragraphs of his lawsuit alleging electoral shenanigans by one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s charities. In Wisconsin, another lawsuit attacking the election on the ground of “Zuckerberg money” failed.
Davis distanced himself from Giuliani and others, prefacing his lawsuit in Texas with the disclaimer [bolding ours]: “This is not a Sidney Powell lawsuit. This is not a Rudy Giuliani lawsuit. This is not a Lin Wood lawsuit. This is not a Team Trump lawsuit.” But his own legal action appears to be following a trajectory similar to that of more than 60 cases by Trump, his allies, and his proxies. U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, a Trump appointee, quickly found Davis’s claims “without merit” on Jan. 27.
Scoffing at that finding, Davis reacted: “I kind of laughed when I read the show-cause order because in my view, it was so weak.”
“My suspicion is that some law clerk in his office just drafted it, and he just rubber-stamped it because federal judges are busy,” the 39-year-old added, adding that this was “pure speculation.”
