President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is stepping in to rescue a long-running MAGA legal crusade red-state voters just rejected at the ballot box.
The Justice Department told a court Friday night it intends to intervene in a five-year-old Texas lawsuit accusing Planned Parenthood of Medicaid fraud, The New York Times reported Saturday.
The case was a pet project of outgoing Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who lost his U.S. Senate bid this week. The Republican running to succeed him as attorney general lost, too. An anonymous plaintiff filed the suit in 2021, and Paxton joined it on the state’s behalf the following year.
The suit claims Planned Parenthood’s Texas clinic operators and its national federation improperly collected Medicaid reimbursements while the state was working to kick the group out of the program. Planned Parenthood denies the allegations and points out that no court barred it from receiving payments while the fight played out.
Texas wants roughly $1.8 billion in reimbursements, interest and penalties. Planned Parenthood, which recently reported about $2.1 billion in annual revenue, has warned that a payout that large could shut it down.
The move signals the administration may be prepared to undercut Democrats who just won state offices in former GOP strongholds, according to the Times, which noted that Biden’s Justice Department passed on joining the case in 2021.
A surprise Democratic sweep in Texas this week handed the attorney general’s office to Nathan Johnson, a veteran litigator who takes office in January. Johnson told the Times he plans to review every lawsuit Paxton filed during his 12-year tenure, and that the review will include this case.
“We are reviewing this action closely, including what it means for Texans and what the law allows,” Johnson said in a statement. “When I take office as Attorney General, I will take appropriate action in the interests of my state.” He has already vowed to end Paxton’s practice of suing out-of-state doctors who mail abortion pills into Texas.
A Planned Parenthood lawyer told the Times the intervention shows Trump is “undeterred by the election results.”
“This is an effort by the Trump administration to shut us down,” said Susan Baker Manning, general counsel for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “It is going to weaponize the Department of Justice against us.”
Norm Eisen, who served as White House ethics counsel under President Barack Obama and founded the legal advocacy group Democracy Defenders Action, said it’s unusual for the Justice Department to jump into a case it had previously declined to join.
“Texas voters have now rejected Paxton and his brand of politicized litigation, which is the Justice Department’s only apparent reason for intervening,” Eisen said.
The case could head to trial as soon as next spring. The presiding judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, is a Trump appointee who opposes abortion.
The Texas attorney general’s office and the Justice Department did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.
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