Attorney General John Cornyn’s ethics investigation into how five prominent Texas plaintiffs lawyers acquired the tobacco litigation may outlast his term in office, creating a politically tinged quandary for the new attorney general. As the fall political season nears, an unusual suit Cornyn filed more than two years ago to aid his effort to collect discovery from the state’s tobacco team is coming to a head in state court in Houston. Cornyn wants 280th District Judge Tony Lindsay to decide if the AG’s office can depose the five plaintiffs lawyers who negotiated the state’s $17.3 billion settlement with the tobacco industry in 1998. She may hear the matter at a hearing on July 30.
Meanwhile, years after Cornyn began investigating allegations that the Tobacco Five — as the five plaintiffs lawyers have been dubbed — gave campaign funds to former Attorney General Dan Morales as a condition of getting hired by the state for the tobacco litigation, the AG’s office is turning up the heat by making public the sworn statements from three other plaintiffs lawyers.
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