Grumet: Travis elections chief says Texas AG tried 'to intimidate me' – Austin American-Statesman

I am worried for our democracy.So is Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir, the county’s tough-as-nails elections chief for the past 35 years. Which is why DeBeauvoir is finally speaking publicly about a serious threat she faced this year: an effort by Attorney General Ken Paxton to charge her with a crime for her handling of the 2020 election.“I don’t take kindly to being threatened and (feeling like) I can’t speak back,” DeBeauvoir told me last week.To be clear, Paxton did not succeed. (Nor did his office return multiple requests for comment for this piece.)Earlier this year, Paxton’s office tried to indict DeBeauvoir on a charge of unlawfully obstructing a poll watcher, a Class A misdemeanor that could bring up to a year in jail. It was a petty and trumped-up charge, and it did not fly, not even in Paxton’s hand-picked venue of Williamson County, known for its more conservative leanings. A grand jury there returned a “no bill” in April.It all sounds so tidy in the past tense. But DeBeauvoir lived through months of uncertainty. Paxton pursued the complaints made by a few partisan poll watchers in November 2020, and it wasn’t until July that DeBeauvoir learned the grand jury…
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