AUSTIN, Texas — For six weeks, the most mysterious political operation in Texas was a text message. It arrived without a sender name, offering parents resources about trans students at their local schools. The brochures that followed were printed in soft blue and pink, and no one would say who paid for them.
What finally ended the mystery was not an exposé. It was a court order about letterhead.
A timeline, in order of how it fell apart:
On October 3, the texts begin arriving statewide. The messages are cordial. They point families to a website listing “age-appropriate resources,” a website that lists, in fact, almost nothing — a contact form and a copyright line.
On October 8, the brochures follow into apartment buildings and suburbs from Houston to the Panhandle — millions of pieces, by the count of people who had strong feelings about the count. Reporters ask who paid for them. No one answers. A Republican operative describes them, on camera, as “just opposition research that got out early” — a phrase that has never calmed anyone.
On October 20, a Travis County district judge, hearing a civil suit filed by an LGBTQ advocacy group, orders the senders to reveal themselves by the end of the week. The senders’ lawyer — Chris Hilton, a former staffer in the Texas attorney general’s office, who identified himself in court with the visible satisfaction of a man who has been waiting to — does not object. He simply says his clients are “electoral speech.”
On October 27, the paperwork arrives, and it is the paperwork that does the damage. The filings name a group, the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund, and a man, John Braun. They name a print vendor, Three Z Printing, operated near Dallas by a major Trump donor, Matthew Zarusen. There is no public evidence the donor family personally authorized or financed the mailers, and the filings do not claim it; what the filings do claim, in reporting by the San Antonio Express-News, is that the addresses lead to the same strip mall.
The group’s own filing, meanwhile, lists its business address as a UPS store in a suburb of Fort Worth, which a clerk there told this newspaper, on background, “gets a lot of that stuff.”
By Thursday, the operation’s defenders had regrouped around the only available argument: that the senders were revealed not by journalistic genius but by a district-court subpoena nobody bothered to fight. “Anyone can be unmasked if somebody files the right form,” one GOP consultant said. “It’s not that they lied. It’s that they filed it wrong.”
He was not speaking for the campaign. He was speaking generally, and sadly, about paperwork.
A hearing on the lawsuit’s next phase is set for November 17.