Ken Paxton tried to end the lawsuit that spurred his impeachment. A judge turned him down again.

A Travis County judge has denied Attorney General Ken Paxton his attempt to stave off a looming deposition in the whistleblower suit that spurred his impeachment.

Paxton is accused in the suit of having fired four employees in retaliation for their claims that he accepted bribes and abused his office to help a friend and campaign donor. He has denied wrongdoing, but he filed a petition this month saying he would no longer contest the lawsuit.

BACKGROUND: AG Ken Paxton stops fight against whistleblower suit that launched impeachment

The judge, Jan Soifer, denied that request on Wednesday, a move that Paxton quickly condemned as biased. The statement called out previous decisions Soifer had made in immigration- and transgender-related cases that he described as activism.

“With this decision, this Travis County court has escalated its troubling pattern of behaving as a political actor instead of an impartial arbiter of disputed cases,” Paxton said. “Travis County has established itself as an unfair venue where litigants’ fate is predetermined by the court’s political leanings.”

Soifer’s ruling comes one week ahead of Paxton’s scheduled deposition ordered by the judge to take place Feb. 1. First Assistant Brent Webster and two other top aides’ depositions are scheduled for the days following.

It will be the first time that Paxton will have to answer to the allegations against him, which later became the basis for the Texas House filing impeachment charges against him last year. The Texas Senate later acquitted him. Paxton declined to testify in the Senate proceedings.

TIMELINE: Allegations against Texas AG Ken Paxton through the years

Lawyers for the whistleblowers did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. According to a recent filing, the whistleblowers were unanimous in wanting to move forward with the suit.

They have said that Paxton’s request is an attempt to avoid deposition.

“This delay tactic by Ken Paxton will not stop our efforts to question him under oath,” Tom Nesbitt, a lawyer for one of the whistleblowers, said in an interview last week.

Paxton explained his decision to accept the allegations against him as an effort to avoid further expenses and disruptions to his office.

“Neither the plaintiffs nor the court will take ‘yes’ for an answer in this case,” Paxton said in his statement this week. “They have, instead, elected to waste time and resources by waging lawfare against the attorney general until they have satisfied an apparent desire to inflict further harassment, expense, and misuse of resources on the OAG.”

On Thursday, Sen. Drew Springer, a Muenster Republican who voted to acquit Paxton, said the chamber should revisit impeachment in light of Paxton’s latest court filing saying his agency would not dispute the whistleblowers’ allegations.

“I am asking the Senate whether there is a legal mechanism to reopen the impeachment proceedings,” Springer wrote in a letter to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and the rest of the Senate. “Failure to at least consider this possibility runs the risk of AG Paxton making a mockery of the Texas Senate.”

Springer, who is not running for re-election and whose term ends in 2025, lamented that Paxton, by asking for the judge to award the whistleblowers yet-to-be-determined damages had “essentially written a blank check – at taxpayers’ expense – in an attempt to stop the case and prevent his deposition.”

In a written response, Paxton cast Springer as a “bad senator” who he said left the chamber because he wasn’t going to get re-elected, adding “why should anyone listen to his sour grapes.”