In 2018, when Ken Paxton ran for reëlection as Texas’s attorney general, he was under state and federal indictments for securities fraud, and he also had a reputation for pettier malfeasance. Justin Nelson, his Democratic opponent, decided to make Paxton’s questionable ethical judgment central to his campaign. “I really just tried to ridicule the dude, and highlight the base venality of the corruption,” Nelson told me recently. Not long before the election, Nelson’s campaign obtained security-camera footage from 2013 of the entrance to the courthouse in Collin County, where Paxton lives. In the grainy video, Paxton, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, spies a Montblanc pen that someone has left behind at a metal detector. Paxton slips the thousand-dollar pen into his pocket, then walks away. (After a sheriff’s deputy contacted him a few days later, Paxton returned the pen, saying he took it by mistake.) The video was widely viewed; Paxton won the election anyway, by three points.
Paxton has long been dogged by allegations of fraud, corruption, and general impropriety—his state securities-fraud charges date from 2015—but, until recently, he seemed impervious to them. (He pleaded not guilty to the state charges, and no trial date has been set.) In October, 2020, eight of Paxton’s ex-employees, all high-level staffers in the Texas attorney general’s office, accused their former boss of bribery, abuse of office, and other federal and state crimes. Last fall, Paxton was reëlected again, this time by a margin of nearly ten points.
In the past six months, though, it seemed as though there might be a remarkable turn in Paxton’s political standing. In May, after a secret investigation into the allegations laid out by the whistle-blowers, the Republican-controlled Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach him. More than seventy per cent of the Republicans voted in favor of impeachment, including every House member from Paxton’s home county. “I was surprised—I think most people were,” James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project, at the University of Texas at Austin, said. “There was no evidence to date that any Republicans would be willing to call Paxton on his behavior, outside the limited conditions of a primary challenge. He’d gotten away with all this percolating for so long.”
For two weeks, Paxton was on trial in the Texas Senate to determine whether he would become the third elected official in Texas ever to be removed from office. As the minority party, Democrats were mostly on the sidelines; the drama played out among Republicans, who comprised both Paxton’s accusers and his ardent advocates. In the lead-up to the vote, Paxton’s supporters attempted to link his fate to that of Donald Trump. “This feels a lot like what they’ve tried to do to President Trump,” Jonathan Stickland, the head of Defend Texas Liberty, a PAC that supports far-right candidates, said on Steve Bannon’s show. Paxton denied wrongdoing and one of his lawyers called the impeachment a “political witch hunt.”
Early in the first week of the trial, I went to the red-granite capitol building in Austin, which Texans like to point out is fourteen feet taller than the national Capitol, to watch the proceedings in the Senate chamber, a fluorescent-lit room ringed by dim oil paintings, relentlessly air-conditioned against the stifling heat outside. As presented by the prosecution, the case against Paxton was both tawdry and consequential, spanning everything from illicit Uber rides to bribery—in the form of a home renovation—and accusations about Paxton’s “bizarre, obsessive” focus on using the power of the state to help a friend, the prominent real-estate developer Nate Paul. At times, the proceedings had an uncomfortably intimate atmosphere. The witnesses testifying against Paxton included several of his top employees: his former chief of staff, attorneys in his office, and the personal assistant whom Paxton’s wife, Angela, once jokingly referred to as the couple’s “second son.” (One of the most-anticipated witnesses, a woman with whom Paxton was reportedly having an affair, did not end up testifying.) The testimony was delivered to a jury that included Angela, a state senator, as a non-voting member.
The trial was presided over by the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, a political ally of Paxton’s. (Patrick, a former talk-show host with no formal legal training, seemed occasionally befuddled by the lawyerly jargon.) The two attorneys leading the prosecution, Dick DeGuerin and Rusty Hardin, had never worked together before, although they’ve argued opposing sides of a handful of cases. “Nothing where we kicked each other’s shins or anything,” DeGuerin told me. Between them, DeGuerin and Hardin, who are both in their early eighties, have played a role in many of Texas’s most scandalous events, from the fall of Enron to the Waco siege. After Robert Durst admitted to killing and dismembering his neighbor in Galveston, DeGuerin got him acquitted of murder. As the attorney for the estate of Anna Nicole Smith’s oil-tycoon husband, Hardin needled the former Playboy Playmate so relentlessly during cross-examination that she exclaimed, “Screw you, Rusty!” (Smith received nothing from the estate.) As prosecutors, both men affected the role of fond but stern country grandfathers. (At one point, DeGuerin, objecting to a claim by one of Paxton’s attorneys, declared it to be “hogwash.”) Paxton’s lead attorney, Tony Buzbee, was a trial lawyer who, in 2017, got in trouble with his H.O.A. for parking a tank in front of his Houston home. During the first week of the trial, the notably tan Buzbee accused the “bias” press of publishing a photograph that makes him look more orange than he really is.
The testimony was at times dramatic, and the prosecution emphasized that the witnesses testifying against Paxton were not motivated by partisanship. (When one was asked how conservative he was, on a scale of one to ten, he rated himself an eleven.) Part of the prosecution’s closing statement was delivered by the state representative Jeff Leach, a Republican, who described Paxton as a friend and mentor. “I have loved Ken Paxton for a long time,” he said, before urging the senators to remove Paxton from office. On Saturday, Paxton was acquitted of the sixteen charges against him, in a largely party-line vote.
Paxton was born in North Dakota, where his father was serving on an Air Force base, and later attended Baylor University, in Texas, where he met Angela. For much of his career, he’s lived in McKinney, a sprawling and fast-growing exurb thirty miles north of Dallas, where he helped found a nearby megachurch, involved himself in various questionable business deals, and served as in-house counsel for J. C. Penney. His rise to political power seems based less on his outstanding personal qualities than on his alliances within the Republican Party. (When I described Paxton as “not particularly charismatic” to Henson, he burst out laughing. “Yeah, I think that’s safe to say,” he said.) He won his first election to the State House in 2002, part of a wave that gave Republicans a majority in the legislative chamber for the first time since Reconstruction and cemented their control over Texas politics. While in office, Paxton aligned himself with an increasingly reactionary evangelical faction. As that cohort came to dominate Republican politics in Texas and across the nation, Paxton “rode that wave impeccably,” Henson said.
After one term in the State Senate, Paxton was elected Texas’s top lawyer at a time when attorneys general were playing a newly prominent, and partisan, role in national politics. At an event in 2016, Angela Paxton joked onstage about how often her husband was away, either at the state capitol or in Washington, D.C., where he followed the example of his predecessor, Greg Abbott, in initiating numerous lawsuits against the Obama Administration. “If you’re gonna come home after I’ve already gone to bed, I need a heads-up, so you don’t get shot,” Angela said brightly, to chuckles from the crowd. “As you can see, he’s here, he has not gotten shot.” Then she launched into a version of a Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters song, adapted to reflect the details of her marriage: “I’m a pistol-packin’ mama, and my husband sues Obama, I’m a pistol-packin’ mama, yes, I am.”
Under Paxton, the attorney general’s office has issued guidance classifying gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse and supported legislation that incentivizes private citizens to sue anyone who helped someone get an abortion. Paxton has said that he would back Texas’s anti-sodomy law if the Supreme Court revisited Lawrence v. Texas. He has also been a key defender of Donald Trump. On January 6, 2021, Paxton spoke at the pro-Trump rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol, with Angela by his side. “Because we’re here today, the message goes on: We will not quit fighting,” he said. “We’re Texans. We’re Americans. And we’re not quitting.” He would go on to blame that afternoon’s violence on Antifa, and to spearhead a failed lawsuit that sought to overturn the election.
Some Republicans were uneasy that statewide concerns seemed to be taking a back seat to grandstanding about national issues. The attorney general’s office also developed a reputation for issuing opinions that aligned with the interests of Paxton’s supporters, a former high-ranking Republican elected official told me. “I can’t imagine that happening under Abbott and certainly not under [John] Cornyn,” now a senator, he said.
Soon after taking over as attorney general, Paxton fired high-ranking employees and replaced them with aides with far-right pedigrees. These new employees included Jeff Mateer, an attorney who had previously represented an Oregon bakery that refused to bake a cake for a lesbian couple, and who had called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan.” In September, Mateer was the first of the whistle-blowers called to testify against Paxton. Mateer was red-faced and uneasy on the stand, but his sense of betrayal by his former boss was palpable. “I concluded that Mr. Paxton was engaged in conduct that was immoral, unethical, and I had the good-faith belief that it was illegal,” he said.
The impeachment charges stemmed from Paxton’s relationship with Nate Paul, the developer. Paul, the son of immigrants from India, bought his first piece of real estate, a thirteen-unit apartment building, after completing his freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin. He eventually dropped out of college, and, around the time he was twenty-two, his business started raising a twenty-five-million-dollar investment from the Austin Police Retirement System. Paul’s timing was fortuitous: not long after he started the business, the 2008 recession hit, and he bought properties during a period of low interest rates and prices, and he saw their valuations rise precipitously during Austin’s tech-fuelled boom. In 2014, “Nate Paul” was the most-searched phrase on the Austin Business Journal’s Web site; three years later, Paul, then thirty, told Forbes that he had “kind of cornered the market on potential office space in downtown Austin.”
But soon there were signs of trouble. In 2018, Paul’s businesses began to default on reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of loans. The next year, his office and home were raided by the F.B.I. (In June, Paul was indicted on eight counts of lying to financial institutions in order to get loans. According to the indictment, he provided crudely doctored financial statements indicating, for example, that an account held $18.5 million when it actually held only twelve thousand dollars. Paul had previously denied wrongdoing in the case.) Paul believed that the raid was politically motivated, and he wanted the attorney general’s office to intervene. According to one of the whistle-blowers, Paxton thought that his securities-fraud charges were the result of a biased investigation, and was a willing listener. But his deputies were skeptical. Paxton’s former head of law enforcement, a gruff veteran Texas Ranger named David Maxwell, testified that he warned his boss against getting involved with Paul. “I told him Nate Paul was a criminal, that he was running a Ponzi scheme that would rival Billie Sol Estes”—a notorious Texas fraudster—“and that, if he didn’t get away from this individual and stop doing what he was doing, he was gonna get himself indicted.” Paxton’s and Paul’s legal representatives didn't respond to requests for comment.
Paxton and Paul made for unlikely friends. Paul partied with Leonardo DiCaprio, drove a Lamborghini, and had a reputation as “someone who, you know, would come through a night club and spend a crap ton of money and be there for, like, thirty minutes and be gone,” a woman who worked at a downtown club told me. Paxton, in contrast, portrayed himself as a devout and devoted husband and father. To explain why Paxton would go to such lengths to support Paul, the prosecution offered two theories: First, that Paul had hired a woman whom Paxton allegedly was involved with, and was helping to enable the affair. (“Just because somebody has an affair doesn’t mean they’re a—quote—‘criminal,’ ” Buzbee argued.) Second, that Paul paid for renovations to the Paxtons’ home—the ideas for which at one point included new granite countertops. (In opening arguments, Buzbee scoffed at this idea; the defense ultimately presented evidence that, they argued, proved that the Paxtons paid for the renovations themselves. Paul has denied bribing Paxton.)
Whatever the motivation, during the spring and summer of 2020, Paxton allegedly went to unusual lengths to assist Paul, according to the House investigation and witness testimony. He arranged meetings between Paul and top officials in his office, and sought to help Paul obtain documents that laid out the evidence against him, including the names of confidential sources. One of Paul’s business entities was embroiled in a protracted legal dispute with a charitable trust; Paxton planned to personally argue a motion in the case on Paul’s behalf, until one of his deputies persuaded him not to. Then, when a number of Paul’s properties were scheduled to be sold at a foreclosure auction, Paul again asked the attorney general for help. In late July, Paxton instructed Ryan Bangert, his deputy first assistant attorney general, to draft an opinion about whether outdoor foreclosure sales should proceed, given the state’s COVID protocols. Bangert concluded that the sales were fine; Texas was prioritizing keeping businesses open. When Paxton read the draft, he was upset. “This is the wrong answer,” he said, according to Bangert. Bangert rushed to revise the opinion with Paxton breathing down his neck, “like someone was holding him hostage,” Bangert later said. The final draft, which recommended that foreclosure auctions be temporarily halted, was, Mateer testified, with some disgust, “as if Anthony Fauci had written it.” Bangert finished it on a Sunday night, after midnight; he later learned that Paul’s properties had been scheduled to be auctioned two days later. (Paxton’s defense team maintained that the opinion had no impact on Paul’s properties, which were placed into bankruptcy, thus halting the foreclosure proceedings.)
The whistle-blowers’ testimony painted a picture of a dysfunctional office, where the focus on Paul distracted from what they saw as more important priorities: preparing lawsuits challenging Biden’s election; responding to COVID. Bangert testified that, as he and Mateer were about to begin a key meeting about a planned lawsuit against Google, Paxton telephoned, wanting to talk about another Nate Paul matter. (With the spotlight on the attorney general’s office, pettier complaints began to emerge as well. Several former employees told the Associated Press about a coconut cake that H-E-B sends to the attorney general’s office every Christmas. The staff used to share the cake, but when Paxton took over he reportedly kept it for himself.)
By September, Paxton had concluded that his employees were not giving Paul’s complaints the attention that they merited. He hired an outside counsel, without informing his deputies, records and testimony show. That attorney, Brandon Cammack, had graduated from law school five years earlier. (In a group text, Mateer referred to him as “the kid.”) “Somebody probably had to tell him how to get a subpoena served,” Cammack’s father told the Texas Tribune. “That’s how inexperienced this boy is.” Michael Wynne, Paul’s attorney, provided Cammack with a list of dozens of targets that Paul wanted investigated, and Cammack pursued subpoenas against some of them, using language provided by Wynne. (Paul, who seemed to see himself as the protagonist in a spy thriller, liked to refer to his plans by code names; he called this one Operation Deep Sea.) The subpoena list included members of law enforcement, people Paul was embroiled in a legal battle with, and banks that had lent him money. When Cammack went to serve the subpoenas at two banks, Wynne accompanied him.
In late September, one of the banks that had received a subpoena called the attorney general’s office to make sure it was real. “We have a major problem,” Mateer texted his group chat. “The kid has served a subpoena on a bank. Showed up there in person at the bank.” The group gathered in Mateer’s office. Concluding that, as Bangert put it in his testimony, Nate Paul and his interests “metastasized” in the agency, and that Paxton was “determined to harness the power of our office and to fulfill the interests of a single individual against the interests of the state,” they decided to approach the F.B.I. Doing so felt like they “had stepped into the void,” Bangert testified. “We were protecting the interests of the state and ultimately, I believe, protecting the interests of the attorney general and, in my view, signing our professional death warrant.”
Even after some of the whistle-blowers made the broad outline of their complaints public, in a wrongful-termination lawsuit, in 2020, the fallout was limited. In the last two years, Paxton’s job approval among Republicans remained reasonably high; his alliance with Trump seemed to overshadow the scandals playing out in his office. In February, 2023, Paxton agreed to a three-million-dollar settlement in the wrongful-termination case. “I have chosen this path to save taxpayer dollars and ensure my third term as Attorney General is unburdened by unnecessary distractions,” he said in a statement.
According to the settlement, the whistle-blowers were to be paid out of state funds, pending lawmakers’ approval. The House initiated an investigation, and their findings include nearly four thousand pages of documents available online. For at least some Republicans, Paxton’s personal scandals were proving too much of a distraction. “There are people working on child-support enforcement, or working on representing the railroad commission, or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality—all the work that helps keep people healthy and safe in a state the size of Texas,” the former high-level Republican told me. “And this is potentially harming their reputation.”
If Paxton had been removed, Abbott would have appointed an interim replacement—likely someone just as conservative, but without Paxton’s baggage. But Paxton’s alliance with Trump, and with the MAGA wing of the party, remained strong. This summer, Paxton’s supporters poured money into a fund dedicated to defending him. Defend Texas Liberty, the PAC supporting far-right candidates, paid for billboards condemning a Republican House member who voted to impeach Paxton, and threatened to fund primary campaigns against senators who vote for his removal. (Defend Texas Liberty also gave three million dollars to Dan Patrick.) On Thursday, Trump posted a defense of Paxton, blaming the impeachment on “establishment RINOS.” Pressure from such groups is a serious concern for the senators, particularly since Republican primary voters play an outsized role in deciding the outcome of Texas races. “You look at this particular Texas Senate, and you don’t see a group that seems particularly politically courageous, or particularly willing to embrace principle over self-interest,” Henson said.
Although Paxton will resume his position as attorney general (he had been suspended since the vote to impeach in May), his legal troubles are not over. He still faces state securities-fraud charges, and there may be further fallout from his association with Nate Paul. Paxton’s own lawyer, Dan Cogdell, has speculated that Paul, now facing federal charges, might face pressure to flip on his former friend. (After Saturday’s vote, Cogdell called both the impeachment and the securities-fraud charges “B.S.” “That case, like this one, should have never been brought,” he said. “They ought to dismiss it. And if they don’t dismiss it, we will try them and beat them there just like we beat them here.”)
Paxton’s acquittal is further evidence that the Republican Party is captive to its most extreme voters. According to recent polling, the more that Texans—including Republicans—learned about Paxton’s actions, the less inclined they were to overlook them. (In contrast, voters’ perceptions of Trump haven’t changed much, despite his numerous indictments.)
“A lot of what we’re seeing now is the by-product of a party being in power for more than two decades, having total domination of all the statewide offices,” Jennifer Harris, a communications strategist who has worked for a number of Republican officials in Texas, said. “As a partisan, back in the day, I could cheer that on, but I think you can become complacent, disconnected from your own voters.” Harris said that she no longer considers herself a Republican. “The branding-comms person in me is, like, ‘You can’t salvage this brand.’ ”
“From a very narrow partisan perspective, it’s almost better for the Democrats if he’s acquitted,” Justin Nelson, the former Democratic candidate, told me before the vote. “Then the entire Republican Party is tarred with this corruption, and you can’t separate it out.” ♦