If you missed it, earlier this year, I published “Ken Paxton Will Go Down As The Most Corrupt Attorney General In Texas’ History: Part I.” What surprised me the most was how many emails I received after publishing that article, telling me I’d missed this or that scandal. And perhaps there is enough Ken Paxton corruption to write an entire book about, so here is part two. And I fear the depravity may never stop boiling to the surface.
Trans kids and medical privacy.
In November 2023, Paxton subpoenaed Seattle Children’s Hospital for unredacted records on any Texas minor who ever received gender-affirming care there. Except Seattle Children’s doesn’t have a Texas practice, in person or remote. Paxton wanted the records anyway. The hospital sued, citing HIPAA and Washington’s “shield law,” which exists specifically to stop states like ours from reaching across state lines to punish people for legal medical care.
That same year, Paxton went to the Texas Department of Public Safety and demanded a list of every single Texan who had changed the gender marker on their driver’s license.
In February 2024, PFLAG, the LGBTQ family support organization, sued Paxton after he demanded the org’s records on families it had helped find gender-affirming care. He wanted to know who they’d helped and how.
By April 2024, Paxton finally dropped the Seattle Children’s subpoena and settled after Seattle Children’s agreed to withdraw its Texas business license as part of the deal. So the hospital had to formally give up the right to operate here just to make him go away.
It’s the same move he pulled on PFLAG, on Yelp, on every nonprofit he’s decided to harass using “consumer protection” and “deceptive trade practices” law as a costume. His own office has admitted, in writing, that these investigations start with Ken Paxton deciding he doesn’t like you.
In March 2026, the Texas Supreme Court sided with Paxton, ruling the lower court had no business blocking his investigation and that PFLAG has to hand over records after all, including communications about how families found care outside Texas. This is the state’s highest court telling a family support nonprofit that Ken Paxton can dig through their files.
The Beto lawsuit saga.
On August 8, 2025, Paxton sued Beto and his group Powered by People, claiming Beto was funding “Beto Bribes” to Democrats who broke quorum. Raising money to support lawmakers exercising a legal, constitutional tool is, you know, politics. Paxton got a same-day temporary restraining order out of a Tarrant County judge.
A week later, on August 15, Paxton wasn’t satisfied with just blocking the fundraising. He amended the petition to go after Powered by People’s entire nonprofit charter. The whole organization. Shut it down.
Then on August 20, an El Paso judge looked at what Paxton was doing and issued a competing TRO blocking him from prosecuting the group at all. So now you’ve got dueling restraining orders out of two different counties, which is a fun way to spend the state’s legal resources.
Beto, for his part, did not sit quietly. He held a rally in Fort Worth, told the crowd to “fuck the rules,” and kept right on fundraising. Paxton’s response was to ask the court to hold him in contempt and put him in jail.
Yes, the Attorney General of Texas tried to get a private citizen jailed for continuing to raise money and speak at a political rally.
By September 17, the Texas Tribune was reporting that the case was falling apart.
Quorum-break arrest warrant campaign.
While Paxton was busy trying to jail Beto, he and Speaker Dustin Burrows asked courts in Illinois and California to enforce Texas civil arrest warrants against the Democratic legislators who’d fled the state to deny quorum. An ask for out-of-state law enforcement to hunt down sitting Texas lawmakers and drag them back.
At the same time, Paxton went to the Texas Supreme Court and asked the justices to rule that Rep. Gene Wu and the others had vacated their seats for missing the deadline.
In the end, they didn’t have the legal authority.
Llano County book bans.
Back in 2022, Llano County officials pulled books off library shelves. The books targeted were disproportionately by Black and Latino authors, or dealt with gender. They fired the librarian who wouldn’t go along with it, then closed library board meetings to the public so nobody could watch them do it.
Naturally, Ken Paxton’s office jumped in to defend them, on the taxpayer’s dime.
The legal defense effort pulled in America First Legal, the same group that filed a brief backing Paxton against his own whistleblowers, the ones who got fired for reporting him to the FBI. Same right-wing legal infrastructure, showing up again and again, whether the fight is about Paxton’s own corruption or somebody else’s culture war.
The Waco plea deal.
Waco attorney Adam Hoffman was charged with a first-degree felony, sexual abuse of a child. His 2025 trial ended in a hung jury. Rather than retry the case, Paxton’s office cut a deal. Hoffman pleaded down to two misdemeanors and one day in jail. A judge looked at that deal, was apparently as disturbed by it as you’d expect, and bumped the sentence to 30 days, then 60 after public outcry. Hoffman was released after 30. He never had to register as a sex offender.
The facts, reported by the Texas Tribune and independently confirmed by Snopes.
The real estate and net worth.
Ken Paxton makes $153,000 a year as Attorney General. A report published just this week found that Paxton’s financial disclosures appear to violate federal ethics law. Seven properties worth a combined $5.2 million weren’t listed. Mortgages on his Utah condos went undisclosed. A piece of land got valued at roughly $950,000 less than what it’s actually worth.
In 2019, Paxton pocketed $2.2 million when Motorola bought out WatchGuard, the company behind his old “blind trust” stock. Since then he’s gone on a buying spree, snapping up somewhere between 10 and 15 properties across Texas, Florida, Utah, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. Forbes currently puts his net worth around $13 million.
On the record and sourced, a sitting Attorney General making $153,000 a year has quietly built a multimillion-dollar, multi-state property portfolio, and his own financial disclosures don’t add up. All of his math is either really bad or something is amiss.
Dark money in the Senate race.
James Talarico’s campaign filed an FEC complaint alleging Paxton and his own campaign treasurer illegally routed $1 million to a Paxton-aligned super PAC through Preserve Texas Inc., a Virginia-based dark money nonprofit that isn’t even registered as a political committee. The complaint leans on a 2002 campaign finance law written specifically to stop candidates from laundering unlimited outside cash through friendly committees.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the FEC to do anything about it before November. The commission currently lacks a quorum because Trump fired one of the Democratic commissioners. So the one federal body built to police this kind of thing is sitting there deliberately broken, which is either a hell of a coincidence.
Since January 2025, Talarico has raised $72 million, compared with Paxton’s $16.8 million. And look at where that money’s coming from: 88% of Paxton’s haul is from large donors, while 51% of Talarico’s is from small-dollar givers putting in less than $200 a pop. One of these campaigns is being funded by Texans chipping in what they can. The other is being funded by people who need a spreadsheet to track their own contributions.
End Citizens United has publicly called Paxton one of the most corrupt candidates running anywhere in the country in 2026, and endorsed Talarico on that basis alone.
Ken Paxton keeps getting caught doing more of what he’s always done.
Subpoenaing children’s medical records. Trying to jail a private citizen for holding a rally. Sending law enforcement across state lines to drag elected officials back to Austin. Bankrolling the defense of a county that fired a librarian for refusing to ban books. Cutting a plea deal so lenient for a man charged with sexually abusing a child that a judge had to intervene twice to make the punishment resemble justice. Building a real estate empire on a government salary and calling the missing paperwork an accident. And now, allegedly, laundering a million dollars through a dark money group with his own campaign treasurer sitting on both sides of the transaction.
Every single item in this piece has a court filing, a financial disclosure, a campaign finance record, or a named source attached to it.
Texas Republicans had every chance to be done with him. They impeached him on 20 counts and then let their own Senate acquit him anyway. They watched a decade of securities fraud charges evaporate into a slap on the wrist. They keep handing him bigger jobs instead of smaller ones. He’s not sneaking anything past anybody. He’s counting on us being too exhausted to keep score.
I’m not exhausted. I’m keeping score. And come November, Texans get to do the one thing a decade of prosecutors, judges, and his own party couldn’t manage. Fire him.
60 days until the November election!
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