Ken Paxton Will Go Down As The Most Corrupt Attorney General In Texas' History
He betrayed workers, women, and the planet, and got away with it.
Of course, you must be thinking, “Duh, Captain Obvious.”
This week, our unethical Attorney General launched a lawsuit against ActBlue, a desperate act six months before the election, when Republicans lose Texas. And I’ve been thinking, “I’ll be so happy when this mofo is out of our government.” But even though he won’t be our AG anymore, it doesn’t exactly mean he’s out of our hair yet.
As of last week, Paxton was leading Cornyn +8 points in a Republican runoff poll. And early voting for the runoff election is only three weeks away. And of course, this leads to an entire myriad of new issues.
The Senate race will be between James Talarico and Ken Paxton. And wow! What a juxposition that will be.
What will the new Democratic AG find when they walk into the AG’s office on day 1?
We should all completely expect that before Paxton leaves the AG’s office for the final time in January 2027, large dumpsters full of paperwork will be spotted outside of his office, in a blaze of fire. Because now, on the heels of this election, is as good a time as any to revisit Ken Paxton’s long history of corruption, so we all know what’s at stake.
The securities fraud indictment.
The fact that this case dragged on for so long is probably one of the most in-your-face examples of corruption involving Ken Paxton. While first running for AG in 2014, Paxton was reprimanded by the Texas Securities Board and fined $1,000 for soliciting investment clients without being registered. He admitted wrongdoing but called it an administrative oversight. But it escalated after he was elected.
In 2015, he was indicted on three criminal charges. Two counts of securities fraud and one count of failing to register as an investment adviser.
Paxton was indicted for encouraging other legislators to invest in the McKinney-based company Servergy without disclosing that he would receive a commission, and for allegedly misrepresenting himself as an investor. Servergy was later charged with fraud by the SEC.
The case was moved from Tarrant County to Collin County to Harris County. It was assigned to four different judges. Special prosecutors said they weren’t paid. Each of these events caused delays and prevented the trial from starting.
The case dragged on for a full decade.
In March 2025, prosecutors finally dropped the charges under an agreement requiring Paxton to perform 100 hours of community service, take 15 hours of legal ethics courses, and pay around $271,000 in restitution to those he defrauded. He lucked out.
He killed overtime pay for millions of workers.
In 2016, Paxton sued the Obama administration over a Department of Labor rule that would have made five million additional workers eligible for overtime pay, arguing the regulations would have disastrous consequences for the economy.
He won. Then he did it again. In June 2024, Paxton challenged the Biden administration’s revised version of the same rule, and a federal court vacated it.
The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, because of men like Ken Paxton.
The Texas AFL-CIO said, “In the event the lawsuit succeeds, hundreds of thousands of Texas workers who might work 70-hour weeks with no overtime will have Ken Paxton to thank. Overtime pay is about basic workplace fairness, not Ken Paxton’s political agenda.”
Paxton defended ExxonMobil from climate accountability.
The State of Texas is disproportionately responsible for climate change, more than any other state in America, and much more than many countries.
In 2016, Paxton was one of twelve Republican state attorneys general who sided with ExxonMobil in the company’s suit to block a climate change investigation by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
He blocked accountability for one of the world’s largest polluters while claiming to protect Texans. That was far from his only time participating in earth-killing activities.
He killed the clean power plan, protecting polluters.
Paxton led a successful multistate coalition against the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. His own website says, “Stopping the EPA’s ‘Waters of the United States’ rule preserved Texans’ ability to regulate their own natural resources.” Fucker.
The Clean Power Plan would have required Texas to cut 51 million tons of emissions annually. Paxton directly contradicted EPA studies showing the regulation would reduce carbon pollution by 870 million tons in 2030.
Maybe this is something that should be brought up at the next meeting over the Corpus Christi water crisis or the next memorial for the Kerr County flood victims.
Remember that time he pretended to have a “blind trust?”
It’s funny because Don the Con did the same thing, and the cult followers mindlessly fell for it. After coming under scrutiny, Paxton shifted his investments into a blind trust in 2015 to prevent conflicts of interest.
However, the Wall Street Journal uncovered texts between Paxton and the trustee regarding his 2020 stock trades, which violated the arrangement’s “blind” nature. As it turns out, the “blind trustee” was a close personal friend. Paxton received $2.2 million from his WatchGuard investment when the company was acquired in 2019.
Paxton took $100,000 from a CEO under state investigation.
In 2015, Paxton accepted $100,000 for his criminal defense fund from a CEO who was under investigation by the State of Texas for fraud. This prompted the Kaufman County District Attorney to investigate the gift and whether Paxton had violated state limits on gifts to public officials.
Which wasn’t the same case as…
The Nate Paul bribery scandal.
Of course, this is the scandal that led to his impeachment. In October 2020, seven of Paxton’s top aides published a letter to the office’s director of human resources, accusing Paxton of improper influence, abuse of office, bribery, and other crimes, and said they had provided information to law enforcement. The letter was signed by the first assistant attorney general and the deputy attorneys general overseeing criminal investigations, civil litigation, administration, and policy.
The whistleblowers alleged Paxton used his office to benefit Austin real estate developer Nate Paul, who had donated $25,000 to Paxton’s 2018 campaign and was under FBI investigation. In exchange, Paul employed a woman with whom Paxton was allegedly having an extramarital affair, and arranged or paid for substantial renovations to Paxton’s Austin home.
Paxton also took steps to interfere with the FBI’s investigation of Paul, tried to have his staff investigate the Bureau’s actions, and, when they refused, hired an independent investigator with taxpayer money to protect Paul, and then appears to have lied in official documents about what he was doing and why.
And a whole bunch of shitty Senate Republicans (and Dan Patrick) were bribed and/or threatened not to remove him from office.
He fired the whistleblowers.
This was a whole separate scandal in itself. By the end of October 2020, all seven whistleblowers had left the office. Three resigned, two were fired, and two were placed on leave.
Four of them sued. The firing of the whistleblowers was accompanied by allegations of intimidation and threats against employees who questioned Paxton’s decisions, and by a workplace environment in which loyalty to Paxton personally was valued over adherence to legal and ethical standards.
Paxton tried to make taxpayers pay his hush money.
Partly to shut down the whistleblower lawsuit quickly, and to prevent the plaintiffs from obtaining AG documents through discovery, Paxton settled in February 2023, offering them $3.3 million in taxpayer money. He asked lawmakers to fund the settlement.
The Texas House’s investigation into that request was what triggered the impeachment inquiry.
Impeachment by his own party! 🤯
We all know Texas Republicans are corrupt, but do you know HOW corrupt you have to be to be impeached by a Texas Republican? Like, infinity.
In May 2023, the Texas House investigation committee unveiled 20 articles of impeachment. The House voted 121–33 to impeach Paxton, suspending him from office and marking only the third time in Texas history the legislative body had impeached an official.
Articles of impeachment included allegations that Paxton gave preferential treatment to a political donor who bribed him, misapplied public resources, made false statements against whistleblowers, obstructed justice in the securities fraud trial, and made false statements regarding his financial interests.
And he pulled his wife into his corruption bubble.
Following the election of Paxton’s wife, Angela Paxton, to the Texas Senate, the Lone Star Project obtained emails showing coordination between Senator Angela Paxton’s office and senior AG staff on legislation to change Texas security law, legislation that could have benefited Ken Paxton’s efforts to avoid conviction on his pending felony charges.
Ken Paxton filed the most audacious election lawsuits in modern history.
In December 2020, Paxton filed a lawsuit in the SCOTUS against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, seeking to invalidate millions of certified votes. The suit was filed after over 60 similar lawsuits had already failed. Even his own Solicitor General refused to sign on.
Pennsylvania’s AG called it “a seditious abuse of the judicial process.” Florida’s AG lawyers reportedly called it “batshit insane.” Senator Ben Sasse said it looked like “a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt rather than a lawsuit.”
Let’s not forget, he spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally before January 6th.
Paxton spoke at the rally Trump held on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He later insinuated on Twitter that antifa, not Trump supporters, was responsible for the insurrection.
Do you think this is a man who will ever put the Constitution above his own ambitions for power?
The Texas State Bar sued him for professional misconduct over that whole trying to commit treason business.
In 2022, the State Bar of Texas sued Paxton in Collin County District Court, seeking to have the court find that Paxton had acted unethically by seeking to subvert the 2020 presidential election. The Bar’s filing said Paxton had made numerous specific “dishonest” representations. Four former presidents of the State Bar co-signed the complaint.
The Bar eventually dropped the case in January 2025 following a Texas Supreme Court ruling on a related case. The all-Republican Supreme Court is an elected body, and each member needs to be voted out.
He falsely claimed immigrants committed 600,000 crimes.
If you pay attention to Republicans long enough, one thing you’ll notice is that corruption and dishonesty often go hand-in-hand.
In 2018, Paxton falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants had committed over 600,000 crimes since 2011 in Texas. This claim was debunked by PolitiFact.
Paxton’s human trafficking unit was a political prop.
Paxton created a human trafficking unit in the AG office in 2015. In 2019, he convinced Texas lawmakers to more than quadruple its annual funding.
However, by 2020, the unit did not secure a single human trafficking conviction. In 2021, it secured only four, two of which resulted in deferred adjudications.
He spent 22,000 staff hours on a voter fraud witch hunt and found almost nothing.
When Democrats finally take control of Texas, one of the first things I want to see is how many BILLIONS (not millions) we’ve wasted on Republicans’ political stunts to entertain their QAnon base over the years.
Paxton’s office spent more than 22,000 hours looking for voter fraud after the 2020 election. They found only 16 cases of false addresses on registration forms out of nearly 17 million registered voters. He’s bragged about “election integrity” as a signature issue his entire tenure. It’s all bullshit.
He stole a $1,000 pen (literally).
A $1,000 Montblanc pen was accidentally left in a metal detector tray at a courthouse by attorney Joe Joplin, who had received it as a gift from his wife. It found its way into the hands of then-state senator Ken Paxton. After Joplin realized it was missing, he asked a sheriff to review the security footage.
Ken Paxton, a liar and a horse pen thief.
Did you know Paxton investigated Media Matters to protect Elon Musk?
The same day that Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against Media Matters for a report showing ads for major brands appearing alongside white supremacist content on Twitter, Paxton launched a consumer protection investigation into the nonprofit.
In this particular case, it’s hard to decipher if Paxton is more on the side of Musk or the white supremacists. But ye of no morals.
He used the consumer protection law to harass nonprofits.
A Texas Tribune/ProPublica investigation found that not a single one of Paxton’s consumer protection investigations against nonprofits was prompted by a consumer complaint. Paxton’s office admitted in a court filing that it did not believe PFLAG (a nonprofit supporting LGBTQ+ families) was actually violating the state’s consumer protection law. Still, it argued it could demand records from anyone, “not just those suspected of a violation.”
Two attorneys representing nonprofits Paxton targeted said they believe he launched the investigations simply to harass their clients and create a chilling effect among organizations doing similar work.
Then, he blocked the methane tax on oil and gas.
Texas produced 663.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), 13.5% of the country’s total. Which makes moves like this particularly evil.
Paxton led a 23-state coalition in suing the EPA over a rule that would have required oil and gas producers to pay fees for excessive methane emissions. Methane emissions are a dozen times more potent than carbon dioxide. Paxton called it a “last-minute effort to harm the energy industry.”
He opposed corporate climate disclosure rules.
Paxton led a multistate letter opposing an SEC rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose climate-related risks to investors. He called the rule “unlawful, unconstitutional, and just plain bad policy” and claimed it was motivated by “a small number of environmental activists.”
What he should have said is that he fought to keep corporations from having to tell their own shareholders how climate change affects their business.
Paxton strategically interfered in environmental lawsuits against Big Oil.
When Harris County filed suit against ExxonMobil for environmental violations, Paxton filed a nearly identical suit in Travis County, a move environmental advocates warned was an attempt to consolidate the cases under Paxton’s control and away from local jurisdiction.
Critics noted that fines from such cases could be written into the cost of business for Big Oil. Paxton had many opportunities before to take action on pollution, but hadn’t. Want to guess how it turned out?
Aren’t convinced Ken Paxton is a supervillain, yet? Wait until you find out about his attacks on women.
Ken Paxton sued to kill the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act.
Paxton sued the federal government over the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which requires most employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant employees.
A federal judge upheld the state’s right not to require Texas employers to comply with that law.
So, you want to know why your choices are either to pump on the job or to quit? Blame Ken Paxton.
He sued Yelp for warning consumers about fake abortion clinics.
In the eyes of a Republican, it’s okay to lie to voters and the people to maintain power, so business must lie to protect them, or so says the Republican Christian Nationalist God… probably.
After Yelp began posting notices on crisis pregnancy center listings informing consumers that these facilities don’t provide abortion services, Paxton launched an investigation and sued Yelp under the state’s consumer protection law. Paxton is the only attorney general in the country who has investigated Yelp or filed a lawsuit over the crisis pregnancy center notices.
He immediately moved to enforce pre-Roe abortion bans.
Within hours of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Paxton issued an advisory stating that abortion providers could face criminal liability “starting today” based on pre-Roe statutes dating back to 1925, statutes courts had previously found to be repealed and unenforceable.
Ken Paxton threatened doctors who tried to save women’s lives.
Even when a Texas court ruled in 2023 that Kate Cox could undergo an abortion despite the state’s bans, Paxton threatened to prosecute “hospitals, doctors, or anyone else” who assisted in providing the procedure with first-degree felonies. She ultimately had to leave the state.
He blocked emergency abortion protections for pregnant patients.
Paxton sued the Biden administration to block a federal rule that would have required Texas hospitals to provide emergency abortions to stabilize patients facing life-threatening pregnancy complications. A federal court issued an injunction blocking those protections, and the Fifth Circuit upheld it.
He sued doctors across state lines for prescribing abortion pills.
In 2024, Paxton filed a civil suit against a New York doctor for allegedly sending abortion pills to a patient in Texas via telehealth. He also sued a Delaware-based abortion pill provider. Legal experts warned a ruling against the New York doctor could have a significant chilling effect on providers in other states. They could extend beyond abortion to telehealth services broadly.
Paxton is responsible for the first criminal prosecution of an abortion provider post-Roe.
Paxton prosecuted midwife Maria Margarita Rojas, believed to be the first healthcare provider criminally charged for abortion care anywhere in America after the fall of Roe. His office’s own investigators never observed any medical practice inside her clinics. He labeled her and eight colleagues a “cabal of abortion-loving radicals” in a press release while the criminal case was still pending. Since 2022, taxpayers have footed at least $400,000 for Paxton’s legal war on abortion rights.
On November 3, 2026, Texans will vote to permanently remove Ken Paxton from office.
April 27, 2026: Last day to register to vote (Democratic primary runoff elections)
April 28, 2026: Last day of early voting (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
May 2, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
May 2, 2026: Election day! (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
May 15, 2026: Last day to apply to vote by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 18, 2026: First day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 22, 2026: Last day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Election day! (Democratic primary runoff elections)
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It's come to my attention that this article, as deplorable as it is, will need a Part Two.
Stay tuned.
His misdeeds and ill-gotten gains are astronomical yet I may have missed your mention of his harassment of not only the Texas House Democrats but specifically Beto O'Rourke and individuals who volunteer with PoweredxPeople.