Texas attorney general loves a good fight — and to win
Still facing criminal charges, Paxton keeps beating odds
AUSTIN — Ken Paxton’s iPhone buzzed in his pocket as he strolled across the University of Arkansas campus on an October afternoon with his wife and daughter.
He was talking on another phone, so he handed his over to his wife.
When he turned back, Angela Paxton was leaping in the air — a smile stretched across her face — and throwing her hands skyward like he’d just scored a touchdown.
“It’s been dismissed,” she said.
A federal judge had tossed out a damning trio of civil securities fraud charges against Paxton, Texas’ first-term attorney general.
Paxton grinned, took the phone and wrapped his arms around her, then strolled into the university bookstore with his family looking for a souvenir while he debriefed with his lawyer. No hollering, no hoopla. Not even a fist pump.
Paxton has spent more than two years fighting the accusations, which had tarnished his improbable rise from a backbench state rep to a tea party-anointed attorney general who has gained national notoriety for his crusades against the Obamaadministration, including lawsuits over transgender bathroom guidelines, overtime rules and environmental regulations.
Beating back obstacles is nothing new for Paxton, who revels in winning.
Three criminal charges connected to the same securities fraud accusations in the civil suit still loom over him in state court. If convicted, he could face up to 99 years in prison. If acquitted, he could one day be governor.
Eight autographed footballs and a signed Cowboys jersey are on display in Paxton’s corner office in the Price Daniel Building downtown, where his windows overlook the Capitol. The governor’s mansion rises
“I like the challenge of expectations being low and having the opportunity to overcome obstacles and sometimes prove the naysayers wrong.” Attorney General Ken Paxton
in the distance.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” he says, gazing at the view.
Paxton shrugs off suggestions he’d like to be governor someday. But the man who exceeded expectations when he won his first five-way race for the statehouse, captured a coveted spot in the Senate and catapulted to attorney general would have a hard time convincing anyone he hasn’t thought about it.
“I like the challenge of expectations being low and having the opportunity to overcome obstacles and sometimes prove the naysayers wrong,” he says, hinting that his vanilla exterior hides a reservoir of intensity.
His wife, whore mains his closest political adviser, describes him as “a very competitive person.” Her natural charisma is a gift Paxton lacks. She warms up his political events strumming her guitar, singing, “I’m a pistol packin’ momma and my husband sues Obama.” Some say she’d make a great candidate, but she’s more interested in standing at his side.
They hold hands under the heavy wooden table in his campaign office on the other side of the Capitol as a photographer snaps pictures of them.
“He wants his team to win when we’re watching TV, and he loves to win,” she says. Then, turning, to him, “and I think that kind of fuels some of your perseverance, because he is that guy, that he just doesn’t quit.”
Paxton is famous for the walls he has built between himself and the news media. He has been known to duck out back doors at events, walk away from reporters asking about his court case and once even leaked a story accusing a reporter of stalking him. Now, he’s talking. Why? “I don’t expect no criticism; I expect that. But I do want to get my side of the story, and I don’t feel like that’s always happening,” Paxton says later. “Nobody’s tried to get to know me, anyway.”
BBB Ken Paxton has had to fight since the night he was born, his father says.
It was two days before Christmas in Minot, N.D., 1962, and Paxton was trapped. The placenta rushed ahead of him to the birth canal and his mother, Sally, waited more than an hour for a surgeon to drive to town and cut him out.
Paxton was easy to raise, Warren Kenneth Paxton Sr. says. A white trailer with gold accents and no air conditioning often was their home, parked outside Air Force bases or the beach near where the elder Paxton was sta-
“There are times you just have to make a point. You have to stand up and say, ‘OK, we’re probably going to get punched, but we’re going to punch back.’ ” Attorney General Ken Paxton
tioned. The family bounced from North Dakota to Florida, New York, North Carolina, California and Oklahoma, the three kids spending most of the time with their stay-at-home mom.
Junior cultivated an affinity for sports early on, especially football, a game his father never let him play, fearing he’d get hurt. It didn’t stop him from dragging his father to games, and today catching every match he can. The autographed jersey he owns belongs to former Cowboys safety Bill Bates, “one of those guys who didn’t have the most talent, but he was one of these hardworking guys who just never quit,” Paxton says. He named Bates his campaign treasurer.
When the young Paxton wasn’t watching football, he was hustling to make the cut on sports teams and forging relationships with coaches.
Anything Paxton ever played, he played to win, his dad says.
At 12, he nearly lost his right eye in a game of hide-and-seek when a berry thrown by another boy left him virtually blind. It should have been a temporary injury, if not for a misdiagnosis from the physi- cian’s assistant at the veterans’ hospital, Paxton and his family contend.
He spent weeks immobile in a last-ditch effort to save his vision.
“I lost 30 or 40 pounds, so I couldn’t walk when I got out of the hospital, so I had to learn to walk again, and then I had to fight my way back into staying in that grade,” Paxton says.
Doctors later would prod his eye with needles and cut it open to remove the lens.
It has left him with differentcolored eyes. The left one, the good eye, is green. His right eye is brown, shaded by an eyelid that droops slightly as the pupil drifts downward.
It is one of his most noticeable features and leaves him looking squinty, almost smirking, in pictures, and his wife conscious of which side she should stand next to him in photos. He almost never talks about it, though. Not even close friends know that history, or that he can’t identify someone 3 feet away without a contact lens that brings his vision to 20/40, at best.
Life sucker-punched Paxton again during his freshman year at Baylor. An elbow to his face during a rowdy game of basketball shattered the bones around his right eye. Surgeons wired his skull back together, and the 19-year-old returned to campus with a swollen face, berry-blue bruises and failing grades from missing class.
“The whole front side of my face was not good for, you know, a year, so I had to deal with it, just being noticed everywhere,” he says.
Two years later, some of the same people who once gawked at Paxton elected him president of Baylor’s student body, another on a growing list of comebacks: passing that disastrous semester with A’s and B’s, induction to the university’s esteemed Chamber of Commerce fraternity and romancing the woman he would marry.
On one of their first dates, Paxton and Angela Allen leaned against a railing fresh with paint outside the Bill and Eva Williams Bear Habitat on campus, known then as the “Bear Pit.” A formidable competitor, she already had beaten him in a game of mini-golf, pool and bowling.
As the paint rubbed off on their shoes, she asked him, “What would you do if nothing stood in the way, money was no object or anything like that? That you could just do anything. What would you do?” She wanted to sing. Paxton, she remembers, said he might want to go into politics.
After earning a law degree and starting a family — the couple has four children — Paxton waited for his race. It was Angela who woke up one morning and told him it was time. That same day, he learned House Republicans wanted to draw a new legislative district, and he was in it.
Emerging victorious in a five-
“I think people underestimate Ken, which I think is a good thing. All the while, he’s plenty clever, and he’s damn sure plenty ambitious.” Bill Miller, Austin lobbyist
way contest — which included beating his state senator’s chief of staff and building up animosity in his county — he’d go on to serve in the Texas House of Representatives without much to show for his time. He often dealt behind the scenes on bills rather than passing many of his own. He also fed an “us vs them” mentality that was growing more common with a Republican majority controlling the House for the first time since Reconstruction.
His philosophy in the Legislature was simple: try to win.
“I have until the last second that you can pass a bill, and then I lose,” Paxton explains, his face lighting up, “but up until that point, I can still win.”
Eight years later, he announced his intent to run against San Antonio Rep. Joe Straus for the speaker’s gavel. Despite grassroots support from conservatives who ran TV ads hyping it as a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, Paxton pulled out at the last minute, saving him the embarrassment of a certain, overwhelming loss.
He spun his defeat, calling it a victory for tea party values for which he’d became a staunch supporter. Suspecting the aborted power play would prompt mainstream Republicans to draw him out of his district as punishment, Paxton moved on, upgrading to a newly open seat in the Senate. Two years later, he upsized again to attorney general.
As a legislator, he’d rack up controversies linked to companies in which he held an ownership interest, a list that grew from two businesses to 28 during his decade in public office. Critics, including fellow Republicans, painted him as unethical for suggesting taxpayers don’t need to know whether lawmakers have a financial interest in companies hired by the state. Paxton once introduced legislation to benefit cellphone companies when he was investing in a cellphone tower business, and he voted on a spending bill that included a $10 million contract to outfit patrol cars with the very digital video cameras one of his businesses sold.
Not a single newspaper in the state endorsed him for attorney general in 2014. It didn’t matter. He won handily, part of a Republican wave that swamped every Democrat seeking statewide office by at least 19 points.
The questions continued, like why the number of his investments grew when he promised they’d shrink, and why he kept finding himself ensnared in controversy.
It was during the GOP primary for attorney general against moderate Dallas Republican Dan Branch that the securities issues arose. Paxton acknowledged his failure to register as an investment adviser with the state securities board and paid a $1,000 fine. Two special prosecutors were appointed to probe the matter.
The investigation ended in a pair of felony securities fraud indictments by a grand jury in his home of Collin County for recruiting friends and colleagues to invest in a North Texas tech company, Servergy Inc., without mentioning that he was being compensated by the firm. According to prosecutors, Paxton received 100,000 shares of company stock for his recruitment efforts. He also caught a third, lesser felony charge of failing to register as an investment adviser with the state.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission later sued Paxton in civil court on similar charges. Forced to hire lawyers, he sought donations to cover his legal costs, sparking new questions about the legality of accepting a benefit from someone under the attorney general’s oversight or with a matter pending before the office.
BBB “Something good has come out of every difficult situation I’ve had to go through,” Paxton says on an early morning jog around Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin.
Asked if he thinks people underestimate him, Paxton takes a moment to ponder as the morning sun streams through the trees ahead on a wide, gravel path. “A lot of people who don’t know me do.”
His breath is steady in the final stretch of the three-mile jog. He’s not a runner, never has been, but he’s training to run a halfmarathon in Disney World with his daughter next month. He’s confident he can beat her to the finish, if he wants to.
“I think people think that because I’m not out talking all the time that I’m, maybe I’m not capable,” he says. “But the reality is, I have to try to let my actions speak louder than my words.”
A lot of people don’t want to talk about Paxton, at least not on the record. Nearly a dozen former classmates, state lawmakers past and present, even former political rivals declined to comment for this story, with the spokesman for one citing the so-called 11th Commandment made famous by President Ronald Reagan: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
“I think people underestimate Ken, which I think is a good thing,” says Bill Miller, a gregarious Austin lobbyist whose clients include the city of Houston and Houston’s three pro sports teams. “All the while, he’s plenty clever, and he’s damn sure plenty ambitious.”
Paxton’s “got that internal fire,” says Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, who sat next to him in the Senate. “It just doesn’t flame out where everybody can see it.”
“He’s come up from the bottom so many times,” says his younger sister, Robin Allen, who remembers watching the news when the Collin County grand jury indicted him. “I wanted to say to those people on the courthouse steps, ‘Just look in his one good eye. Look in the eyes of the other people.’ The eyes tell the truth.”
Some critics don’t like what they see in Paxton. They see his name on a legion of lawsuits, including ones aimed at limiting access to abortion, blocking the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Texas and protecting a voter ID law a federal court has rejected for disenfranchising minority voters. A champion of religious liberty, last week he went after the Killeen school district for taking down “A Charlie Brown Christmas” decoration of Linus explaining the meaning of the holiday. Paxton won.
What state Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, sees is a man fighting against a court-ordered overhaul of the state foster care system.
“Kids were in unimaginable situations, and Ken Paxton
“I think people think that because I’m not out talking all the time that I’m, maybe I’m not capable. But the reality is, I have to try to let my actions speak louder than my words.” Attorney General Ken Paxton
continues to, through his capacity of attorney general, drag this out in court, complain that these reforms would be too costly, and too expensive, and Texas knows best,” Turner says, adding that having the state’s chief law enforcement officer under felony indictments disturbs him.
Figuring out how to fix the beleaguered foster care system should be up to the state, not the courts, Paxton has countered.
“There are times you just have to make a point,” the attorney general says. “You have to stand up and say, ‘OK, we’re probably going to get punched, but we’re going to punch back.’”
His biggest test is yet before him. Hewants to defeat the people trying to take him down in his court fight. He won’t say who or why. But the charges he’s facing are personal, he says, and if not, “it sure does look like it.”
In the meantime, there’s always another competition.
Paxton bought a fresh pair of gym shoes for a pingpong match after forgetting his at home last month. The royal blue low-tops clashed with his gray dress pants and white-collared shirt as he darted around the table.
He asked his spokesman if he should try to win or lose, since he was playing against a reporter. Win, his spokesman said, try to win.
And that’s what he did, taking every opportunity to whack the orange ball, too hard and too fast to return. He sometimes wanted to hit the ball so hard he whiffed, missing it entirely. Still, he won. Every game. Afterward, Paxton basked in his victory and walked into the night, a thin layer of sweat drying on his face.