Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has managed to amass millions of dollars while in office, according to new reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
The attorney general's state salary is roughly in line with that of a middle class attorney, a little over $150,000 a year. According to reporting based on thousands of previously unpublished documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Paxton told a lender in 2018 he'd amassed a net worth of about $5.5 million, and the following year had another $2.2 million gain from his investment in a company with a lucrative state contract.
None of this includes millions in assets held by him and his wife in a blind trust.
Paxton is running for the Senate seat currently held by John Cornyn, and previous polls showed Paxton posed a clear threat to Cornyn's reelection ambitions – though new polls show the race appears to be tightening.
Elizabeth Findell, who reports for the Wall Street Journal, said when Paxton first ran for office over 20 years ago, he did not have this many assets — only a handful of stocks and a house with a mortgage. His wealth now amounts to much more than that, but the exact details can be hard to find.
"So many assets have been moved into the blind trust and there's not as much of a window into those. But what we did see is a very rapid increase in his net worth after he became elected to office," Findell said. "He started investing a lot in partnerships and private companies. He disclosed many of those in his ethics filings, especially before the trust was created. And so we can see some of those."
Findell said it's not clear where the money came to buy these investments, or necessarily how much they were worth.
"Then we obtained financial statements that he had provided to banks in various years, estimating his net worth first at $5.4 million before the trust was created," she said. "And then just a few years later at $5.5 million, not counting the millions he had put into the trust."
One significant investment was paid out in 2019, when Paxton received $2.2 million from an investment in a police technology company called Watch Guard.
"(They) had a contract with the Texas Department of Public Safety. And he had invested in the company shortly after it formed back in the early 2000s, and then it got the DPS contract a couple of years later," Findell said. "And then in 2019 it sold to Motorola for a total of $250 million. So he received a significant payout for his investment at that time."
Texas doesn't require public officials to disclose their total income, but Findell said there are questions about the management of Paxton's blind trust.
"I think (the Paxton's) are going to face some questions about their blind trust, which is a tool set up by politicians sometimes to basically block them from knowledge of their investments so that they don't have conflicts of interest," she said. "And the trustee of that trust is supposed to manage their assets without providing them any information about how those are being managed or even what assets are included in the trust. And that appears to not have happened in this case."
Findell said her reporting was based on documents that had been subpoenaed from Paxton and that were provided by a trusted source.
"I think the big-picture takeaway is that this is someone who is a rising star within the MAGA world who became very wealthy very quickly on a public official's salary," she said. "And who did that through a series of investments that people may want to know more about."
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