Christian in name only
Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of Texas, which is a funny job for a man whose own office eventually treated him like a case file. He sells the usual package: church, family, law and order, the works. The public record sells a different package. An affair he admitted. A donor he was accused of using the office to help. Senior lawyers on his own payroll walking into the FBI. A Republican House that impeached him. A Republican Senate that put him back.
Call the brand whatever you like. The invoices do not match the sermon.
The mistress
Paxton admitted an extramarital affair with Laura Olson, a woman tied up in the same donor mess that ate his office. The impeachment articles did not treat this as a private sadness. They treated it as part of the job he was doing with everyone else’s authority: allegations that real-estate developer Nate Paul, a campaign donor, employed Olson while Paxton used the Attorney General’s office in ways that looked a lot like a personal favor desk.
His wife, Angela Paxton, is a Texas state senator. She sat in the chamber for the trial and was barred from voting on whether her husband stayed in office. That is a family portrait you do not put on the Christmas card. The man who campaigns as a defender of the household had already explained, in his own words, that the household rules were for other people.
Corruption, Nate Paul, and the rest of the file
The darker paperwork is older than the affair and uglier than a sermon clip.
In 2015 a Collin County grand jury indicted Paxton on state securities-fraud charges over his work pitching investments without the registration the law expects from people who do that for a living. Those charges hung over him for years. In 2024 they went away in a deal: restitution on the order of $271,000 to people who lost money, community service, legal-ethics coursework, and the prosecutors dropped the felonies. No conviction. Also no clean slate you would frame. The state’s top lawyer closed a securities case by paying the investors and taking an ethics class.
Then there is Nate Paul. In 2020 Paxton’s own senior aides — the conservative lawyers he hired, not a squad of opposition researchers — told federal authorities he was abusing the office to help Paul. The claims, laid out later in lawsuits and in the House impeachment articles, were specific: intervene in Paul’s legal problems, lean on other agencies, chase Paul’s enemies, and do it with the seal of the Attorney General. Paul had given to Paxton’s campaign. Olson had a job in Paul’s orbit. Paxton’s answer to the aides was to fire them.
They sued. The state settled the whistleblower case for about $3.3 million. The Legislature, controlled by his own party, balked at writing the check like it was a routine office expense. Nothing says confidence in your story like a settlement you would rather not explain on the House floor.
Impeached by his own party
In May 2023 the Texas House impeached Paxton, 121 to 23. Republicans hold that chamber. This was not a Democratic stunt and it was not a close shave. The articles bundled the Paul allegations, the whistleblower retaliation, and the affair. The House’s own investigators had sat with the record and decided the Attorney General should be suspended and tried.
In September 2023 the Texas Senate acquitted him on every article and put him back behind the same desk. His party threw him out the front door and then unlocked it. He treated the acquittal as a resurrection. The House vote is still on the books. So is the settlement. So is the admission about Olson.
His own staff called the FBI
The detail that never gets less bleak is who made the call. Not a rival campaign. Not a newspaper that disliked his politics. His deputies. The people inside the office, the ones who had watched the Paul requests up close, went to the FBI and then got fired for it.
You can win the Senate trial and still have that sentence on your résumé. The lawyers he trusted looked at the work, decided it belonged in a federal tip, and accepted the career damage that followed. He is still Attorney General. They were still right about what they saw long enough for the House to impeach him and for the state to settle with them.
That is the Ken Paxton story. A Christian brand, a mistress in the impeachment articles, a donor, a securities case closed with a check and an ethics class, an impeachment by his own party, and a staff that reported their boss to the FBI. The acquittal put him back in the chair. It did not rewrite the file.
