A follow-up to our earlier Texas Senate profile on the Cornyn/Paxton primary and the Talarico general election matchup.
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Ken Paxton’s official salary as Texas Attorney General is $153,000 a year. According to property records reviewed by the New York Times amid his ongoing divorce, Paxton — either personally or through a blind trust and a family trust — now owns roughly 15 properties worth approximately $9 million: five homes in Texas, three in Florida, four condominiums at a luxury Utah resort, a cabin in Oklahoma, and a plot of land in Hawaii.
The Wall Street Journal has independently traced the trajectory: Paxton entered public service in 2002 with less than $175,000 in total assets. By 2018, his net worth had reached $5.5 million. His most documented windfall came from a $300,000 investment in WatchGuard, a police video technology company, which paid out $2.2 million when Motorola acquired it in 2019 — an investment that became controversial specifically because WatchGuard secured a Texas Department of Public Safety contract in 2006 while Paxton simultaneously held a state legislative seat and owned shares in the company.
THE PART THAT MATTERS MOST FOR THIS RACE
His Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, has made this the center of his contrast case, telling MS NOW’s Jen Psaki directly: “Since taking office, Ken Paxton has now become a multimillionaire, while our pay has remained stagnant for years, for decades.” Talarico himself discloses one property and an annual salary under $100,000 — a deliberate, pointed contrast. MaddowBlog’s own fact-check largely confirmed Talarico’s numbers, and if anything found he’d understated the total once the New York Times’ later reporting on the additional Utah condos came out.
THE MORTGAGE FRAUD ALLEGATIONS ARE THE PART THAT SHOULD ACTUALLY BE DISQUALIFYING
This isn’t just a story about wealth accumulation — it’s a story about a state’s top law enforcement official allegedly committing the exact category of fraud his own office prosecutes. An Associated Press review of public records found mortgage documents where Paxton and his then-wife Angela declared three separate houses as their “primary residence” simultaneously — a designation that unlocks meaningfully lower interest rates than second-home or investment-property mortgages, saving the couple tens of thousands of dollars over the life of those loans. Knowingly making false statements on mortgage documents is both a federal and a state crime. Separately, Texas homestead property-tax exemptions — legally limited to one primary home — were allegedly claimed on both the Dallas home and a $1.1 million Austin property.
It gets worse on the voting side: a joint ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation found Paxton appears to have voted in up to six elections using an address where he no longer actually lived — the same violation his own office has criminally prosecuted other Texans for committing, a second-degree felony under Texas law carrying up to 20 years in prison. On the deeds for one property in question, Paxton listed a Frisco home as his address; police records obtained by the Times indicate a woman who is not his wife lives there, and he’s been photographed vacationing with her in London, without publicly addressing the relationship. His wife, State Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on what she described as “biblical grounds,” accusing him of adultery.
WHY THIS BELONGS IN THE PROJECT ZERO FILE
This is the same man already carrying a 2023 impeachment (20 articles, centered on allegations he used his office to benefit a wealthy campaign donor) and a Trump endorsement for this Senate seat that came over the objections of Senate Republican leadership, who’d spent months trying to talk Trump into backing the incumbent instead. A candidate who may have committed the exact category of mortgage and voter-address fraud his office is legally empowered to prosecute other Texans for — while amassing a real estate portfolio nearly 60 times his annual salary in value — isn’t a minor character flaw. It’s the same pattern of self-dealing and unaccountability that keeps showing up across this entire administration’s ecosystem, at every level of government, from the presidency down to a single state’s Senate primary.