By Elizabeth Findell and Mark Maremont
AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton went from being a middle-class lawyer to a multimillionaire during his two decades on a public official's salary, according to thousands of pages of previously unreported documents that shed new light on the personal finances of one of the Republican Party's most-watched midterm candidates.
Paxton, who entered state government in 2003 with a modest income and few assets, by 2018 told a lender he had amassed a net worth of about $5.5 million, not including millions in assets he and his wife had previously moved into a blind trust.
The following year, Paxton reaped an additional $2.2 million gain -- never previously disclosed -- from his investment in a local company with a lucrative Texas state contract, according to the documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, which include Paxton's tax returns and bank statements.
Paxton's accumulation of wealth has become a key campaign issue as he vies to unseat U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in a hotly contested Republican primary set for March 3, 2026. The race is crucial to Republicans' hopes to hold on to their Senate majority. Paxton is popular with the party's base, but national GOP strategists fear his nomination could cost them in a general election.
Cornyn has cast suspicion on Paxton's finances and highlighted the attorney general's failures to fully disclose them. Paxton has sought to paint Cornyn as a Washington insider. U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt said Monday he is joining the Republican primary field as well.
Paxton, 62 years old, became a rising star in the MAGA world, winning support for his battles on issues such as abortion, border security and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
But allegations of corruption and other impropriety have surfaced repeatedly during Paxton's career. The Republican-majority Texas House voted to impeach him in 2023 over allegations that he abused his office to aid a campaign donor, which he denied. The Texas Senate acquitted and returned him to office after a two-week trial.
A spokesman for Paxton called this article a "bogus hit piece" given to The Wall Street Journal by Paxton's political enemies.
The documents reviewed by the Journal were produced via subpoena by banks and other parties for the impeachment trial. Most were never entered into evidence and haven't been previously disclosed.
The documents include seven years of Paxton's tax returns; personal financial statements prepared by Paxton and his wife for a series of property loans; personal bank records; the bank records of his blind trust; and text messages between Paxton, his wife and the trustee of the blind trust.
Angela Paxton, a Texas state senator, filed for divorce from Paxton in July, citing adultery as the reason for ending 38 years of marriage.
Angela Paxton declined to comment, via a spokesman.
Paxton in 2015 put his assets into a blind trust, a tool used by politicians to avoid conflicts of interest by separating them from management of their money. Although he said in public filings that he would no longer know what assets were in his trust, the text messages show a closer involvement, including in one instance his trustee texting Paxton updates on stock trades.
Making a fortune
Before Paxton first ran for public office in 2002, his only listed assets were a handful of stocks and a house with a mortgage, with a combined value of less than $175,000, according to an analysis of his 2001 state financial-disclosure form. At the time, he was an attorney and his wife, a former public-school teacher, was homeschooling their four children. Both came from modest upbringings.
Over the next dozen years, as Paxton was re-elected to the state House and then the Texas Senate, he disclosed owning interests in more partnerships and private companies in annual ethics filings. It is unclear from the filings where the money came from to buy them or how much they were worth.
Texas' annual ethics filings don't require public officials to disclose their total income, net worth or the value of holdings in business entities. Paxton previously has taken the position that assets within the blind trust don't need to be disclosed.
Paxton provided more information to his banks, the documents show. In 2015, his first year as attorney general, a personal financial statement he provided to a bank pegged the couple's total net worth at $5.4 million, roughly 40% of it from investments that they had moved into the blind trust earlier that year.
On that year's tax return, he and his wife reported earning a combined $161,000 from their salaries as a state employee and a Christian school guidance counselor. They reported about $200,000 in additional income, mostly from investments.
A $2.2 million windfall arrived in 2019. The gain derived from Paxton's 2004 investment in a police video technology company, later named WatchGuard, that he had shifted into the blind trust. Paxton, who reported investing about $300,000 in WatchGuard, cashed out with a huge gain when the company was bought by Motorola Solutions in 2019 for about $250 million.
The investment had drawn scrutiny over the years in Texas, sparked by ethics concerns about a lucrative contract the company obtained in 2006 from the Texas Department of Public Safety while Paxton was an investor and a state legislator. Paxton said in 2008 that he wasn't aware the company had a state contract.
Two years after the big gain, the Paxtons and their blind trust went on a 10-month real-estate buying binge, spending almost $3.5 million on residential properties in Florida, Oklahoma, Utah and Hawaii. They took out mortgages to pay for some of the properties.
Last year Paxton bought an $800,000 condo, at a resort in Ivins, Utah, and transferred it into the trust in March 2025, according to public records. The Paxtons now own at least 11 residential properties around the U.S. with an assessed value of $7.5 million.
Blind trust
The blind trust the Paxtons voluntarily established in 2015, called the Esther Blind Trust, is structured to block the couple from knowledge of their investments. Its governing documents say that the trustee must act without providing them information other than what is narrowly required for trust maintenance.
Paxton publicly affirmed he had no knowledge of trust investments in his 2015 state ethics filing. He told one of his banks that neither he nor his wife "have knowledge of the current investments."
But the text messages with the trust's trustee, Charles Loper III, show otherwise.
In March 2020, Loper texted Ken Paxton a list of eight stock buys worth a combined $618,000. The trust's bank-account records show it had made the buys the day before.
Legal experts called the texting of the stock trades a potential violation of ethics statutes defining blind trusts as blind only if the trust is managed without consultation.
"That would be an occasion in which a blind trust is blind in name only, " Texas trust attorney Brad Wiewel said.
Loper didn't respond to requests for comment.
In the summer of 2020, Angela Paxton texted Loper: "Please keep me informed of any financial actions initiated by Ken and don't assume I am aware even if he tells you I consent."
Loper is a close friend of the Paxtons from church who had gifted Ken Paxton $20,000 for his legal defense. Texas law requires a trustee to be a "disinterested party."
Write to Elizabeth Findell at elizabeth.findell@wsj.com and Mark Maremont at Mark.Maremont@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 09, 2025 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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