America's Trumpiest Attorney General Is Under Indictment Himself

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has waged some of the country’s most partisan legal battles while charged with fraud. Will his allegiance to Trumpism help him survive a fresh round of corruption allegations?

-  David Yaffe-Bellany

Joe Joplin was smoking a cigarette in his North Texas garage when he had a moment of clarity. At security—that’s where he’d left it. Joplin, a probate lawyer, had spent the day looking for a $1,000 Montblanc pen he’d misplaced at the local courthouse. The Montblanc had been a gift from his wife. “I really wasn’t happy with my wife paying that much for a pen,” he says. And now it was missing.

Joplin rushed back to court, but there was no sign of the pen near the metal detector. He sent an email to the local sheriff, who called him back with good news. “Joe, I found the pen,” the sheriff told him. “It was an elected official.” Joplin was stunned. Had a judge swiped his Montblanc at security? No, it wasn’t a judge, the sheriff replied. It was Ken Paxton.

Back then, in the summer of 2013, Paxton was a state senator from McKinney, a city about 30 miles north of Dallas. Today he’s the attorney general of Texas and one of the country’s most prominent and influential lawyers. In December he filed a now-notorious lawsuit urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. When the court refused to take up the suit, which scholars described as factually baseless, he became the first state attorney general to sue President Joe Biden’s administration, filing a complaint days after the inauguration that succeeded in preventing the government from imposing a moratorium on deportations. He’s threatened more legal action since, vowing to fight what he calls the administration’s “lawlessness.”