Column details 2023 impeachment acquittal and Pressler abuse allegations
The Guardian published a Wednesday opinion column by Sidney Blumenthal, identified by the outlet as a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, advancing the argument that Texas Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s embrace of Christian nationalism functions as a shield for what Blumenthal calls a “rap sheet” of financial and sexual allegations spanning decades. Blumenthal, also identified as a Guardian US columnist and co-host of the Court of History podcast, frames Paxton’s Senate campaign as “not only his last stand, but also the Alamo for Christian nationalists in Texas.”
At the center of the column’s account is Paxton’s record in office. The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives impeached Paxton in May 2023 on 20 articles — twice the Ten Commandments Paxton has said should be displayed in Texas classrooms — centered on allegations that he used his office as attorney general to benefit campaign contributor Nate Paul. The Texas Senate, dominated by Republicans, acquitted Paxton in September 2023 by a 16-14 vote. Paxton’s wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, attended the trial but was barred from voting, the column reports.
The column reports that the allegations against Paxton included his alleged interference with a federal investigation into Paul, who faced accusations of financial fraud involving $172 million in loans. According to the column, Paul allegedly secured a job at his real estate firm, World Class Holdings, for a woman described as Paxton’s alleged mistress, a former state senate aide; allegedly created a fake Uber account for Paxton to travel for the alleged liaisons; and allegedly paid for renovations at Paxton’s home. In exchange, according to the column’s account of the impeachment articles, Paxton allegedly passed sealed FBI documents to Paul, installed a special prosecutor to target federal agents and judges investigating Paul’s alleged crimes, and halted foreclosures on Paul’s properties. Paul took a plea deal in April 2025 that included four months of home confinement, five years of supervised release and a $1 million fine.
The column also recounts Paxton’s 2015 federal indictment on felony counts of securities fraud. Paxton avoided trial through a plea agreement under which he would perform 100 hours of community service, take 15 hours of legal ethics courses and pay $271,000 in restitution to investors, according to the column. Blumenthal writes that Angela Paxton “had been instrumental in advancing his career, a political force in her own right, a crucial conduit to Christian nationalist leaders and funders,” quoting her as having told cheering supporters, “I’m a pistol-packing mama, and my husband sues Obama.” The column reports that the two met as students at Baylor University, have four children and that she presented their “sacred covenant” as a faith-based partisan calling; Paxton financed her election with a $2 million loan from his campaign fund, and once in office she filed bills to increase his office and salary. In July 2025, Angela Paxton filed for divorce on “biblical grounds,” according to the column. In July of this year, Paxton was photographed on a trip to Iceland and London with Christian influencer Tracy Duhon, the column reports.
Blumenthal traces the political network he says produced Paxton to a 1967 meeting at Café du Monde in New Orleans, where Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson forged what the column characterizes as a pact to take over the Southern Baptist Convention and transform it into a political machine for a “Conservative Resurgence.” Pressler’s grandfather and hero, E.E. Townes, an oil industry lawyer, was a leader of the Texas Regulars movement in favor of “white supremacy,” as Townes explained, and the lifting of wartime price controls on oil and gas, according to the column. The Regulars sought to defeat President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944; four years later, the Regulars folded into the segregationist Dixiecrat party, the column reports.
The column reports that Pressler sought out Paige Patterson, whom the column characterizes as an apostle of W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist pastor of the “mammoth First Baptist Church of Dallas.” Criswell, the column reports, denounced civil rights activists as “infidels” and President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 candidacy on the basis that he was “a stalking horse for the pope.” Criswell would appoint Patterson the head of his Criswell Center for Biblical Studies, “a power base of 14 churches,” according to the column.
In 1979, Pressler, by then appointed a Texas state judge, and Patterson applied their clout within the SBC to elect its president. “It was like Gettysburg,” Pressler said in remarks quoted by the column. “But this time the right side won.” Moderates were systematically fired from Southern Baptist seminaries and bureaucracy. “We are going for the jugular,” Pressler said.
From Pressler and Patterson, the column traces the lineage to Kelly Shackelford, who founded the First Liberty Institute in 1997 and, according to the column, “created a powerful political machine, raising tens of millions from a handful of billionaire oilmen.” Shackelford, the column reports, helped elect Greg Abbott as Texas attorney general in 2002 and later backed Paxton to replace Abbott when Abbott ran for governor in 2014. Pressler served on Paxton’s advisory committee. Paxton hired more than half a dozen of Shackelford’s staff lawyers, including his general counsel Jeff Mateer, who became assistant attorney general, and threw the full weight of his office behind Shackelford’s culture-war litigation. In 2020, Mateer had what the column calls “a crisis of conscience” and reported Paxton to the FBI for alleged bribery; Shackelford stood by Paxton, the column reports, “keeping the Christian right in line and providing money for his legal defense.”
Shackelford also “begat” a “slew of rightwing politicians” who took over the Texas Republican party — Senator Ted Cruz, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and “a host of Texas legislators” — according to the column. The Texas state senate that refused to remove Paxton after his impeachment by the house had been packed, the column reports, with the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, funded by Shackelford’s oilmen, threatening the political future of any Republican who voted to convict Paxton. Dan Patrick, who presided over the trial as judge, received $3 million in loans and contributions, according to the column. Shackelford also “begat” House Speaker Mike Johnson, “long before he became speaker,” originally a litigator at First Liberty, the column reports. Johnson was selected in 2010 to become the founding dean of the new Paul Pressler School of Law in Louisiana, which collapsed in 2012 due to lack of funding and failure to achieve accreditation, according to the column.
The column documents allegations of sexual abuse against Pressler. In 2004, the First Baptist Church of Houston, where Pressler was a deacon, investigated a complaint that Pressler molested a young man; church leaders sent Pressler a private warning letter saying the conduct was “morally and spiritually inappropriate” and could “distort your testimony” if it came to light, and that letter remained private for more than a decade, according to the column. In a separate incident that year, Pressler privately settled a suit for $450,000 with Duane Rollins, who alleged that as a 14-year-old he had been repeatedly raped by Pressler, the column reports. Jared Woodfill, Pressler’s law partner who helped fundraise for Paxton, was informed of the allegations, and “for years afterwards” Woodfill maintained Pressler as a law partner “though he performed no work, compensating him by sending him a string of young men to serve as assistants, three of whom have accused Pressler of sexual misconduct,” according to the column. Pressler, who died in 2024, denied the allegations against him and was never criminally charged; Woodfill has denied wrongdoing.
Duane Rollins filed a new lawsuit in 2017, this time naming the SBC and multiple Baptist entities, not just Pressler, and alleging the SBC leadership covered up the abuse, the column reports. After the news of his suit broke in the Texas Tribune, other young men stepped forward with similar allegations, according to the column.
The column credits Houston Chronicle reporter Robert Downen with investigative reports in 2019 documenting widespread sexual abuse across Southern Baptist churches, of which Pressler was, in Blumenthal’s phrasing, “only one example.” Downen’s reporting prompted the SBC to commission an investigation that identified allegations against 263 church leaders in 30 states, according to the column. After that report’s publication, the SBC “stonewalled further inquiry and its officials denounced it all as a ‘reckless hoax,’” the column reports.
Paige Patterson was later “disgraced,” the column reports, when he was accused of advising women who endured marital abuse to pray for their husbands while he was president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he was ousted in 2018. Patterson and the seminary were dismissed from Rollins’s lawsuit against Pressler in 2023. The school had “immortalized Pressler and Patterson as virtual saints with stained glass windows in its chapel,” the column reports, but after their fall from grace the windows were quietly removed.
The column lands as Paxton campaigns against state Representative James Talarico in the Texas Senate race. Blumenthal characterizes the contest as one in which Paxton “projects himself as a specimen of hypermasculinity to feminize his opponent — his actual opposite in other respects — a Presbyterian seminarian animated by social justice.” Paxton’s campaign has aired ads and used nicknames including “Low-T Talarico Too Weak For Texas,” “Tofu Talarico,” “Six-gender Jimmy” and “James Tala-freako,” according to the column. The column documents a series of advertisements generated with the help of artificial intelligence attacking Talarico: a conservative group’s AI-generated ad featuring a phoney Talarico in a dress singing a song from “The Sound of Music” about “changing the gender of all your offspring”; a Paxton-posted AI-generated ad depicting a fake Talarico drawing in crayon on a “Talarico King James Bible” and delivering “a sermon of false and distorted statements about religion and sex”; and a right-wing PAC’s $10 million buy of a deepfake AI ad depicting Talarico as a surgeon apparently performing a sex reassignment operation on a girl.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X that “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate” — a claim Blumenthal describes as false and notes that Talarico is “opposed to transgender surgery for minors and trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports.”
Blumenthal writes that “the more unnerved Paxton becomes, the deeper he descends to smears to incite a sexual panic. Through his calumnies, he positions himself as defender of the faith. He evangelizes for restoring ‘Judeo-Christian values’ and protecting them from the threat of Talarico, ‘a Christian who hates Christianity,’ he says.”
Blumenthal concludes by describing Paxton as “a throwback to a venerable tradition,” comparing him to the title character of Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel “Elmer Gantry,” a licentious preacher and political conman who, Lewis wrote, “got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.” The Guardian identifies Blumenthal as the author of three published volumes of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln.