Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says, “in Texas, we fight fraud head-on and will not rest until every last corrupt actor is brought to justice”; the records from his 2023 impeachment investigation show his family’s “blind” trust running the other way. In 2020, four years after North Texas home builder Scott Sherman completed a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, Sherman’s new construction-materials company received $600,000 from the Esther Blind Trust.

Ken and state Sen. Angela Paxton created the trust when Ken became attorney general to prevent private investments from colliding with public duties. Previously unreleased records from the impeachment investigation show money, knowledge and conflicts crossing the line while a paper shield remained between private interests and public power.

Sherman had pleaded guilty in 2014 to a mortgage-fraud conspiracy involving artificially inflated home prices and larger loans on more than two dozen properties across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The trust did not put $600,000 behind an unknown entrepreneur. It put it behind a man already convicted of using a house to enlarge the loan on it.

Sherman’s businesses grew rapidly after the investment. He bought a sand mine in Denison and a concrete plant in Gunter, near the Oklahoma border, and Wildcatter developed a network of locations and subsidiaries. Its tax obligations did not grow at the same pace.

Blind is a word doing a great deal of work around here. According to the trust’s incorporation documents, Ken and Angela Paxton appointed their friend Charles “Chip” Loper to manage its assets without consulting them or taking “any instructions regarding investment matters.” Text messages uncovered in the impeachment probe showed Loper and Ken Paxton discussing certain investments. Mortgage and deed records show Ken Paxton bought eight properties between 2015 and 2026 and then transferred them into the trust.

Trustees may manage assets. They cannot also be used to outsource official memory. Paxton did not answer detailed questions about the Wildcatter investment or whether he knew of Sherman’s conviction. He has defended his business dealings by saying he follows ethics laws. Loper and Mitch Little did not answer questions about the transactions. Angela Paxton’s spokesperson said she was unaware of Sherman’s criminal history. Ignorance is not a financial-control system.

Most striking is the Paxtons’ 2020 joint federal income-tax return. It itemized more than $93,000 in losses from Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel. A blind trust is supposed to keep its investments unknowable to the politicians who benefit from them. Their tax return named the companies, itemized the losses and assigned dollar values. The structure said “blind.” The paperwork said otherwise.

Angela Paxton’s role was even less blind. Beginning in 2022, she served on a Wildcatter advisory board and later joined the advisory board of Wildcatter Materials, which owned the Wildcatter Redi-Mix concrete plant. Her financial disclosures called the position non-governing. No documents were found explaining her responsibilities. She remained on the board in her last disclosure in 2025.

At the Gunter concrete plant, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued violation notices to Wildcatter Redi-Mix in 2021 and 2022; at least one dust-related violation was resolved when a road to the plant was paved. Neighbors said clouds of dust coated their properties for as long as 12 hours a day.

Then came Senate Bill 471. In 2023, the proposal would have allowed the TCEQ to disregard residents’ complaints after more than five unsubstantiated complaints in seven years. State Sen. Drew Springer dismissed the neighbors’ complaints as “abusive” and described the bill as a way to stop efforts to “weaponize the system.” Angela Paxton voted for it.

Her spokesperson said she did not recuse herself because the legislation applied to an entire industry and her board role carried no decision-making authority. Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said Texas’s prohibition on legislators voting for measures that benefit them or their businesses did not apply to legislation regulating an entire industry. Her spokesperson also said she was unaware of complaints or violations against the company. Ethics experts said she should have disclosed the relationship and recused herself.

Those explanations answer the legal questions. They leave the ethical ones untouched. A legislator need not own a company or command it to have a financial relationship with it. Disclosure and recusal exist because broad laws can benefit particular businesses and because waiting for proof of favoritism is too late to protect the public appearance of fairness.

The public contradiction remains. The attorney general’s family had money invested in a company facing environmental complaints, and the state senator connected to that company voted to make those complaints harder for regulators to heed.

Then the money started moving.

In the months leading up to the Legislature’s vote and during Paxton’s impeachment, four Wildcatter companies wired more than $73,000 to the Paxtons’ trust. It was part of 15 payments between January and June 2023 totaling more than $83,000. About $10,000 arrived during the two weeks before Angela Paxton voted, and another $12,000 came the week after the Senate passed the bill.

The reviewed records do not establish why the payments were made or how they were recorded on the companies’ books. Uncertainty about the accounting is not an alibi for the timing. These payments came as Wildcatter companies owed local governments money while Springer sought legislation favorable to one of Wildcatter’s subsidiaries. As former Bush ethics lawyer Richard Painter put it: “They’ll pay out their friends while they’re not paying their taxes, run up debt.”

The taxes were not abstractions. Wildcatter Sand Services owed more than $31,000 in back taxes by 2023. Several Wildcatter companies owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in local taxes that soon became delinquent. The following year, two companies fell delinquent on nearly $200,000 in 2023 property taxes owed to schools, cities and counties. Local governments had to sue to recover the money.

A stranger payment came as Paxton’s political situation reached its most dangerous point. On May 19, a week before his formal impeachment, the trust wired $9,000 to the law firm of Mitch Little. Little later represented both the trust and Paxton during the impeachment trial. The records do not establish that this payment funded the legal defense. They do show that the trust’s checking account could not have covered it without earlier Wildcatter deposits. The trust also had $9,300 in cash and just under $1 million in securities, but records showed no transfer from the investment account during the relevant period.

That was not a quiet stretch for Paxton. The Justice Department’s public integrity unit was investigating allegations by senior advisers that he had abused his office, and a judge later awarded the whistleblowers $6.6 million in 2025. The Texas Legislature acquitted Paxton in the impeachment proceedings. Acquittal did not alter the bank records, the tax return or the sequence of payments. It did not make the trust blind, erase Angela Paxton’s board seat, turn the $83,000 into nothing or restore the taxes the businesses failed to pay.

This is not Paxton’s only proximity to accused fraudsters. Earlier reporting showed two indicted Americans at Paxton’s New Year’s Eve 2024 party in Dubai. The two had been indicted months earlier on federal healthcare-fraud charges and had not returned to the United States. Paxton’s spokesperson did not address the association, saying instead that Paxton had been politically persecuted for years. Wildcatter is more direct. Sherman had pleaded guilty, served his sentence, and then his company received $600,000 from the Paxtons’ trust.

Now Paxton wants Texas voters to send him to the U.S. Senate in a race against James Talarico. Donald Kettl, an ethics expert and former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, said Senate rules would require a senator with a blind trust to have no knowledge of its investments. The impeachment records show at least some knowledge. A candidate asking voters to entrust him with Senate ethics cannot dismiss his own trust as something he was required not to know.

The class this case exposes is not a collection of solitary crooks. It is the arrangement in which money and office are joined by family, company, trust and vote while every document says they never met. Trustee here, spouse and board seat there, senator on the floor, cash in the family account. That is not separation. It is architecture.

Paxton can invoke his acquittal, the limited nature of the records and his defenders’ distinctions. He can parse every noun and noun modifier until the sun comes up. He cannot parse his way out of the arithmetic.

His argument for public trust is simple: equal enforcement, no exceptions, every corrupt actor brought to justice. The arithmetic is less flattering.

The Paxtons’ trust supplied $600,000. Their tax return identified more than $93,000 in losses. Wildcatter companies wired the trust more than $83,000. The trust paid $9,000 to the firm of the lawyer who later represented both it and Paxton. Meanwhile, Wildcatter companies left hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes for schools, cities and counties, which then had to sue to recover the money.

The documents saw every number. A blind trust can hide a transaction from the public. It cannot make the conflict disappear.

The only person the blind trust kept blind was Texas.