I feel duty-bound to note this.
Best mugshot ever
Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is in a hotly contested primary, has filed a corrected campaign finance report after he did not disclose a large portion of his donors from the last six months of 2021.
The corrected report was filed Monday, 13 days after it was due to the Texas Ethics Commission. On the original report, Paxton left $2.1 million of his $2.8 million fundraising haul unitemized, meaning he did not include donor information for those who helped give the $2.1 million and who were required by law to be identified. His campaign cited technical issues and promised to file an amended report.
On the amended report, Paxton’s campaign said it has now “itemize[d] all contributions” and dealt with duplicate records.
“The [campaign] continues to resolve some of the issues, and we are happy to provide additional information to the TEC regarding the issue,” the campaign said.
With the corrected report, Paxton revealed 3,846 donations that had not been disclosed on the initial filing, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. The first report included 2,092 contributions, and the latest one shows 5,938.
Some of the top donors who were newly disclosed include the Republican Attorneys General Association, which gave $250,000 to Paxton on the last day of the reporting period, Dec. 31. Paxton also newly disclosed a $100,000 contribution from Holly Frost, a leading Texas GOP donor from Houston, and two $50,000 donations from Dan and Farris Wilks, the West Texas fracking billionaires.
See here for the background. Some people you might shrug and accept a lame excuse about software trouble when they finally submit their corrected finance report almost two weeks late. Here, I have to assume that the utterly amoral and ethics-free Ken Paxton, knowing full well that there’s no mechanism to make him do the right thing, felt pressure from somewhere to fix this. It’s a good outcome, no matter how ridiculous the path we had to take to get to it. How much better it would be to have the state’s top lawyer be someone who respects and follows the law, voluntarily and willingly and in a timely fashion.