Ken Paxton finds a new thing to lie about

This counts as personal growth for him.

Best mugshot ever

The state police made him do it.

That’s the excuse Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gives on his Texas ethics disclosures in place of revealing, as required by law, the addresses of properties he owns in Austin and College Station.

“Redacted for security purposes on request of TX DPS,” the second-term Republican has written on every disclosure form since he began work as attorney general.

There are two problems with that statement: Nothing in the law allows him to refuse to provide the addresses, and none of the parties involved — the Department of Public Safety, Texas Ethics Commission or even Paxton’s own office — could produce any records proving such a request was ever made.

“The department doesn’t have any record of making that request,” DPS spokesman Travis Considine said.

An attorney general’s office spokesman and Paxton’s campaign spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

The ethics commission is barred from releasing Paxton’s home address in McKinney to the public. He provides that address to the agency annually. It’s unclear, however, why Paxton wouldn’t disclose the addresses of his other properties.

The agency, which enforces campaign finance and political ethics laws, keeps the information on file to ensure transparency for voters and guard against conflicts of interest. Paxton did include the properties’ counties, zip codes and acreage on the paperwork.

One of the unknown addresses is likely that of an Austin home that Paxton’s former aides claim was remodeled by Nate Paul, one of the various perks they said Paxton received in exchange for using his office to benefit Paul, a wealthy investor and campaign donor.

The home, in the Tarrytown neighborhood of Austin, was purchased by Paxton in 2018, county records show. Its appraised value in 2022 was nearly $1.7 million.

[…]

By state law, the ethics commission must redact a fair amount of information from the ethics commission forms before releasing them to the public, including: filers’ home addresses, telephone numbers and names of dependent children.

People who hold public office can check a box to indicate an address is a home address, as Paxton has done most years for his McKinney property, which has a market value of nearly $1.2 million. But those redactions are the commission’s purview.

“A filer may not choose to make their own redactions,” said J.R. Johnson, general counsel with the Texas Ethics Commission. “A filer must include all information required by law.”

Except that Ken Paxton doesn’t care about that. He’s a law unto himself, and he doesn’t answer to anyone else. More to the point, he has figured out that there isn’t anyone or anything that can hold him accountable for his utter contempt for laws and rules and other things that chumps subject themselves to. Well, maybe the voters, and maybe someday the criminal justice system. But until then, he’s gonna keep on giving the system the finger.

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• The answer to “who watches the watchers” is “Ken Paxton”