New reporting from ProPublica found that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has taken “nearly 1,000 trips during his tenure, costing $3.3 million in security.” Yet only 138 of the trips and $553,000 in security costs could be verified as state business. More than 800 trips lack a documented business purpose.
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reviewed “every publicly available document Paxton’s office says it possesses about his travel,” the article said, and found that only 1 in 6 of his trips listed a business purpose.
You’d think the state’s highest law enforcement officer would take special care to document the legitimacy of his expenses. But not Paxton! “Records detailing the purpose of Paxton’s visits to 36 states and 19 countries do not appear to exist in most cases,” reporter Zach Despart found. He works for both ProPublica and The Tribune.
This news comes as questions are still swirling about Paxton’s source(s) of income. The article reminds us that he still “has not answered questions about how he vastly increased his wealth as a public servant.” This is especially significant now that Paxton is running for a U.S. Senate seat.
Some of the destinations themselves seem to clue in on the purpose of Paxton’s travel. “These include a trip to a small town in Hawaii months before his family’s blind trust bought land there; 24 trips to Utah, where the trust owns five properties; and 53 trips to Florida, where Paxton and the trust have two houses and a townhome.”
Not surprisingly, Paxton also failed to answer questions for the ProPublica/Tribune report. “ProPublica and the Tribune sent Paxton a spreadsheet detailing travel for which there was no record that he was on state business and asked him to provide additional information if the trips were not personal. Neither Paxton nor his office provided such records,” Despart wrote.
Paxton also trotted the globe for reasons unknown. “The attorney general’s records do not show a business purpose for travel to Albania, Aruba, Australia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, England, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Poland, South Africa or Taiwan,” ProPublica found.
Maybe this “public servant” is planning to go global with his real estate holdings, like his corrupt buddy in the White House.