Ken Paxton

Some Lesser Known Facts About Ken Paxton

• Ken Paxton is the 51st Attorney General of Texas.

• Paxton was born on Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, where his father was stationed while in the United States Air Force.

• He grew up living in various cities of the USA, such as Florida, New York, North Carolina, California, and Oklahoma.

• In his childhood, his family lived in a trailer, often without air conditioning, parked wherever his father was temporarily stationed.

• In his childhood, Paxton was a fan of football. He carried a jersey autographed by Bill Bates, who was formerly a player Dallas Cowboys football team.

• When Paxton was 12 years old, he nearly lost an eye while playing hide-and-seek. A misdiagnosis resulted in long-term vision problems. As a consequence, his good eye is green, while the damaged one is brown and droopy. He further injured his eye while in college.

• While studying at Baylor University, he was elected president of the student government.

• From 1986 to 1988, Ken Paxton worked as a management consultant at Arthur Anderson LLP, Chicago.

• In 1988, Ken enrolled in the University of Virginia School of Law and received a Juris Doctor degree in 1991.

• In the 1990s. Paxton and his wife, Angela, helped financially to found Stonebriar Community Church, a Christian evangelical megachurch, in Frisco, Texas.

• From 1991 to 1995, Ken Paxton worked in a law firm named Strasburger & Price, LLP in Dallas, USA, as an Attorney.

• In 2002, Ken Paxton joined politics by joining the Republican party, where he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 2002, serving District 70 in Collin County for the next ten years till 2012.

• In 2012, Ken Paxton won a senator seat in the Texas Senate (District 8), succeeding Florence Shapiro. He served in the position till 2015.

• During his time as senator, Paxton became known for sponsoring anti-abortion legislation and opposing Common Core education standards.

• In 2012, he participated in a lawsuit filed by 33 state attorneys general against Apple, accusing the company of violating antitrust laws by tying up with publishers to artificially raise the prices of electronic books.

• In 2014, Ken Paxton became a candidate for the Texas attorney general election. In the general election held on November 4, 2014, Paxton defeated his Democratic opponent, Sam Houston, an attorney from Houston. Paxton won the attorney general’s election without the endorsement of a single Texas newspaper.

• He took the office on January 5, 2015. After a few months of taking charge as AG, he was indicted for felony securities fraud charges.

• In 2015, Paxton set up a human trafficking unit in the Attorney General’s office. By 2019, he successfully convinced Texas lawmakers to increase the unit’s annual funding by more than four times. However, in 2020, the unit did not achieve any human trafficking convictions, and in 2021, it only tracked four convictions, two of which resulted in dismissal.

• As Attorney General, Paxton appointed several social conservatives and prominent opponents of LGBT rights to positions in his department.

• In June 2015, after the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, Paxton expressed support for clerks who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He stated,

I will do everything I can from this office to be a public voice for those who are standing in defense of their rights.”

• In 2016, Paxton led a movement of twenty-six states which they challenged President Barack Obama‘s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) executive action. This action granted deferred action to certain undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States since 2010 and had children who were American citizens or lawful permanent residents.

• In 2016, Ken was one of eleven Republican state attorneys general who supported ExxonMobil in the company’s attempt to block a climate change investigation by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

• He had also sued the Obama administration over a 2016 rule by the United States Department of Labor, which would have made five million additional workers eligible for overtime pay.

• Ken Paxton is an advocate of handgun culture in the United States. In 2016, when three professors from the University of Texas at Austin filed a lawsuit to prohibit concealed handguns on campus and challenge the state’s campus carry law, Paxton described the lawsuit as “frivolous” and dismissed it. Additionally, he took legal action against the City of Austin to permit license holders to openly carry handguns in Austin City Hall.

• In July 2017, Paxton, along with a group of Republican Attorneys General, threatened the Trump administration with legal action if the president did not terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that had been implemented by President Barack Obama.

• In the same year, Paxton filed lawsuits against six Texas cities to remove marijuana decriminalization measures adopted by citizens.

• In 2018, Paxton ran unopposed in the Republican primary for re-election.

• With the endorsement of U.S. President Donald Trump, he won second time as attorney general in the general election held on November 6, 2018. Paxton narrowly defeated his opponents, Democratic nominee Justin Nelson, a lawyer, and Libertarian Party nominee Michael Ray Harris.

  

• In 2020 and 2021, during COVID-19, Ken Paxton threatened and sued local governments like Austin for keeping strict safety rules on people, like stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, and limits on indoor dining in restaurants. He called Austin’s contact tracing ideas “Orwellian” and fought their mask rules even after the governor ended the statewide mask mandate.

• In October 2020, seven of Ken Paxton’s top officials accused him of serious misconduct in a letter to their HR director. They claimed Paxton had abused his office, accepted bribes, and used his position to help his friend and donor, real estate developer Nate Paul, who had given Paxton’s campaign $25,000 in the 2018 general election.

• For several years, Paxton was involved in an extramarital affair. Although he claimed to have ended the affair in 2018, it reportedly continued at least until 2020. Nate Paul allegedly arranged to meet Paxton with his girlfriend so she could move to Austin. He also helped Paxton connect with her through a secret Uber account that they created with a pseudonym.

• On December 8, 2020, after Joe Biden won over Donald Trump, Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In the lawsuit, he alleged various unconstitutional actions, including voter fraud. Following the 2020 election, Paxton’s office spent over 22,000 hours investigating claims of voter fraud. However, they found only 16 false addresses on registration forms out of nearly 17 million registered voters.

• In 2022, Paxton won the Attorney General of Texas office for the third time.

• On May 25, 2023, the Republican Party-led House General Investigating Committee mutually recommended the impeachment of Ken Paxton. The committee filed a total of 20 articles of his impeachment.

  

• On May 27, 2023, Paxton was impeached after the Texas House voted 121-23 in favour of impeachment. Sixty Republicans and sixty-one Democrats voted for impeachment, while all twenty-three who opposed it were Republicans.

• After the impeachment, the Texas House of Representatives appointed 12 representatives (seven Republicans and five Democrats) to serve as impeachment managers. His wife, Angela Paxton, was also one of the senators in his impeachment trial. However, the Senate voted to bar her from voting in her husband’s impeachment trial.

• The impeachment trial began on September 5, 2023, and concluded on September 16, 2023, in which the Senate dismissed Paxton on all charges, with 16 Republicans voting to acquit and 12 Democrats plus 2 Republicans voting to convict. He resumed office on September 18, 2023.

• In August 2023, just a week before Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial began in the state Senate, 14 lawyers submitted a complaint to the State Bar, where they sought to prevent Paxton from practicing law. In the complaint, they accused Paxton of abusing his office and engaging in other misconduct, including bribery and organised crime.

• He met his wife, Angela Allen, while they were students at Baylor University. She is the state Senator for District 8 and a former teacher and guidance counsellor at Legacy Christian Academy in Frisco.

  

• Ken’s wife was considered as his closest political advisor. She often opens up his events with a musical performance. She oftenly called her husband “a very competitive person”.

• On April 8, 2025, Paxton went on the Ingraham Angle (an American conservative news and opinion-based talk show) to announce his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, challenging current senior Senator John Cornyn.

• On July 10, 2025, Angela Paxton, his wife, tweeted that she had “filed for divorce on biblical grounds.” The court filing claimed that Ken Paxton was at fault for committing adultery and stated that the couple had not lived together since June 2024.