TRANSPARENCY! James Talarico turns up the HEAT on Ken Paxton’s secret depositions.
When your political opponent has been through accusations of criminality, an impeachment attempt by members of his own party, and adultery charges as part of a nasty divorce proceeding — and still wins his party’s nomination to run for a Texas Senate seat — what more can you do?
Well, James Talarico's Senate campaign decided that the next best move was to take direct legal action to force the release of something Ken Paxton has spent years dodging: sworn testimony about his own conduct.
Talarico's campaign filed a petition in Collin County seeking to unseal depositions Paxton gave in 2019 and 2022, depositions tied to a messy securities fraud lawsuit involving his financial adviser and former business associates.
These depositions represent one of the rare instances Paxton has ever been forced to answer questions under oath — a striking fact given the sheer number of scandals he's managed to slip through over the years without sworn testimony ever seeing daylight.
The stakes go beyond simple curiosity. A Wall Street Journal report earlier this year, based on the 2019 deposition, found Paxton may have violated attorney-client privilege by sharing records from Unity Resources — a company he'd previously represented as a lawyer — with his own attorney, who was simultaneously suing that same company on behalf of another client.
That attorney, Mitch Little, later represented Paxton during his 2023 impeachment trial on bribery and abuse of office charges, which the Republican-controlled state Senate ultimately acquitted him of.
"The right of Texans to see these depositions matters more than ever," Talarico's lawyers wrote in the filing. "Texans have the right to know what Paxton said under oath in these proceedings and see the whole story before they go to the polls in November."
This whole tangled saga traces back to Paxton's OWN 2015 criminal indictment for securities fraud, in which two investors accused him of failing to disclose he'd be paid a commission for recruiting them into a company. Those charges were quietly dropped in 2024 in exchange for restitution and ethics classes — hardly the kind of full accountability voters deserve before deciding whether to send someone to the U.S. Senate.
Paxton's campaign responded not by addressing the substance, but by attacking Talarico directly, accusing him of trying to "hide his own extremism" over unrelated tax and sports policy votes — a classic deflection when you don't actually want to talk about sworn testimony regarding your own ethics violations and potentially criminal behavior.
Texans deserve to know what their Attorney General said under oath before deciding whether to promote him to the U.S. Senate. Paxton's campaign clearly would rather they never find out. Hopefully Talarico’s latest move will help bring everything into the harsh glare of daylight.
