As millions of Texas voters cast their ballots in an election that could determine control of the United States Senate, the rest of us can only hope they have gleaned the single most salient fact about Republican nominee Ken Paxton. As Texas attorney general, Paxton is technically the state's top law enforcement officer. And he is also an unrepentant racketeer.

Many of Paxton's offenses involve complex securities transactions, financial litigation and real estate foreclosures that are simply opaque to most people. The average Lone Star voter is assuredly aware of this "conservative Christian" husband's marital infidelities. Texans know how he used a donor's firm to conceal one of several affairs — a baroque tale that emerged during his 2023 impeachment by Republican state senators. Yet his betrayals of constituents, his oath of office, and the public trust go far deeper than those peccadilloes.

The Texas House of Representatives approved a resolution of impeachment that specified 20 offenses, ranging from misuse of state resources and abuse of office to accepting a series of bribes from a real estate investor named Nate Paul. Once regarded as a wunderkind developer in Austin, Paul became infamous during the impeachment trial for hiring a Paxton mistress, secretly renovating Paxton's home for free, and using burner phones and a fake Uber account to evade surveillance of his contacts with the attorney general.

The Republican majority acquitted Paxton despite plentiful evidence of his guilt presented at his state Senate trial, allowing him to continue in office and plot his path to higher office. The permanent damage to his reputation would not dissuade his ethically tarnished ally Donald Trump from helping him to snatch the Senate nomination from incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn earlier this year.

Facing Democrat James Talarico, a state legislator with no ethical blemish on his record, Paxton can safely assume that most voters have forgotten — or never knew — exactly what he did to draw the attention of the FBI, the state Senate and other investigators who examined his record for evidence of crimes. Indeed, the coverage of his trial in the state Senate never fully revealed the dimensions and victims of his misconduct.

Of all the charges brought against Paxton, perhaps the least understood involved his actions on behalf of Paul. A high-flying young investor who proclaimed his ambition to become "the first self-made real estate billionaire," Paul turned out to be a conman whose Austin-based empire began to crumble in 2019 amid a series of bankruptcies and a spectacular FBI raid on his office and home.

Federal prosecutors charged him with over a dozen counts of fraud and deception in swindling his real estate partners, an indictment that neatly coincided with Paxton's impeachment. (Paul ultimately escaped prison by pleading guilty to a single count of misrepresentation.)

From press accounts, it is unclear when Paxton first encountered Paul, but as the latter increasingly came under legal scrutiny, the attorney general used his authority to protect the high-flying investor — by launching his own investigations against Paul's adversaries, intervening in lawsuits that involved Paul, and directing his subordinates to aid Paul's attorneys with confidential information, including unredacted FBI files.

But the action that epitomized Paxton's corrupt relationship with Paul concerned the investor's attempt to evade payment of a multimillion-dollar loan from a business development company known as Princeton Capital. About $50 million had been transferred under dubious circumstances from Capital Point, a limited partnership vehicle that had amassed millions of dollars in investment from public employee pension funds, including the Austin Police Retirement System as well as first responder funds in Little Rock, Seattle and several other municipalities.

The details of the creation of Princeton Capital and its agglomeration of those public pension assets is a classic American tale of political pay-for-play. The narrative recalls the public finance escapades of George W. Bush and his cronies that I examined in Harper's magazine in 1999. Regardless of the current enmity between the Bush and Paxton factions in the Texas GOP, they have always played this lucrative game much the same way.

When the Capital Point limited partners learned how their money had been secretly moved to Princeton Capital, they exercised fiduciary power to remove the discredited management — which had made the loans to Paul — and sought to recover that money. The loan to Paul became embroiled in litigation as the public pension funds sought to recover their absconded capital.

Paul's capacities as a fraudster were tested as he used shell companies and false filings to evade multiple state court orders to pay back the loan, which persisted long after the limited partners won a $10 million judgment against him. Finally, the court appointed a Texas attorney named Seth Kretzer to seize and auction Paul's hidden properties in order to satisfy the judgments against him.

As the state's top law enforcement official and a self-proclaimed advocate for "law and order," Paxton might have been expected to intervene in this case, if at all, on behalf of the police and firefighters whose pensions were at risk. But the Texas attorney general felt no such imperative. He made no effort whatsoever to safeguard the cops' pensions in the Austin Police Retirement System, or those of the other first responders across the country, as this exceedingly complex series of lawsuits wound through the Texas court system.

Instead, Paxton shockingly intervened to hinder Kretzer from liquidating Paul's assets and restoring that money to the first responder pension funds. As later reported by whistleblowers in his office, the attorney general came up with a creative scheme to forestall the sale of Paul properties.

Early on the morning of Aug. 1, 2020, two days before a scheduled auction of foreclosed Paul properties, Paxton's office issued an opinion declaring that outdoor building foreclosure sales could not be held lawfully under COVID-19 restrictions on public gatherings. As his top deputies and aides testified three years later during his impeachment trial, Paxton ignored normal procedures to rush the opinion out.

It was probably not a coincidence that on Oct. 29, 2018, the date when Princeton Capital's limited partners sent a notice of loan default to Paul, the investor had sent a check for $25,000 to Paxton's reelection campaign. Or that Paul then found so many ways to underwrite the personal grifting and extramarital sprees that are the essence of this Texas politician.

Paxton chose to "serve and protect" the crooks, not the cops.

For anyone hoping that a new Congress will hold Trump and his Cabinet accountable next year for their acts of massive and brazen corruption, nothing could be more repellent than the prospect of Senator Ken Paxton.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Elimende Inagella at Unsplash