Ex-Trump Secretary Blows Up Over President’s Endorsement of Texas AG, Who Agreed to Just ‘ONE DAY IN JAIL’ for Child Molester 

AP Photo/Steve Helber, File

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who served as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy in the first term, shredded the president’s latest endorsement.

On Tuesday, Trump finally waded into the U.S. Senate race in Texas between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who will face each other in a runoff on Tuesday after neither candidate received a majority of the votes in March’s Republican primary. Trump endorsed Paxton, who, even conservative pundits have acknowledged, has baggage that could actually put the seat in jeopardy. The winner of the runoff will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico in November.

Paxton has a scandal-plagued record that includes an impeachment by the GOP-controlled Texas House of Representatives for abusing his office. Those impeachment articles allege that Paxton used his office to assist a donor, Nate Paul, who was the subject of a federal investigation. At the behest of Paxton, Paul also employed a woman who was having an affair with the attorney general.

On Thursday, Perry, who was governor of the Lone Star State from 2000 to 2015, weighed in on X, where he quote-tweeted a Texas Tribune article about Paxton cutting a lenient deal with an admitted child molester.

“Ken Paxton initially offered a plea deal to a MAN WHO ADMITTED TO MOLESTING a child to serve only ONE DAY IN JAIL,” Perry wrote.

The linked article noted that three years ago, Paxton’s office took over the case of Adam Hoffman, a Waco attorney who had been charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young child. Hoffman went on trial last year, and the case resulted in a hung jury, after which prosecutors decided to cut a deal. The prosecutors in the case defended the arrangement, stating that the child, whose age was not mentioned in the plea agreement, wanted the ordeal to be over.

“The child emphasized that he preferred to move on with his life and prioritize his mental and emotional health,” prosecutors Brenda Cantu and Dorian Cotlar wrote.

Upon hearing the plea deal, the judge in the case was incredulous:

“One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it,” said Judge Roy Sparkman, according to a transcript of an April 16 hearing. Sparkman, a visiting judge who previously served on the bench as a Republican, later insisted on a 60-day jail sentence.

The mother of the victim agreed to an early version of the plea deal in court, but said in an interview that she now disagrees with the outcome.

“We were put in an impossible situation,” said the mother, who The Texas Tribune and The Texas Newsroom are not naming to protect the identity of the victim. “How do you trust the prosecution to go back to a case that they want to plead out when they’re the ones that are supposed to fight for it, and they don’t want to do it?”

The Texas Newsroom and the Tribune examined hundreds of pages of court documents related to the Waco case and conducted more than a dozen interviews, including with people close to the case as well as experts who were not involved in it but reviewed some of the details.

The experts said the outcome reflects the difficult nature and often-painful reality of prosecuting complex child abuse cases.

The judge went on to say that Paxton’s office appeared to have a penchant for doling out light sentences after mistrials via hung juries.

“I’m seeing a pattern here that is concerning me,” Sparkman said at the hearing. “If they get a mistrial, all of a sudden it’s just a little misdemeanor with a slap on the hand.”

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