Talarico Campaign Fights for Court Docs They Believe Show Paxton Admitted to Crimes Under Oath: MS NOW Source

AP Photo/Eric Gay, File

Texas State Rep. James Talarico’s (D) campaign has filed a motion seeking access to two deposition transcripts of his GOP opponent in the Senate race, Ken Paxton (R), testifying in a securities fraud case, among the very few occasions when the scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General has been forced to speak under oath.

The Texas Tribune’s Kayla Guo summarized the complicated legal matter in her report, noting that it had spawned both a civil lawsuit and criminal indictment for Paxton:

North Texas businessman Charles Loper III, who oversees Paxton’s blind trust, in 2016 accused an energy company called Unity Resources and two of its investors, Byron Cook and Joel Hochberg, of defrauding him. The case centered in part on alleged securities fraud, with Loper accusing Cook and Hochberg of launching a scheme to profit off a Unity investment fund. Cook and Hochberg in turn accused Loper and Paxton of conspiring to sully their names because they were set to serve as key witnesses in a separate criminal securities fraud case against Paxton.

The attorney general previously served as a lawyer and board member for Unity and invested in the company.

In Paxton’s separate criminal securities fraud case, Cook and Hochberg accused Paxton of misleading them into investing in a McKinney technology company without disclosing he’d be paid a commission for the recruitments. Paxton was indicted in 2015, the year before Loper brought his lawsuit. Federal prosecutors dropped the charges against Paxton before trial in 2024, under a deal that required him to pay restitution and take legal ethics courses.

The civil case was settled in 2023, but Texas’ civil procedure rules have a process for a party to seek to intervene for specific purposes, such as unsealing court documents, even in closed cases.

In an 11-page motion filed Wednesday in the District Court of Collin County, Talarico’s campaign spelled out why they were seeking to unseal two depositions of Paxton from 2019 and 2022 in the civil matter.

Paxton had previously filed motions to seal the transcripts, but the court had “rightly denied” them, the attorneys for Talarico’s campaign argued. However, they continued, “the Court has nevertheless kept the transcripts out of public view by retroactively deeming them as having been filed only in camera, for review by the Court alone.”

“There is no legal basis to withhold Paxton’s testimony from public view,” the motion argued, citing the specific requirements imposed by the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, which “sharply restricts the circumstances in which court filings may be withheld from the public.”

“The issue is of immense public importance and urgency given Paxton’s candidacy in a sharply competitive election for U.S. Senate,” the motion continued. “Existing public reporting suggests that Paxton’s testimony raises substantial ethical questions. 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.”

Included in the public reporting that Talarico’s legal team cited in their motion was a report by The Wall Street Journal in April that found, according to the 2019 deposition, that Paxton may have violated attorney-client privilege.

A spokesperson for Paxton’s campaign had denied the Journal’s report as “blatant lies.” In response to Wednesday’s motion, another Paxton spokesperson attacked the Talarico motion as “nothing more than a desperate attempt to hide his own extremism.”

Talarico’s campaign urged the court to grant “expedited treatment” of their motion so as to have a ruling “as far in advance of the November election as possible.”

MS NOW’s Eugene Daniels reported an additional aspect of Paxton’s deposition transcripts that could end up having a major impact on the election while guest hosting for Alicia Menendez on Wednesday’s episode of On the Line.

Talarico’s “effort to flip a Texas Senate seat blue relies in no small part on highlighting his Republican opponent Ken Paxton’s lengthy list of scandals,” said Daniels, reporting on the motion the campaign had filed in the court earlier in the day.

“A source tells us MS NOW the campaign has reason to believe Paxton admitted to crimes in one of those depositions related to but separate from the securities fraud charges he faced years ago,” Daniels continued. “But that source didn’t provide additional details, and MS NOW has no information to back that claim up. The charges against Paxton were dropped, and he has always maintained his innocence.”

Democrats have not won a major statewide race in Texas since the late 1990s, but several factors have elections prognosticators giving Talarico a solid chance at flipping the seat blue.

Paxton won the primary against the incumbent Republican, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), but it was a contentious battle that required a runoff, burned through campaign funds, put a spotlight on the series of scandals, lawsuits, a bitter divorce from his state senator wife, and other controversies that have dogged Paxton for years.

The AG did score President Donald Trump’s endorsement but is still widely viewed as a weaker candidate in the general election due to the seemingly unending parade of messy headlines and the downward drag of Trump and the GOP’s poor polling on key issues like immigration and the economy. Talarico has made Paxton’s “corruption” issues a key part of his campaign messaging.

Earlier this month, Nate Silver released his updated forecast for the November midterms and rated Texas as “Lean D,” designating it as one of his top picks to flip blue, the Fox News Power Rankings analysis shifted its prediction from Likely R to Toss Up, and the Cook Political Report also rated the Texas Senate race as a Toss Up.

Watch the clip above via MS NOW.

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