Paxton's Blind Trust Put $600,000 Into a Convicted Fraudster's Company, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune Report

A blind trust set up for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, invested $600,000 in a construction materials business built by a North Texas home builder who had served a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported. The reporting, published October 23, is based on previously unreleased records gathered by investigators during Paxton's 2023 impeachment, and it lands in the final days of his U.S. Senate race against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, with Election Day on November 3.

The business owner is Scott Sherman, who ran a homebuilding firm, Artisan Operating LP, when he pleaded guilty in 2014 for his role in a mortgage fraud conspiracy that, according to the report, inflated home prices to obtain larger loans on more than two dozen properties across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Four years after Sherman finished his prison sentence, the Paxtons' trust put $600,000 into Wildcatter Sand Services, the reporters found. Wildcatter and Grayson County Sand and Gravel, which Sherman built with his father, grew into a network of locations and subsidiaries, and some of those companies later stopped paying property taxes to local governments, including school districts, the report said. Sherman did not respond to calls or emailed questions, according to the report.

The question the reporting presses is how blind the trust was. When it was created, the Paxtons agreed their friend Chip Loper would manage its assets without consulting them or taking 'any instructions regarding investment matters,' according to incorporation documents cited by the news organizations. But the reporters pointed to text messages from the impeachment probe showing Loper and Ken Paxton discussed certain investments, and reported that the Paxtons claimed more than $93,000 in itemized losses from the Wildcatter and Grayson County companies on their 2020 joint federal tax return. 'That is proof positive that there's nothing blind about this trust,' Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told the news organizations.

Bank records reviewed by the reporters showed Wildcatter companies wired the trust 15 payments totaling more than $83,000 between January and June 2023, the run-up to Paxton's impeachment; the news organizations said they could not determine why the payments were made. On May 19, 2023, a week before the House impeached Paxton, the trust wired $9,000 to the firm of attorney Mitch Little, who later represented Paxton at his Senate trial — the report said it is unclear whether Wildcatter money paid for legal work, and Little did not respond to questions. Angela Paxton served on an advisory board for Wildcatter Materials beginning in 2022, described the role as 'non-governing,' and voted for a 2023 bill limiting repeat environmental complaints after a Wildcatter company received state violation notices; her spokesman said the bill had bipartisan support, did not concern any specific company, and that she was unaware of Sherman's criminal history. Ken Paxton did not answer the news organizations' detailed questions about the investment or whether he knew of Sherman's conviction; he has previously said he follows ethics laws. Paxton was acquitted by the Texas Senate in 2023, and a federal public integrity investigation was dropped in 2025.