Ken Paxton Welcomes the New Year with Federal Fugitives

Just when you think Texas politics has finally scraped the bottom of the barrel, somebody hands Attorney General Ken Paxton a backhoe. On Monday, this publication looked into how our globe-trotting chief legal officer managed to stick taxpayers with a $3.3 million bill for state trooper security details across nineteen countries in Ken Paxton Bills Texas Millions for His Vacation Guards. The burning mystery was what, precisely, General Paxton was doing on all those international junkets that the state ledger classified as official business only one-sixth of the time. Now we know at least one itinerary, and honey, it is enough to make a hound dog laugh into his bowl.

According to civil court records and video footage broken by The Wall Street Journal, Paxton spent New Year’s Eve 2024 perched high above the desert sands on a luxury balcony in Dubai. There he stood, gazing out at the midnight fireworks exploding over the Burj Khalifa, accompanied by his girlfriend, Tracy Duhon, and two men who were, at that very moment, active fugitives from federal criminal justice. You read that right. While working stiffs back in Lubbock and El Paso were figuring out how to balance electric bills with grocery runs, the top law enforcement officer in the state of Texas was standing alongside two gentlemen ducking federal warrants for fleecing a safety-net hospital.

The two balcony buddies were Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail. Back in 2024, federal prosecutors in Illinois indicted both men for allegedly embezzling $15 million from Loretto Hospital, an underfunded community facility on the West Side of Chicago where Ahmed served as chief financial officer. Federal grand juries later hit Ahmed with charges in a separate, gargantuan racket alleging he bilked the public out of another $195 million in fraudulent billing for COVID-19 tests. Both men chose to ring in the holidays thousands of miles beyond the reach of the United States Marshals Service rather than submit to an arraignment. Lawyers for the two men later argued their clients were merely detained overseas by legitimate foreign business and family health troubles before ending up in federal handcuffs. But on that breezy night in the Persian Gulf, they were simply Ken Paxton’s party companions.

This was no accidental run-in near the elevator bank. Ahmed is a long-standing political patron who poured $190,000 into Paxton’s campaign coffers, including a tidy $25,000 check cut mere days after the federal government handed down his indictment. If you are keeping score at home, that is nearly two hundred grand in campaign cash flowing directly from an indicted hospital executive into the pockets of the man sworn to uphold the laws of Texas.

Paxton’s Senate campaign staff declined to explain why the Republican nominee was cavorting with international runaways or who picked up the tab for the skyline suite. Instead, campaign spokesman Nick Maddux served up the standard boilerplate, announcing that like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas. It takes a special brand of brass to look at a videotape of yourself toasting the new year alongside two health-care fraud fugitives and shout that you are the real victim of law enforcement overreach.

The comedy turned downright delicious because of what Paxton’s allies were doing right before this video landed. For the better part of a week, right-wing keyboard commandos flooded the internet with breathless rumors that Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico had secretly vanished into an inpatient mental health clinic in Ohio. That tall tale crashed into a ditch on Sunday when the Ohio clinic pointed out Talarico had never set foot on their property, Talarico noted he had never even been to Ohio, and time-stamped home security camera footage confirmed the candidate was merely home in Texas fighting off a nasty bout of the flu. Less than twenty-four hours later, the universe balanced its books: while Republicans were inventing phantom hospital visits in the Midwest, Paxton was caught on tape celebrating in the Middle East alongside actual outlaws. As Talarico put it on social media, A party with multiple fugitives and Ken Paxton is still the sketchiest guy in the room.

All of this arrives three weeks before the November election and less than a week before early voting booths open across the state on October 19. Vice President JD Vance flew out to Tyler Pounds Regional Airport on Tuesday to rally the party faithful and warn that Paxton is in genuine danger of losing a Senate seat Republicans have held since the Jurassic period. A fresh University of Houston Hobby School survey shows Talarico leading Paxton 58 percent to 36 percent across Harris County, while nonpartisan statewide polls show the Democrat up by four points. Texas has not elected a Democrat statewide since Bob Bullock and fellow Democrats won in 1994, but Texans have an old, stubborn allergy to being taken for fools.

When the ruling crowd spends a decade treating the machinery of state government like their personal country club, they eventually forget that the rest of us are watching. Paxton has survived state felony securities fraud charges, FBI bribery investigations, and an impeachment trial in his own legislature, always figuring the voters would swallow whatever slop he dished out. Now he is standing on a balcony across the ocean, flanked by millions of stolen public dollars and federal warrants. Texans do not mind a rascal, but they sure do hate a moocher who treats their treasury like an open bar. Come Monday morning, folks get their chance to raise a little hell at the ballot box.