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In the fall of 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton faced a mutiny. Seven high-ranking staffers suspected that the state’s chief law-enforcement officer was using the powers of his office to benefit an Austin real-estate developer named Nate Paul, who had given generously to the Republican’s re-election campaign. The staffers put their concerns in writing, shared them with the FBI, and asked for a meeting with their boss, a major Trump ally. Paxton fired four of them instead (the rest resigned), and issued a statement through his office stating that he was being targeted by “rogue employees.” In response, they filed a lawsuit alleging wrongful termination. The lawsuit and the whistleblower complaint they shared with the FBI described a pattern of truly bizarre behavior on the part of one of the most powerful lawyers in America. As I reported in a profile of Paxton :

Citing Paxton’s “frantic” and “obsessive” activity, his penchant for cycling through personal “burner” phones, and his closeness with Paul, they feared that Paxton was performing his duties “under duress.” In the wrongful termination lawsuit, they speculated that the moves might have been “an effort to repay Paul” for a $25,000 donation to Paxton’s reelection campaign. Their most intriguing theory was one that cut at the core of the Paxtons’ power-couple brand: Sometime in 2019 or 2020, they stated,...

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