A former top aide to Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, is appearing in a new online ad endorsing Mr. Paxton’s Democratic rival, James Talarico, in one of the most hotly contested and costly U.S. Senate races in the country.
The aide, David Maxwell, served as Mr. Paxton’s director of law enforcement for several years until 2020, when he and other high-level staffers accused Mr. Paxton of abusing the power of his office to help a campaign donor under federal investigation. The allegations were central to Mr. Paxton’s impeachment trial in 2023, in which he denied any wrongdoing and was acquitted by the Republican-led Texas Senate.
Last year, a judge awarded a total of $6.6 million to Mr. Maxwell and three other former aides to Mr. Paxton who had filed a whistle-blower lawsuit after their dismissals.
“Ken Paxton ended my five-decade career in public service because I blew the whistle on his corruption,” Mr. Maxwell says in the ad, wearing a dark suit and white cowboy hat.
Mr. Talarico, a state lawmaker, has focused his campaign on Mr. Paxton’s impeachment and other controversies in his career, calling him “the most corrupt politician in Texas.” One of Mr. Talarico’s earlier ads featured a story that has become political lore in Texas, in which Mr. Paxton filched a $1,000 Montblanc pen from a courthouse security tray.
But Mr. Paxton has shown striking resilience against accusations of corruption. Though Senator John Cornyn ran a well-financed re-election...
In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But fo...