Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to perform community service at food bank as part of fraud settlement

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will work with a food bank to help it comply with its settlement and avoid prosecution for fraud, according to the Houston Chronicle.

On Thursday, Paxton’s attorney confirmed the type of community service his client will perform but offered no further details on when or where it will be completed.

“I’m not going to go into details because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” Dan Cogdell told the Chronicle. “I don’t want protesters showing up.”

Cogdell did not immediately return a call and email from The Texas Newsroom.

Brian Wice, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined to comment on Cogdell’s statements and offered no additional details about the community service.

In 2015, Paxton was charged with two counts of securities fraud and acting as a representative of an investment adviser without being registered with the state, both felonies. The case dragged on for years, with the district attorney being recusal and special prosecutors being appointed, judges being removed and venues being changed between Collin and Harris County.

Then in March, just weeks before Paxton was due to appear before a jury, his defense team and the special prosecutors handling the case announced they had reached an agreement to forgo a trial.

Under the agreement, charges against Paxton will be dropped if he takes legal ethics classes, pays about $270,000 in restitution to the men he allegedly defrauded and performs 100 hours of community service.

When the settlement was first announced, the parties said Paxton would perform his community service in Collin County, where he has had a family home for decades.

But this month, an official with Collin County’s community supervision department said Paxton’s case had not been transferred there. Even if he had information about Paxton’s case, he wouldn’t provide it, he said.

“We would be reluctant to release information regarding an individual’s performance of community service,” Robbin Gilbert, the department’s deputy chief, said Aug. 9.

Lucio Vasquez

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Houston Public Media

The Houston court handling the case appears to have approved the agreement reached between Paxton and prosecutors, called a PTI, or pretrial intervention contract, on July 12. But the contract itself is not in the public docket in the case.

Prosecutors and Paxton’s attorneys have declined to release a copy of the contract, which would likely provide more details about the deal they reached.

Texas Newsroom also attempted to obtain more information about the Harris County settlement, including the court assigned to the case, the district attorney and local community supervision officials. No one had details.

Reached again by phone this week, Wice said he believes the document can be kept secret.

A judicial precedent could back him up, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

In 2016 and 2017, the Travis County prosecutor was asked to turn over agreements his attorneys had made with defendants in domestic violence cases. The initial request came from a woman who wanted a copy of the agreement her ex-husband had reached after she accused him of abuse.

The county attorney refused to release the documents and asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose agency interprets state records laws, to uphold them. Instead, Paxton’s agency decided that the still-active agreements, in which the defendant had not complied with the terms of the agreement, should be disclosed.

In response, the county attorney sued Paxton.

His office argued that state law allows police records to be withheld if the investigation did not result in a conviction or deferred sentencing, and if disclosing the records would interfere with the “detection, investigation or prosecution of the crime.”

The state district court sided with the county attorney. Paxton continued to fight but ultimately lost after the Texas Supreme Court refused to overturn the lower courts’ decisions.

A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions about whether Paxton still supports such agreements being made public.

Bill Aleshire, who represented the woman in the Travis County case, said keeping these records secret harms victims and the public’s trust in the criminal justice system.

“I don’t think in any case the prosecutor should make deals with criminal defendants that they then keep secret from the public, and especially not when there are victims of the crime,” Aleshire told The Texas Newsroom.

Texas Newsroom has filed a public records request for a copy of the agreement between prosecutors and Paxton’s defense team.