In the summer of 2023, after he was impeached on charges of abusing his office for personal gain, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was suspended and barred from conducting any official business for more than three months while awaiting trial in the state Senate.

So, he traveled.

Paxton, a Republican who is now running for U.S. Senate, took at least 17 trips over three months, including to resort destinations Park City, Utah, and Vail, Colorado. He visited the Oklahoma town where he owns a vacation lodge and a Utah community with a golf resort, where he later bought four condominiums.

State police joined him each time, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars for trips unrelated to his job as attorney general. The Texas Senate ultimately acquitted him on the impeachment charges.

But Paxton’s use of the taxpayer-funded detail did not begin or end there. In fact, it stands out compared with his predecessor, fellow elected officials in Texas and other state attorneys general, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Paxton has traveled frequently out of state while listing little on his official calendar, The Associated Press reported last week. ProPublica and the Tribune’s analysis, which included reviewing every publicly available document Paxton’s office says it possesses about his travel, discloses for the first time how few of his trips had a listed business purpose: just 1 in 6.

It also found Paxton’s security has cost taxpayers far more than has previously been reported.

Since assuming office in 2015, Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a state-funded security detail, costing $3.3 million. The newsrooms’ review of Paxton’s travel records, obtained through the state’s Public Information Act, could only connect 138 of those trips and $553,000 in security costs to state business.

Records detailing the purpose of Paxton’s visits to 36 states and 19 countries do not appear to exist in most cases. These include a trip to a small town in Hawaii months before his family’s blind trust bought land there; 24 trips to Utah, where the trust owns five properties; and 53 trips to Florida, where Paxton and the trust have two houses and a townhome.

“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, who has also criticized Paxton’s conduct on other issues. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”

Texas law allows the Department of Public Safety to provide security for key state leaders, including the attorney general, but does not require officials to use it. In fact, Paxton himself hasn’t used it in at least two dozen cases while traveling on official business.

Paxton has dismissed opponents’ attacks that he has used the perks of office to benefit himself and has not answered questions about how he vastly increased his wealth as a public servant.

He also did not answer detailed questions for this story. ProPublica and the Tribune sent Paxton a spreadsheet detailing travel for which there was no record that he was on state business and asked him to provide additional information if the trips were not personal. Neither........

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