How Ken Paxton whistleblowers stood up for Texas and the truth

Forget about politics for a minute.
We are so conditioned now to make politics everything that it’s hard to see the world outside a political lens.
For too many of us, it has become the arbiter of right and wrong. It’s a looking glass that distorts reality and confuses the soul about things we should understand but somehow can’t anymore.
To understand this story, you have to forget about labels, about Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. For some, it won’t be easy. The story is too entwined with politics, which is how those who can’t stand the truth want you to see it — as a political story.
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There are billboards now around the state that say the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton was a political vendetta. They lead people to a website that spouts nonsense and confusion about what really happened. Some people believe it because they believe this is a political story.
But it isn’t. This is a story about the truth of what happened in our state. It’s a story about a small group of people who, facing terrible consequences, saw beyond their own politics and did what was right, not in their own interests but for the greater good.
Over two days in late September 2020, while the nation was in the grip of the pandemic, eight of Paxton’s top deputies gathered, seven in person and one by phone, in a suite in the executive offices of the attorney general and decided to turn in their boss for corruption.
They had determined that he had repeatedly used his office to benefit a real estate developer named Nate Paul and that he had gone so far as to set the law enforcement powers of the state upon Paul’s perceived enemies.
The deputies recognized a pattern of abuse that touched each of their areas of the attorney general’s office. And they refused to accept it.
For some of the eight, it was a decision that had been brewing for months. For others, it took the collective understanding of the group to see how thoroughly Paxton had corrupted his office.
Around 1 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 30, 2020, the whistleblowers arrived at the FBI office in North Austin. They sat with two agents for four hours, and each, in turn, told the story we are going to tell you here.
They did it without regard for their careers. They did it without regard for their standing in a conservative movement that some have devoted their lives to. They did it without knowing what the personal fallout would be. They did it without knowing whether there would ever be justice or vindication.
Their public reward has been to be held up as rogues and self-dealers by Paxton and his coterie of wealthy supporters, to be officially smeared by the office of the attorney general, to be treated with contempt among some in their own party, and to be subject to legal actions against them.
Over 11 days this September, seven of the eight took the stand in Paxton’s impeachment trial. They laid out damning firsthand evidence of Paxton’s actions. They weathered ugly cross-examinations aimed at undermining their credibility.
And when it was over, they watched as 16 Republicans in the Texas Senate turned their backs on the evidence and voted to acquit Paxton.
History might move slowly on behalf of these eight. But if there is justice, history will come to see them as we do — heroes for the truth who stood up for our state and for honest governance when both were under attack.
Their names are Ryan Bangert, Blake Brickman, Lacey Mase, Jeff Mateer, David Maxwell, Darren McCarty, Mark Penley and Ryan Vassar. They are our 2023 Texans of the Year.
Earlier this month, seven of the eight former Paxton deputies sat around a conference table in Austin, not far from their old offices. Only Mase, who didn’t participate in this story, wasn’t there.
It was the first time they had been together in one room since they met in Ryan Bangert’s office on Sept. 29, 2020, and decided to turn their boss in.
There was happiness at seeing one another after all this time, but also sadness, frustration and anger.
These are people who care about one another and about the work they did who are still trying to understand how it all went so wrong.
Maxwell, a giant of a man and a legendary Texas Ranger who still wears the white hat of his trade, called it the best group he had ever worked with at the attorney general’s office — and his tenure stretched back to when Greg Abbott held the office.
“We had fun together,” he said. “We relied on each other. We trusted each other, and you could see it in our relationship.”
Bangert said the same. “Up until the events in question, I felt like the entire office had a good ethic of openness and trust,” he said.
They remembered the work they had done before things fell apart.
While Paxton’s name was on the office, Mateer ran day-to-day operations as first assistant, and Bangert was his No. 2. Together they were responsible for the 4,000-person agency. The rest of the group each had responsibility over individual divisions.
For all of them, it was work they believed would change the state for the better.
“As a conservative, it was like the crown jewel of AG offices,” Brickman said. “The team Jeff put together was known across the country as really smart, principled conservative people.”
Some of their work was highly political, from fighting mask mandates and school closures during COVID-19 to suing the Obama administration over everything from health care to immigration. Some was nonpartisan, like fighting human trafficking or suing Google over antitrust issues.
“We never took a position that we thought bordered on frivolous in any way,” said McCarty, who ran civil litigation. “We never took a position that was purely for a headline without any thought we could prevail.”
Plenty of that work did make headlines. And if the office was beloved in conservative circles, it was viewed as archly activist by just about everyone on the left and plenty in the center too.
But “overwhelmingly, our work was not political,” Mateer said.
From defending state agencies, to child support issues, to routine open records requests to working with law enforcement around the state, most of the daily grind was about common government functions.
And who knows? It might be going on just like that today if it weren’t for one name. Nate Paul.
Paul is a wealthy man with a reputation for bankruptcies and not paying his own lawyers. In mid-August 2019, as part of an investigation into his finances, federal agents executed search warrants on his Austin home and the headquarters of his company, World Class Holdings, which describes itself as “one of the largest private real estate owners in the United States.”
The searches are a good place to mark the beginning of the strange journey that the whistleblowers were about to take with Paxton and Paul. In the ensuing months, each of them would be affected in some way by a relationship none of them fully understands to this day.
They don’t know even now how Paxton and Paul met, though it’s public record that Paxton’s campaign accepted a $25,000 donation from Paul in 2018. They also don’t know why Paxton wouldn’t stop engaging with Paul even when they warned him, and several of them explicitly did, that Paul’s demands were likely to end in legal trouble.
To Maxwell, it was dollars that drove Paxton. “I saw from the very beginning that he was motivated by money,” Maxwell said, recalling how Paxton had griped that his deputies were paid more than he was.
To Brickman, it was Paxton’s weak spirit. “He’s easily persuadable. He is not someone with core conviction,” he said.
To Mateer, it was about power. Power corrupts, and Paxton lost his way.
Whatever the motive, public evidence against Paxton indicated that Paul provided him with a home remodel and helped him secretly pursue an extramarital affair.
Paxton and Paul have both denied all criminal allegations. Paxton, who is facing state securities fraud charges, is under federal investigation for corruption related to Paul. Paul is under federal indictment for fraud. Paxton’s office and Paul’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment for this editorial.
Whatever comes of the criminal investigations, we know for a fact that, at Paxton’s direction, Paul had extraordinary access to the most powerful people in the attorney general’s office to personally work on matters concerning Paul and Paul alone.
According to evidence presented during the impeachment, Paxton intervened on Paul’s behalf in these major areas:
— He tried to get the attorney general’s office to give Paul access to protected law enforcement information about the ongoing criminal investigation.
— He tried to have the office assist Paul in a lawsuit with the charitable Mitte Foundation.
— He used the office’s powers to halt foreclosure sales in Texas when properties belonging to Paul were going to be sold on the courthouse steps.
— He personally deputized an outside attorney to issue grand jury subpoenas on Paul’s behalf after his deputies refused to do so.
“In each instance, we were being asked to use the power of the office in a way that would provide no meaningful, tangible benefit to the people of the state of Texas,” Bangert said.
All of this happened within a period of about a year, from the point of the search warrants in August 2019 to the whistleblowers’ decision to go to the FBI in September 2020. For the whistleblowers, even that timeline is compressed. The first awareness of Paul among the deputies came in late 2019, when Paxton tried to get his deputies to provide Paul with protected law enforcement information through the open records process.
During the months that followed, Paxton’s focus on Paul became increasingly intense.
It included brazen requests that bordered on demands — like having Maxwell, probably the most legendary active law enforcement officer in the state, and Penley, a former federal prosecutor with a record of pursuing fraud, sit down with Paul and his lawyer to discuss a conspiracy theory Paul hatched about how federal agents, prosecutors and even a magistrate were out to get him.
Maxwell and Penley couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They both told Paxton to get away from Paul. It didn’t happen.
“This was a guy who was totally wound up, totally locked down by this guy, under total control of Nate Paul, to the point where Nate Paul thought he had Jeff’s job [as first assistant],” Brickman said. Paul “would send emails basically saying, ‘Why aren’t you doing what I’m telling you to do?’”
Brickman recalled confronting Paxton in late July 2020 and telling him to stop the association.
“He said, ‘I’ll stop dealing with Nate Paul,’ and I think the next morning he called you guys” to assist Paul, Brickman said, turning to Penley and Maxwell. “It got to the point where it was like, ‘Does this guy think we’re idiots?’”
The requests to help Paul kept coming through the summer of 2020 and intensified in the fall.
On Sept. 24, 2020, Paxton, who was becoming closer to President Donald Trump, called Penley from the White House, insisting that Penley sign a contract for an outside attorney to start an investigation into how federal authorities were treating Paul, an investigation that Penley and Maxwell had refused to pursue.
On Sept. 25, Paxton was becoming more agitated. Normally passive, he screamed over the phone at Mateer about Penley’s refusal.
On Sept. 26, Paxton called Penley to an in-person meeting in McKinney, demanding Penley sign off on the outside attorney. He was acting like a desperate man, Penley said.
By the end of the month, it came to a head over the refusal, first from Penley, then by other deputies, to bring on an outside lawyer to do work they all saw as unethical.
Around 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2020, the group learned through a contact of Lacey Mase’s that a lawyer named Brandon Cammack had issued a subpoena on behalf of the attorney general’s office to a financial institution. It sought records about legal matters involving Paul.
Cammack, an inexperienced lawyer, would later testify that Paul’s personal attorney was assisting him at every step, including on how to obtain the subpoenas through the Travis County district attorney’s office.
Mase was in a meeting with Vassar when a text from her contact came through. She showed it to Vassar, who ended their meeting and walked with Mase to Mateer’s office.
Mateer was in a separate meeting with top officials from attorney general offices across the country, in the midst of working on a potential opioid settlement.
He left that meeting and summoned the other deputies. With the exception of Maxwell, who was in Colorado, they all met in Bangert’s office, a converted conference room in the same suite with Paxton and the other deputies.
The meeting stretched late into the night and took up again early the next morning. They learned that day that Cammack had ordered not one but 39 subpoenas related to people or institutions Paul wanted targeted.
Among other things, the subpoenas sought the personal phone and email records of state and federal law enforcement agents, federal prosecutors and a federal magistrate.
By early afternoon, the deputies were in their cars on the way to the FBI.
During Paxton’s impeachment, the defense hammered away at the question of why the group didn’t go to authorities sooner. The question has no relevance to the evidence that was gathered against Paxton, but it lingers anyway.
The answer is complicated. Some of the whistleblowers had concerns about Paul, but they knew only about what was happening in their area. Others, like Bangert and Mateer, had a sense of a growing problem but weren’t sure whether to believe what Paxton was telling them about Paul.
Paxton “kept offering different explanations for his behavior that seemed plausible in the moment,” Bangert said. “But at the very end, there was tangible evidence that what Ken was telling us simply wasn’t true.”
To Maxwell, it was the whole story that came together in those pivotal final meetings on Sept. 29 and 30.
“Everything individually was not sufficient to go to the FBI,” he said. But the totality — with each person’s story told in one place — made it clear that the office had been corrupted, he said.
To Maxwell, hearing all of the stories about the ways Paul had infiltrated the office left them with one choice.
“This is a cancer growing, and it was up to us to stop it,” he said.
They knew after they went to the FBI that they would all be fired or forced to resign. It was just a question of when and how.
Mateer resigned on Oct. 2, and Paxton replaced him with a man named Brent Webster. Penley and Maxwell were placed on investigative leave the same day by Paxton’s order.
On Oct. 3, the attorney general’s official press office sent out a release calling the whistleblowers rogue employees and said they were under investigation.
On Oct. 8, the five remaining deputies gathered with Paxton and Webster for what would have been the normal Thursday executive meeting.
“It happens as if nothing has changed,” Brickman said. “It was a super awkward meeting.”
Each of the deputies went around the table and gave their normal reports. Then, at the end, Paxton had something to say.
He started quoting Scripture and gave a vague speech, saying everything he had done was for the right reason.
“It was like, ‘I’m a sinner and we’re all saved by grace,’” Bangert said.
When the meeting was about the end, Webster asked if anyone had any questions. McCarty had one. It was dead silent in the room.
“I asked him, ‘When are you going to stop using the resources of this office to slander me and my colleagues who made a good faith report to law enforcement?’” McCarty recalled.
Paxton didn’t say anything. Webster said this wasn’t the place for that conversation.
“I said, ‘No, this is exactly the right place to talk about it,’” McCarty said.
It took about a month for all of them to be gone, fired or forced to resign.
Over 11 days this September, the evidence against Ken Paxton was broadcast to the people of Texas in a Senate impeachment trial that, at the beginning at least, appeared like it might be a genuine search for justice.
The impeachment was born of a lawsuit four of the whistleblowers, Brickman, Penley, Maxwell and Vassar, filed after they were fired. Paxton attempted to reach a $3.3 million settlement with them. But when it came time to approve the payment, the Texas House balked and an impeachment inquiry began.
During the trial, Paxton’s legal team was forced to cross-examine the consistent and detailed stories of seven of the whistleblowers.
As the trial advanced, it became clear that it was a show, half of it a serious prosecution, half of it defense antics. The time constraints alone were too tight for the amount of evidence gathered.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick presided as judge, and as the days wore on, he seemed to lose interest in listening to the legal advice he needed to do the job competently.
Paxton’s defense, led by Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee, did all it could to run out the clock on the prosecution with baseless objection after objection that would have seen them sanctioned by any real judge.
The defense team was a kind of caricature. Anyone who has spent time in court knows how a defense with no exculpatory evidence behaves — object as often as you can get away with it, sow confusion, muddy up the witnesses and pretend you’re outraged at the injustice of it all. The Paxton defense put that strategy on steroids.
Day after day the whistleblowers faced accusations that this was all some kind of coup by rogue employees, that Mateer somehow wanted Paxton’s job. There was zero evidence of that. Every indication, in fact, was that the eight deputies had done all they could to advance Paxton’s agenda except when it came to putting the office at the service of Nate Paul.
“There was nothing gained by any of us,” McCarty said. “There were things that I wanted to do in that office before I left. There were things that mattered to me that I was not able to see through. I walked out on the street having just publicly accused my boss of corruption. It’s probably not the greatest first line on a resume.”
In the end, despite the evidence, 16 Republican senators, with Patrick’s blessing and more likely his insistence, voted to acquit on every single article of impeachment. The hope for truth and justice over politics was extinguished inside the Texas Capitol.
Three months after the trial ended, back in Austin at that conference table with seven of the whistleblowers, they are trying to make sense of it all.
What does it mean for the state and our democracy that this all went the way it did?
What does it mean when a political party has turned so far inward that it cannot oust one of its own, even when the evidence is as compelling as it was against Paxton?
Bangert thinks of a T.S. Eliot poem, “Gerontion,” where the poet describes how deceived we can become “in a wilderness of mirrors” where our own ideas are reflected back upon us, over and over until we can’t see truth from error.
“History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,/Guides us by vanities,” the poem reads.
“Human temptation is as old as time,” Bangert said. “When you become detached from principle, you enter the wilderness of mirrors. And that’s where we are.”
Principle is now the subordinate of power in Texas. Paxton’s impeachment trial proved that.
And in the gathering and holding of power, principle must be trampled. Throw aside those who served something higher than oneself. Call them liars and rogues. Disregard all facts, all evidence. Disregard the truth.
If that was the end of the story, it would be a sad one. But it isn’t the end. The eight whistleblowers aren’t the only heroes here. There were members of the Texas House who stood up for the truth and impeached Paxton, who led the impeachment effort in the Senate, who are even now being hounded by Paxton and Patrick’s political machine, as well as two Republican senators who voted to convict Paxton. And there are federal investigators still digging, still searching, and what they find perhaps we will know soon.
Meanwhile, a ruling earlier this month in the whistleblowers’ lawsuit will require Paxton to take the stand and face questions about what he has done. He may invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. If so, let people see him do it.
Time, we must believe, is on the side of the truth. But it won’t come forth absent the hard work and courage to seek it.
Bangert summed it up well, sitting around the table with his former colleagues.
“The truth has always been a precious commodity, a costly commodity,” he said. “Every society needs individuals who are willing to bear the cost of speaking the truth. And I’m not trying to elevate us sort of as heroic here, but I think all of us at moments in our lives are put in positions where we are given the choice whether or not to pay the price of speaking the truth.”
We needed these eight people to be where they were when their moment came.
They spoke the truth; they paid the price. And, whatever comes, Texas is better for it.
You read about all finalists for 2023 Texan and the Year and explore prior years at dallasnews.com/opinion/texanoftheyear.
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