For more than a year, Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton have told Texans that a Muslim congregation in North Texas was breaking the law. A new Texas Monthly investigation shows how they built that case — and what happened to the career official who told them there wasn't one.
The congregation is the East Plano Islamic Center, known as EPIC, which has been in Plano for more than two decades. It was planning a 402-acre development called EPIC City, with more than a thousand homes, a school, a mosque and shops. Anti-Muslim activists spread claims online that it would be a Muslims-only housing development. Texas Monthly reports plainly: "It was not."
Abbott amplified those claims anyway. "To be clear, Sharia law is not allowed in Texas," he posted in February 2025. "Nor are Sharia cities."
A memo with no name on it
On March 25, 2025, Abbott's office summoned Travis Iles, the Texas securities commissioner, to a windowless conference room. Iles had spent nearly 25 years at the State Securities Board, 7 of them in charge.
Two of Abbott's lawyers — his general counsel, Trevor Ezell, and an assistant general counsel — handed him a nine-page document. It had no letterhead, no date and no author. Every page was stamped confidential. Texas Monthly obtained a copy.
The document walked through every part of Texas government that could be turned against the mosque — fair housing law, consumer protection, investor rules, taxes, even funeral licensing. One paragraph suggested EPIC could be prosecuted for material support for terrorism. Texas Monthly describes it as "a road map for turning the online Islamophobic campaign against EPIC into official government action."
Within days, those same theories started showing up in public announcements of investigations by the attorney general, the Texas Workforce Commission, the funeral commission, the Texas Rangers and the state's environmental agency.
Iles's agency announced its own investigation — because, he told Texas Monthly, an Abbott adviser called and told him to put out a press release. The securities board doesn't normally announce a case before it finds anyone at fault, so innocent people don't look guilty. This time it did. Abbott's office put out its own release the same day: "All entities in Texas must follow state law, not Sharia law."
The experts found no case
Iles put six career investigators and lawyers on it. The developer handed over what its lawyer estimated was about 100,000 pages of records.
The question was whether the $80,000 "units" EPIC City sold to raise money were securities — investments people buy hoping someone else's work will make them money. Iles's team concluded they weren't. Buyers were paying for the right to buy land to live on or build on. That's a real estate deal, not a stock.
"I asked everybody on that primary team, 'Show me where I'm wrong. Please, I want to be wrong,'" Iles told Texas Monthly. "I had nobody on our team that didn't draw the same conclusion."
Paxton went around him
Paxton had been running his own investigation since March 2025. His demand for EPIC's records was finalized on the afternoon of March 24, 2025 — right after one of his regular meetings with the governor's office, according to his calendar, which Texas Monthly obtained.
About six weeks later, Paxton told Fox News's Will Cain he had "been directed" to investigate EPIC. He didn't say by whom. In May 2025, when Cain asked him whether EPIC City would be open to people of other faiths, he said: "So, I don't know that yet. I don't know that for sure."
On October 14, 2025, Paxton announced that the developers "flagrantly and undeniably violated the law" and demanded that the securities board refer the case to him so he could sue. By law, he couldn't bring a securities case without that referral. The securities board got no warning — Iles found out from the press release while driving to work.
Iles reached out three times asking to see Paxton's evidence and to meet. When they finally met, Paxton's deputy refused to share it, saying there was no need, according to a person with direct knowledge of the meeting.
"Corrupt"
In late 2025, the developer threatened to sue the state. Abbott's team summoned Iles again, Texas Monthly reports. This time the governor's general counsel put a laptop in front of him with a draft declaration — a statement he would sign under penalty of perjury. Iles refused to sign anything calling EPIC's units securities. He spent an hour rewriting it so he wouldn't be "perjuring myself," he said.
The final version said only that he'd asked the attorney general to "take action as the Attorney General deemed appropriate." In his email sending it, Iles made his finding plain: "I do not believe the transactions constitute securities under the [Texas Securities Act] with the evidence available to date." He advised Paxton to use the state's consumer-protection law instead.
Paxton ignored that advice. Late on the day of the developer's deadline, he sued EPIC for violating securities law. His lawsuit portrayed the securities board as having found the very violations Iles had said weren't there. Fox News reported that Iles had found "flagrant" violations.
Iles read the story and emailed his deputy. The subject line: "Horseshit." The body, describing Paxton's lawsuit: "Corrupt."
On December 8, 2025, Iles published a statement on the securities board's website calling the claim that EPIC had sold securities "a wholly false statement" improperly attributed to him.
Shortly after Iles emailed that statement to Abbott's adviser, the adviser called the board's chair — an Abbott appointee — for 33 minutes, according to call records Texas Monthly obtained. The chair then called Iles. Iles says he was told the governor's office wanted him to resign immediately. Before agreeing to go, he sent the adviser 29 pages of performance reviews from 2014 to 2025 — top marks in every one. He stepped down as commissioner at the end of the month.
Paxton's securities case against EPIC is set for a jury trial in June 2027.
A pattern, not a one-off
This isn't the first time Texas Monthly has found Abbott's inner circle steering a state agency against EPIC — it previously documented how his team took over the funeral commission's probe. And it fits what we've reported before: Abbott declared the nation's largest Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization using reasons that matched an anti-Muslim think tank's report, and a "Sharia takeover" panic pushed by Republican officials in Texas and Arkansas — one that, in Arkansas, traced back to a hate group's blog post.
Paxton, for his part, knows exactly what a securities fraud charge does to a reputation. He was charged with securities fraud himself in 2015, and that case hung over him for nearly a decade before he settled it in 2024.
What the documents show
Greg Abbott's lawyers gave Texas's securities commissioner an unsigned memo laying out ways to use state power against a Muslim congregation, then pressed him to announce an investigation. His team of career regulators concluded EPIC City had not sold securities. Ken Paxton sued the developer for securities violations anyway, and his lawsuit portrayed the securities board as having found the very violations Iles said weren't there. When the commissioner publicly called that claim "wholly false," Abbott's office pushed him to resign, and he was out within weeks.
Source
Texas Monthly: How Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton Trumped Up Fraud Charges Against a Muslim Community
