Ken Paxton is the attorney general of Texas. His job is to be the state's top law-enforcement officer.
On New Year's Eve 2024, he was in Dubai, watching fireworks burst over the world's tallest building from a crowded luxury balcony. Two of the other guests were Americans who had been indicted on federal fraud charges months earlier and had not come home to face them. One of them had given Paxton's campaign $190,000 — including $25,000 just days after he was indicted.
That's according to an exclusive Wall Street Journal investigation published October 12, based on a video of the party, court filings, and people familiar with the event. Paxton is now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas.
Who was on the balcony
The two men, the Journal reported, were Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail.
In July 2024, a federal grand jury charged both men, along with a third executive, in a scheme to pull more than $15 million out of Loretto Hospital, a Chicago hospital where Ahmed was the chief financial officer. Prosecutors say they paid vendors for goods and services that were never delivered. Suhail owns a medical-supply company.
Ahmed was later charged in a much bigger case. The Journal reports it involves at least $195 million in alleged government payments for fake COVID-19 tests. He has pleaded not guilty.
Both men were abroad when they were first indicted. The Journal reports both are now back in the U.S. to face the charges, and Ahmed is in custody. Their lawyers say family health problems and civil cases in Dubai delayed their return.
But on the night Paxton partied with them, they were fugitives from U.S. justice. And one of them was his donor.
$25,000, days after the indictment
Here is the part that should bother every Texan, whatever party they vote for.
Campaign-finance records show Ahmed gave Paxton $190,000 in total. $25,000 of it came days after Ahmed was indicted, the Journal found.
So the sequence is:
- A healthcare executive is charged with stealing millions from a hospital.
- Days later, he sends $25,000 to the campaign of a state's top prosecutor.
- Months later, still not having returned to face the charges, he spends New Year's Eve with that same prosecutor in Dubai.
Paxton's campaign was asked about the trip. Senior adviser Nick Maddux did not directly address it. Instead, he said Paxton "has been politically persecuted for years."
Nobody is persecuting Paxton by asking why he was at a party with two men who were dodging federal charges.
This is not a one-time lapse
If the Dubai trip were the only thing on Paxton's record, it would still be a scandal. It isn't close to the only thing.
The same Journal report lays out the pattern:
- In 2020, eight of Paxton's own deputies reported him to law enforcement, accusing him of using the attorney general's office to help a top donor, Austin real-estate developer Nate Paul. That set off an FBI investigation.
- In 2023, his own party impeached him on abuse-of-office charges. The state Senate acquitted him.
- The whistleblowers who said they were fired for reporting him won a lawsuit. They were awarded $6.6 million.
- In 2024, he settled state felony securities-fraud charges by paying $300,000 in restitution.
We've documented more. Paxton's calendar sat blank for about 730 workdays while he took hundreds of out-of-state trips on the taxpayers' dime for security. He told the Senate he owns seven homes and earns nothing from any of them, when six were listed for rent. And a $250,000 check to his super PAC came from a donor who doesn't exist.
The trips the taxpayers know about — and the one they didn't
His opponent, Democrat James Talarico, has attacked what he calls Paxton's "jet-setting lifestyle." The records back him up.
From 2022 through 2025, state-paid security went with Paxton on 19 foreign trips, to places including Greece, Italy, South Africa and Mexico, the Journal found. That's more than the governor or the lieutenant governor took in the same years.
The Dubai trip isn't on that list. The records the Journal reviewed don't include it. Texans found out about it from a video another guest took — one cited in a filing in a Texas civil case in which that guest is a defendant.
Trump was warned
According to the Journal, when President Trump was deciding this spring whether to endorse Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn, he was told that damaging revelations about Paxton were likely to come out. Trump brushed it off and endorsed him anyway. Paxton won the May runoff.
The revelations came. Polls now show Talarico with a narrow lead, and a Republican PAC recently ran an ad featuring Paxton's wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, urging voters to back the whole GOP ticket — without saying her husband's name. She filed for divorce last year, citing adultery.
The bottom line
Ken Paxton, Texas's top law-enforcement officer, spent New Year's Eve 2024 in Dubai with two Americans who had been indicted on federal fraud charges and had not returned to face them. One of them, Anosh Ahmed, had given Paxton $190,000, including $25,000 days after his indictment. Paxton's campaign has not explained the trip.
