Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton attended a 2025 New Year’s party in Dubai with two fugitives who did not return to the United States, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.
The revelation comes as the Trump-backed Republican challenges Texas Democrat James Talarico in the final weeks of the Senate race.
Paxton was seen in a short video celebrating the start of New Year’s Day atop a high-rise building with Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, two U.S. citizens who had been indicted on federal charges related to healthcare fraud in 2024. The two men were accused of embezzling more than $15 million in funds from a Chicago hospital into bank accounts they owned, the Department of Justice said in July 2024.
Ahmed, a former healthcare executive, had donated $190,000 to Paxton, according to campaign finance records reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Paxton was also seen partying with Tracy Duhon, a Christian influencer who became his girlfriend. The video showing the couple together was recorded months before Paxton’s estranged wife, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year. Duhon filed for divorce from her husband in July 2024, two months after she met Ken Paxton at the Kentucky Derby.
The Texas attorney general hasn’t admitted to an affair with Duhon, but it’s not the first time they have been seen together in public. The two were spotted in London, where they were celebrating the extended Fourth of July weekend. This is the second affair in which Ken Paxton has been involved.
Ken Paxton’s first affair was at the center of his 2023 impeachment trial, which resulted in an acquittal. The state attorney general was accused of accepting bribes and abusing his office to help a political donor whom the FBI was investigating. He maintained the impeachment charges were politically motivated.
The case was one of many corruption scandals that plagued Ken Paxton during his decade-long tenure. He was also indicted on state security fraud charges in 2015 and federal fraud charges in 2016. Both sets of charges were dropped.
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“When you go after things that protect the people of your state, they come after you, and none of those things were proven,” Ken Paxton told Fox News at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last month. “If you’ll notice, they were all dismissed, or they’re gone.”
Talarico has attacked Ken Paxton over his long list of scandals in several campaign ads. It remains to be seen if Talarico can use those controversies to his advantage in a race that could see a Democrat winning statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994. Talarico has been polling consistently better than the Texas Republican.