On Friday, more than 100 months after a grand jury indicted Ken Paxton for felony securities fraud, the now-attorney general’s legal team is once again trying to have the case dismissed or delayed, according to filings a state District Court in Houston will take up Friday.
In July 2015, a grand jury in Collin County charged Paxton, then a state senator, with two first-degree felonies after he was accused of defrauding investors four years earlier by failing to disclose he was paid to recruit them. He was also charged with soliciting clients for a securities firm without a state registration to do so — a third-degree felony. He had been disciplined by the State Securities Board in 2014 for the latter violation.
But for almost nine years — far longer than the vast majority of other state-level felony cases last, and far longer, some say , than anyone beside Paxton could have dodged a verdict — Paxton’s team and state prosecutors have been locked in a game of legal chutes and ladders. Moving from Paxton’s home turf of Collin County to Democratic stronghold Harris County, they’ve passed by three different presiding judges, filed dozens of motions and clashed over legal technicalities and special prosecutors’ salaries.