Ken Paxton Partied in Dubai With Fugitives Ahead of High-Stakes Texas Senate Race
As President Trump weighed endorsing Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn of Texas this spring, he was told that damaging revelations were likely to surface about Paxton, according to people familiar with the conversations. Trump was dismissive and said there would be more negative material about Democratic nominee James Talarico.
Trump plowed ahead and endorsed the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general, helping him win the Republican-primary runoff in May. Months later, that decision is looking like Trump’s biggest gamble of the midterms.
Despite efforts by Paxton to paint his opponent as a far-left zealot, Talarico consistently holds a narrow lead in polls, raising a once unthinkable possibility: A Democrat could win statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994.
Meanwhile, damaging revelations about Paxton continue to emerge. A new scene that could join the list: a previously unreported New Year’s Eve 2024 celebration where Paxton partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.
As fireworks exploded over the Burj Khalifa skyscraper to welcome 2025, Paxton and his girlfriend Tracy Duhon watched from a luxury high-rise balcony full of people, according to a video of the gathering viewed by The Wall Street Journal, details of which were contained in court filings and confirmed by people familiar with the matter.
Among those at the event with Texas’ top law-enforcement official were two Americans who had been indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges but failed to return to the U.S., Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, according to the court records and people familiar with the matter. Ahmed, a healthcare executive, had donated $190,000 to Paxton, campaign-finance records show, including $25,000 days after he was indicted.
Talarico has hammered Paxton over his jet-setting travels, accumulation of wealth in office, and his business associations.
Paxton, 63 years old, has long been a survivor of controversy, and Trump’s allies maintain the MAGA faithful will power him to a win in the Nov. 3 election.
The three-term attorney general was re-elected twice while securities-fraud charges against him were pending. In 2020, eight of his deputies reported him to law enforcement, accusing him of using the attorney general’s office to help a top donor and spurring a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe. The accusations led members of his own party to impeach Paxton in 2023 on abuse-of-office charges, which he denied. He was acquitted by the state Senate and returned to office.
Last year, his wife of 38 years filed for divorce, citing adultery, after public reports of two affairs, including with Duhon.
In a statement, Paxton senior adviser Nick Maddux didn’t directly address the Dubai trip.
“Like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas,” Maddux said.
The two fugitives at the Dubai event had been both indicted in federal court in Illinois in 2024 on charges that they embezzled $15 million from a Chicago hospital where Ahmed was chief financial officer. A businessman with interests in Texas, Ahmed was later charged in a much larger scheme involving at least $195 million in alleged payments from the government for fraudulent Covid-19 tests, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Both men are now back in the U.S. to face the charges. Ahmed is in custody, and his attorneys have said in court filings that he was abroad at the time of the first indictment and his return to the U.S. was delayed by family health issues. Suhail’s attorney, Adam Sheppard, said civil matters in Dubai affected Suhail’s ability to travel after the indictment and he returned voluntarily when they were resolved.
The video of the event, taken by another guest at the party, was cited in a filing in a Texas civil court case in which that guest is a defendant.
None of Paxton’s political baggage has sunk him so far. Prosecutors who have taken aim at him said they have learned that people who doubt Paxton do so at their peril.
“It’s just amazing to me that he’s never been held accountable,” said Kent Schaffer, a special prosecutor who filed charges against Paxton in 2015.
Early investigations
An Air Force brat born in North Dakota, Paxton first moved to Texas in 1981 to attend Baylor University and later worked at a Dallas law firm.
Paxton’s involvement in politics first came via a North Texas community of Christians pushing religious issues. He served on the boards of an antiabortion crisis pregnancy center and an organization aiming to make the Bible easier to study. When Kelly Shackleford, a friend who now heads the First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative legal organization, suggested that redistricting could make 2002 a good year to consider running for office, Paxton responded “What’s redistricting?” Shackleford recalled.
Still, he ran and won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. Shackleford recalled that, when Paxton received political threats from fellow Republicans for taking an unpopular position on a tax bill early in his career, he remained unflappable and asked friends to pray for him.
“The thing that makes him not necessarily a very charismatic campaign person is what makes him steady in office,” Shackleford said.
But by the time Paxton had ascended through the state House and Senate to become attorney general in 2015, he was beginning to weather a series of controversies. Another lawyer accused him of stealing a $1,000 Montblanc pen at a courthouse. (Paxton later returned it and called it a misunderstanding.) He was facing simultaneous state and federal securities-fraud investigations. An effort to pay his legal bills resulted in a bribery investigation when he accepted $100,000 from a former client under investigation by his office. (The case was closed with no finding of wrongdoing.) Paxton denied wrongdoing in all the cases.
Civil charges filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging securities fraud were dismissed in 2017. And in 2024, he resolved state felony-securities fraud charges with a deal that involved paying $300,000 in restitution.
Luxury life and controversial associates
Before he first ran for public office in 2002, Paxton’s only assets were a handful of stocks and a house with a mortgage, with a combined value of less than $175,000, according to a state disclosure. By 2018, he told a lender he had amassed a net worth of some $5.5 million, not including millions of dollars in assets he and his wife had moved into a blind trust. They now own at least a dozen residential properties.
Nothing has brought Paxton closer to political ruin than his relationship with Austin real-estate developer Nate Paul, a friend and campaign donor. Paxton’s former aides accused him of abusing the attorney general’s office to interfere with an FBI investigation into Paul, sparking a federal probe into Paxton, the 2023 impeachment trial and a whistleblower lawsuit that the former employees won. Paxton denied their claims.
At one point, Paxton requested a meeting with Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C., to raise objections to the FBI agent investigating Paul, which wasn’t within those officials’ jurisdiction, according to people with knowledge of the situation. As a result, at least two top officials later had to recuse themselves when their office took charge of the separate investigation into Paxton, the people said.
The Justice Department ultimately dropped its probe into Paxton. In attack ads, Talarico has highlighted the abuse-of-office claims and the $6.6 million awarded to the whistleblowers who alleged they were fired for reporting Paxton’s actions to law enforcement.
Talarico has also criticized what he calls Paxton’s “jet-setting lifestyle.” From 2022 through 2025, state-funded security accompanied Paxton on 19 foreign trips to countries including Greece, Italy, South Africa and Mexico, according to records, more than either the governor or lieutenant governor during that time. The records aren’t comprehensive and don’t include the Dubai trip.
Paxton met Duhon, a Christian influencer who became his girlfriend, at the Kentucky Derby in 2024, people with knowledge of the relationship said. She divorced her husband the following year, and Paxton’s divorce is pending. Tabloid photos captured the pair as they traveled through Europe over this past summer, while Talarico’s campaign ramped up.
Paxton is hoping an influx of Republican money can head off Talarico. He has held a series of fundraisers around Washington in recent weeks, say people who attended, but has struggled to attract the high-profile crowds.
Earlier this month, a PAC funded by Senate Republicans released an ad featuring Paxton’s wife, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton. In the ad, she tells people to look past individual candidates and support the entire GOP ticket. She never mentions Paxton by name.
“It’s not as much about the individual players on the team, it’s about getting the whole team across the finish line,” she said.
Musk poured more than $11.6 million in total tracked contributions and independent expenditures into the Paxton campaign.
Trump plowed ahead and endorsed the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general, helping him win the Republican-primary runoff in May. Months later, that decision is looking like Trump’s biggest gamble of the midterms.
Despite efforts by Paxton to paint his opponent as a far-left zealot, Talarico consistently holds a narrow lead in polls, raising a once unthinkable possibility: A Democrat could win statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994.
Meanwhile, damaging revelations about Paxton continue to emerge. A new scene that could join the list: a previously unreported New Year’s Eve 2024 celebration where Paxton partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.
As fireworks exploded over the Burj Khalifa skyscraper to welcome 2025, Paxton and his girlfriend Tracy Duhon watched from a luxury high-rise balcony full of people, according to a video of the gathering viewed by The Wall Street Journal, details of which were contained in court filings and confirmed by people familiar with the matter.
Among those at the event with Texas’ top law-enforcement official were two Americans who had been indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges but failed to return to the U.S., Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, according to the court records and people familiar with the matter. Ahmed, a healthcare executive, had donated $190,000 to Paxton, campaign-finance records show, including $25,000 days after he was indicted.
Talarico has hammered Paxton over his jet-setting travels, accumulation of wealth in office, and his business associations.
Paxton, 63 years old, has long been a survivor of controversy, and Trump’s allies maintain the MAGA faithful will power him to a win in the Nov. 3 election.
The three-term attorney general was re-elected twice while securities-fraud charges against him were pending. In 2020, eight of his deputies reported him to law enforcement, accusing him of using the attorney general’s office to help a top donor and spurring a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe. The accusations led members of his own party to impeach Paxton in 2023 on abuse-of-office charges, which he denied. He was acquitted by the state Senate and returned to office.
Last year, his wife of 38 years filed for divorce, citing adultery, after public reports of two affairs, including with Duhon.
In a statement, Paxton senior adviser Nick Maddux didn’t directly address the Dubai trip.
“Like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas,” Maddux said.
The two fugitives at the Dubai event had been both indicted in federal court in Illinois in 2024 on charges that they embezzled $15 million from a Chicago hospital where Ahmed was chief financial officer. A businessman with interests in Texas, Ahmed was later charged in a much larger scheme involving at least $195 million in alleged payments from the government for fraudulent Covid-19 tests, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Both men are now back in the U.S. to face the charges. Ahmed is in custody, and his attorneys have said in court filings that he was abroad at the time of the first indictment and his return to the U.S. was delayed by family health issues. Suhail’s attorney, Adam Sheppard, said civil matters in Dubai affected Suhail’s ability to travel after the indictment and he returned voluntarily when they were resolved.
The video of the event, taken by another guest at the party, was cited in a filing in a Texas civil court case in which that guest is a defendant.
None of Paxton’s political baggage has sunk him so far. Prosecutors who have taken aim at him said they have learned that people who doubt Paxton do so at their peril.
“It’s just amazing to me that he’s never been held accountable,” said Kent Schaffer, a special prosecutor who filed charges against Paxton in 2015.
Early investigations
An Air Force brat born in North Dakota, Paxton first moved to Texas in 1981 to attend Baylor University and later worked at a Dallas law firm.
Paxton’s involvement in politics first came via a North Texas community of Christians pushing religious issues. He served on the boards of an antiabortion crisis pregnancy center and an organization aiming to make the Bible easier to study. When Kelly Shackleford, a friend who now heads the First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative legal organization, suggested that redistricting could make 2002 a good year to consider running for office, Paxton responded “What’s redistricting?” Shackleford recalled.
Still, he ran and won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. Shackleford recalled that, when Paxton received political threats from fellow Republicans for taking an unpopular position on a tax bill early in his career, he remained unflappable and asked friends to pray for him.
“The thing that makes him not necessarily a very charismatic campaign person is what makes him steady in office,” Shackleford said.
But by the time Paxton had ascended through the state House and Senate to become attorney general in 2015, he was beginning to weather a series of controversies. Another lawyer accused him of stealing a $1,000 Montblanc pen at a courthouse. (Paxton later returned it and called it a misunderstanding.) He was facing simultaneous state and federal securities-fraud investigations. An effort to pay his legal bills resulted in a bribery investigation when he accepted $100,000 from a former client under investigation by his office. (The case was closed with no finding of wrongdoing.) Paxton denied wrongdoing in all the cases.
Civil charges filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging securities fraud were dismissed in 2017. And in 2024, he resolved state felony-securities fraud charges with a deal that involved paying $300,000 in restitution.
Luxury life and controversial associates
Before he first ran for public office in 2002, Paxton’s only assets were a handful of stocks and a house with a mortgage, with a combined value of less than $175,000, according to a state disclosure. By 2018, he told a lender he had amassed a net worth of some $5.5 million, not including millions of dollars in assets he and his wife had moved into a blind trust. They now own at least a dozen residential properties.
Nothing has brought Paxton closer to political ruin than his relationship with Austin real-estate developer Nate Paul, a friend and campaign donor. Paxton’s former aides accused him of abusing the attorney general’s office to interfere with an FBI investigation into Paul, sparking a federal probe into Paxton, the 2023 impeachment trial and a whistleblower lawsuit that the former employees won. Paxton denied their claims.
At one point, Paxton requested a meeting with Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C., to raise objections to the FBI agent investigating Paul, which wasn’t within those officials’ jurisdiction, according to people with knowledge of the situation. As a result, at least two top officials later had to recuse themselves when their office took charge of the separate investigation into Paxton, the people said.
The Justice Department ultimately dropped its probe into Paxton. In attack ads, Talarico has highlighted the abuse-of-office claims and the $6.6 million awarded to the whistleblowers who alleged they were fired for reporting Paxton’s actions to law enforcement.
Talarico has also criticized what he calls Paxton’s “jet-setting lifestyle.” From 2022 through 2025, state-funded security accompanied Paxton on 19 foreign trips to countries including Greece, Italy, South Africa and Mexico, according to records, more than either the governor or lieutenant governor during that time. The records aren’t comprehensive and don’t include the Dubai trip.
Paxton met Duhon, a Christian influencer who became his girlfriend, at the Kentucky Derby in 2024, people with knowledge of the relationship said. She divorced her husband the following year, and Paxton’s divorce is pending. Tabloid photos captured the pair as they traveled through Europe over this past summer, while Talarico’s campaign ramped up.
Paxton is hoping an influx of Republican money can head off Talarico. He has held a series of fundraisers around Washington in recent weeks, say people who attended, but has struggled to attract the high-profile crowds.
Earlier this month, a PAC funded by Senate Republicans released an ad featuring Paxton’s wife, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton. In the ad, she tells people to look past individual candidates and support the entire GOP ticket. She never mentions Paxton by name.
“It’s not as much about the individual players on the team, it’s about getting the whole team across the finish line,” she said.
Musk poured more than $11.6 million in total tracked contributions and independent expenditures into the Paxton campaign.
