Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton concocted a securities fraud case as part of a sweeping crusade to target the state’s growing Muslim community.
A nine-page memorandum reviewed by Texas Monthly outlined all of the ways that the state government could thwart the construction of the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC City, a large housing development and mosque outside of Dallas.
The memo warned that “foreign adversarial interests” might be seeking to “abuse” and “exploit Texas, and “undermine our communities from the inside,” Texas Monthly reported Monday. The memo had no letterhead, signature, or date but was disseminated to different agency heads by members of Abbott’s office and his advisers. Sure enough, the memo’s language has since reappeared in press releases announcing official inquiries from a range of state agencies, including the Texas Funeral Service Commission, Texas Workforce Commission, and the Texas Rangers, among others.
Travis Iles, then-commissioner of the Texas State Securities Board, had a meeting in March 2025 with Daniel Mittnacht, a political adviser; Trevor Ezell, Abbott’s general counsel; and Caleb Gunnels, an assistant general counsel. The group went over the memo, and after the meeting, Iles assembled a team of six career regulators and attorneys to investigate whether EPIC City’s investors were being told enough about the project, Texas Monthly reported.
Iles’s investigation found that EPIC City’s fundraising didn’t seem to have anything to do with securities at all. Investors in EPIC City had purchased units that would guarantee them the opportunity to purchase property lots at a discounted price—not securities that would passively derive profits.
That’s when Paxton got involved. In October 2025, Paxton’s office issued a press release alleging that EPIC City’s developer had “flagrantly and undeniably” broken securities laws—without ever discussing the matter with agency officials. Iles quickly realized that Paxton’s office was expecting him to provide the pretext for a securities-fraud case.
Iles was pressured by Mittnacht, Ezell, and Gunnels to refer the case to Paxton’s office. Eventually, he did, but he declined to say that EPIC City’s developers were selling securities, and he made clear that he had not reviewed the attorney general’s supposed evidence. Iles even suggested that Paxton’s office should sue under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, rather than pursue securities-fraud charges.
Paxton was undeterred. He announced a securities-fraud lawsuit against EPIC City’s developers on December 5, 2025. Fox News reported that Iles had claimed the developer “sold securities without meeting registration or exemption requirements,” and had referred the case to the attorney general “after identifying ‘flagrant’ violations.”
“Horseshit,” Iles wrote in the subject line of an email the next day. In the body of the email, he included a link to the Fox News article and his assessment of the case: “Corrupt.”
In a press release on December 8, 2025, Iles said that the assertion the EPIC City’s developers were selling securities was “a wholly false statement” that had been wrongly attributed to him by Fox News. Shortly after, he was asked to resign. He quietly stepped down as commissioner and left the agency in April 2026.