Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton was asked to explain the constant, controversial leaks coming from a September campaign event. He doesn’t think they matter.
“There have been now five audio leaks from a private fundraiser you attended on September 24 published by various media outlets,” Fox News host Alica Acuna asked Sunday. “Are you concerned that they all came from the same, and are you figuring out who did it? But then also, it raises some flags … over your thoughts, publicly and privately, over the president and Washington.”
“Look, I’m not worried about it at all,” Paxton replied. “You can look at my record, you can look [at] what I’ve done over the last 12 years. I’ve supported President [Donald] Trump, I love President Trump. We’ve worked together on many many issues, he’s been at work extremely hard to help me get elected. And I really appreciate him.”
“Just because they were able to clip a few things doesn’t mean that’s actually what I meant. So let’s just go back to the record, not this little game that James Talarico has played the whole time, which is ‘let’s not talk about Ken Paxton’s actual record’…. Let’s muddy the water and try to trick people into believing he’s something that he’s not, which is a real Texan.”
Paxton is framing direct quotes that he said to his own supporters in confidence as a “little game.” The reason he has to justify his relationship to Trump is because he himself was critical of the president.
In previous leaks from the event last month, Paxton called Trump a drag on his campaign and said Trump’s war on Iran was raising prices and making it harder for him to campaign. He also claimed that Washington, D.C. was controlling his campaign from afar, and told people depending on federal benefits programs to “suck it up” and prepare for cuts. All of this makes him sound much more like a Never Trump Republican than the loyalist he claims to be.
Talarico—who was born and raised in Texas—is currently virtually tied with Paxton ahead of the November midterm elections.