The dismissal brings about an end to a long-running legal saga involving Paxton, who also faced an impeachment trial on unrelated allegations in 2023.
DALLAS — The decade-long securities fraud charges against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have officially been dismissed, according to a special prosecutor in the case and one of Paxton’s attorneys.
Prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the charges after a pre-trial diversion program was completed by Paxton, according to special prosecutor Brian Wice. Last year, it was announced that the prosecutors would agree to drop the charges if Paxton completed 100 hours of community service and paid restitution to the victims.
According to a social media post from Paxton’s attorney Dan Cogdell, a judge in Harris County, where the case was moved after initially being filed in Collin County, granted the prosecutors’ motion to officially dismiss the three indictments.
“Over the past 15 months, Mr. Paxton has fulfilled all of the terms and conditions of the pre-trial intervention contract the parties entered into last year. He completed over 100 hours of community service at the not-for-profit in Collin County that the state approved; He completed 30 hours of on-line ethics training through the State Bar of Texas, twice the amount of hours the state required and, most important of all, Mr. Paxton made full and complete restitution to the victims in these matters,” special prosecutor Wice said in a statement. “To be sure, justice was delayed, but to be equally sure, justice was not denied because today’s resolution was the fair, right and just outcome for both sides.”
The dismissal brings an end to a long-running legal saga involving Paxton, who also faced an impeachment trial on unrelated allegations. He was acquitted of all the impeachment articles against him in his high-profile Texas Senate trial in 2023.
Paxton was indicted on the state securities fraud charges in 2015 before he was elected attorney general. He was accused of duping investors in a tech startup called Servergy in Dallas by failing to disclose the company paid him to recruit them, as our sister station KHOU and the Associated Press reported. One of those that Paxton had been accused of defrauding was former state Rep. Byron Cook.
Paxton had also been charged in a federal civil complaint filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over his work with Servergy. But a federal judge in March 2017 dismissed the complaint against Paxton, the outlets reported.
In April, the same month the Associated Press reported that the Department of Justice decided it would not prosecute Paxton in a separate federal corruption investigation, Paxton announced that he’s challenging Sen. John Cornyn for the U.S. Senate seat Cornyn has held since 2002.
This is a developing story. WFAA will update this story as additional information becomes available.