{"id":232557,"date":"2026-04-02T23:16:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T23:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/232557\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T23:16:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T23:16:11","slug":"texas-attorney-general-under-scrutiny-over-hotel-room-payments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/232557\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas attorney general under scrutiny over hotel room payments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Attorney General Ken Paxton<\/a>\u2019s office is under scrutiny after agency employees reallocated taxpayer-funded hotel rooms to donors and other private citizens, some of whom failed to cover the cost of the stay until the state comptroller began auditing the agency\u2019s finances earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Two senior officials involved in the incident resigned soon after it was brought to agency leadership\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

Paxton, who is in a contentious runoff for the GOP Senate nomination against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn<\/a>, was impeached in 2023 over allegations that involved improper relationships with a donor.<\/p>\n

The more recent investigation centers on hotel rooms the agency booked for employees attending last year\u2019s inauguration of President Donald Trump and Supreme Court arguments over a new state law, defended by Paxton\u2019s office, that requires adult websites to verify users\u2019 ages. <\/p>\n

The agency paid more than $20,000 for a nonrefundable block of 10 hotel rooms at the Courtyard Marriott. Then, a winter storm prevented several of the travelers from getting to Washington. <\/p>\n

The agency would have been on the hook for approximately $16,000 of unused hotel rooms, documents obtained through an open records request show. Instead, agency employees identified private citizens who wanted the rooms and agreed to pay out of pocket for them. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe intent was to relieve the OAG of its financial obligation for the unused rooms,\u201d deputy first assistant attorney general Ralph Molina said in an investigative report conducted by the agency. <\/p>\n

The people who agreed to take the rooms included major Paxton donors Terry and Jennifer Lacore, controversial Albanian businessman Bashkim Ulaj and chair of the Albanian Republican Party Fatmir Mediu. Keith Craft, lead pastor at Elevate Life Church in Frisco, later took one of the rooms as well. The list was first reported by Texas Bullpen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

State Sen. Angela Paxton<\/a>, a Republican from McKinney who filed for divorce from Ken Paxton six months later, also took one of the rooms at her own expense. Sen. Paxton authored the bill that was argued, and ultimately upheld, at the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

The state employees did not go through the proper process to transfer these rooms, according to the agency\u2019s internal report. And when two of the private citizens who were supposed to take over the rooms did not end up using them, they were ultimately billed to the OAG \u2014 with the names of the two private citizens, one of whom previously donated to Paxton, attached to the charge. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe employees responsible for effectuating this apparently did not inform their superiors about this billing problem,\u201d Molina wrote. \u201cInstead, they requested the private individuals pay the hotel for their rooms after the fact, despite their ultimate absence from the hotel, which would in turn allow the hotel to issue an offsetting refund to the OAG.\u201d<\/p>\n

These private citizen bookings saved the agency $7,296, although it still paid $8,339 for the unused, nonrefundable rooms. <\/p>\n

In June, officials from the state comptroller\u2019s office notified the attorney general\u2019s office they were opening a \u201croutine post-payment audit\u201d to review payroll, purchasing and travel expenditures. A few weeks later, Craft and another guest paid the hotel for the cost of the room; the hotel then reimbursed Paxton\u2019s office. <\/p>\n

That audit was paused after Comptroller Glenn Hegar left office and was replaced by acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock. <\/p>\n

In October, two of Paxton\u2019s senior aides, chief financial officer Michele Price and chief of staff Lesley French, began emailing about the travel discrepancies. The conversation, and the emails, subsided, until days after the March 3 primary election \u2014 when Hancock reopened the audit. <\/p>\n

Soon after, French alerted fellow senior officials of what Molina described as \u201cerrors and mistakes\u201d in hotel bookings that \u201ccould potentially be misconstrued in an audit.\u201d <\/p>\n

The next day, she resigned. A few days later, Price resigned as well. <\/p>\n

Neither said anything in their resignation letters about the investigation or the audit. French said she had accepted another position. Price did not provide a reason for her resignation. <\/p>\n

The Office of the Attorney General did not respond to a request for comment about the investigation and the departures of French and Price. <\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5182,27,2794,29,28],"class_list":["post-232557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-attorney-generals-office","tag-texas","tag-texas-comptroller-of-public-accounts","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}