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Sarah Sanders at Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea in Austin, where, she says, a meeting with the governor\u2019s top lawyer left her unsettled about the EPIC case.Photograph by Tamir Kalifa<\/p>\nSarah Sanders had spent the day in her small, windowless office drafting letters to funeral directors when her boss came in with a new request.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was a late Monday afternoon in March 2025, and Scott Bingaman, the executive director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, wanted her to put aside her other work and look into a year-old case. It concerned the East Plano Islamic Center, a mosque and Muslim community in North Texas known as EPIC. The soft-spoken 33-year-old Texas Tech University law school graduate had joined the commission, which regulates the funeral industry, only a few months earlier, after bouncing around law firms in Beaumont and briefly serving in another state agency. Most of her time in her new role in Austin had been dedicated to clearing a four-hundred-case backlog of complaints stretching back years. She figured the EPIC case would be just like the rest.<\/p>\n
Sanders opened the agency\u2019s file. A complainant alleged that the mosque was offering Islamic funeral services without a license. Other staffers had left several pages of analysis, in mismatched fonts and text sizes, summarizing evidence the commission had gathered. The file had been shelved for months, sidelined by other, more pressing ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sanders took a few minutes to review one piece of the complainant\u2019s evidence, a video that had appeared on EPIC\u2019s YouTube page announcing a \u201cone-stop shop\u201d for funeral services. Families would call the mosque, and a funeral home it had contracted would transport the bodies to and from it for rites and burial\u2014all for \u201caround three thousand dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a religious institution, EPIC was allowed under state law to perform funerals without regulatory oversight as long as it didn\u2019t charge fees. But if it had done so, it would have needed a license, and its license had lapsed more than a year earlier. To Sanders, the video\u2014which was posted before the lapse\u2014did not provide definitive evidence that the mosque had been charging for services improperly. But that was the point of an investigation, she thought. She prepared to issue a cease and desist order: The facility would have to halt funeral services while investigators did their work. (EPIC would later argue that any money that changed hands was a voluntary donation and that it did not profit. The commission\u2019s lawyers would counter that the definition of compensation was broader than profits.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sarah Sanders at Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea in Austin, where, she says, a meeting with the governor\u2019s top lawyer left her unsettled about the EPIC case.Photograph by Tamir Kalifa<\/p>\n
Sanders then turned to Bingaman\u2019s second instruction, one that was far more unusual: Work on the case with Governor Greg Abbott\u2019s general-
counsel division, a small group of lawyers in his inner circle. Sanders wasn\u2019t sure why Abbott\u2019s team was so interested in a routine regulatory matter; she had never discussed one with anyone from the governor\u2019s office. But she trusted and admired Bingaman, who had wooed her to the agency with a pitch about building something together that would outlast them both. She forwarded the file to one of the governor\u2019s lawyers.<\/p>\n
The next morning, Trevor Ezell<\/a>, the attorney leading Abbott\u2019s general-counsel office, got on the phone with her. Sanders remembers Ezell, who had clerked twice for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, emphasizing, over and over, how important the case against EPIC was to the governor. She didn\u2019t ask why. She assumed he had explained it all to Bingaman.<\/p>\n In the evening, Sanders put together the usual enforcement documents, including a cease and desist order. At Bingaman\u2019s request, she sent the draft to the governor\u2019s office.\u00a0Late that night, she and Bingaman got an email from Ezell. \u201cScott\/Sarah, please see attached a suggestion,\u201d he wrote. \u201cHappy to discuss.\u201d Attached was the draft of the order. She took note of the tracked changes to the document. (The Word file\u2019s metadata indicates that Anthony Rodregous, another Abbott attorney, made the edits.) A boilerplate line, warning that if the mosque didn\u2019t comply, the commission would \u201ctake legal action,\u201d had been struck. In its place, the document now said the commission was \u201cmaking a criminal referral\u201d to the Collin County district attorney.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sanders felt uneasy. During her short tenure at the commission, similar cases had been handled by the agency\u2019s investigators, who worked to quickly bring potential offenders into compliance. Criminal referrals were usually issued only if the agency had completed an investigation and had findings that law enforcement could act upon, or if there was a serious threat to public safety, as in cases in which offenders were mutilating bodies or human remains were rotting in facilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n But she\u2019d recently been begging for a new legal assistant, or another attorney, and Bingaman had framed the governor\u2019s general counsel\u2019s office as a resource she should use. And it was late\u2014after midnight\u2014and Ezell and three other lawyers were waiting for her response. So Sanders accepted the changes. \u201cTrevor,\u201d she wrote back, \u201cI greatly appreciate this. Wonderful edits.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It would be months before she fully understood it, but Sanders\u2019s reply helped set in motion what would become a yearlong campaign by the governor\u2019s office against EPIC. That spring the funeral commission would handle many high-profile cases. The agency was investigating<\/a> a University of North Texas program that had dissected more than eight hundred bodies and leased them to biotech companies and the U.S. Army, often without the consent of the deceased or their families; a Houston embalmer<\/a> who allegedly cut off a dead sex offender\u2019s genitals; and a Dallas funeral home that had reportedly<\/a> accidentally shipped a stillborn baby to a Louisiana laundry facility. Abbott\u2019s team would take an active role in none of those matters but weighed in often on the EPIC probe\u2014requesting regular updates, coordinating public statements, and, at times, directing regulatory action.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Within twelve hours of Sanders\u2019s accepting the edits, Abbott tweeted<\/a> a press release announcing the funeral commission\u2019s investigation of EPIC. Over the next seven days, he announced a host of other civil and criminal investigations into the community, including from the Texas State Securities Board<\/a>, the Texas Workforce Commission<\/a>, and even the Texas Rangers<\/a>.<\/p>\n When asked about the role of the governor\u2019s advisers in steering the funeral commission\u2019s investigation into EPIC, Abbott\u2019s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, sent Texas Monthly a statement saying that \u201centities seeking to impose Sharia law in our communities are not welcome in Texas.\u201d Under Abbott\u2019s \u201cdecisive leadership,\u201d he continued, \u201cefforts to create Muslim-only \u2018no-go zones\u2019 have been stopped in their tracks.\u201d Mahaleris also defended the governor\u2019s authority to direct state agencies and called the coordination \u201cnecessary and common.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But interviews with multiple former funeral commission employees and Texas Monthly\u2019s review of thousands of emails, texts, and documents tell a different story about the commission\u2019s case against EPIC. It is the story of Abbott advisers\u2019 use of a state agency as a weapon against a religious minority\u2014placing a mosque and its congregants in the crosshairs of a GOP-led effort to combat what some Republican politicians have labeled the \u201cIslamification\u201d of Texas. It is the story of how the governor\u2019s office continued its attacks against EPIC even as the underlying allegations against it collapsed.\u00a0<\/p>\n When a handful of Muslim families in east Plano began holding informal prayers in private garages<\/a> in 2003 to avoid the long drive to the nearest mosque, they didn\u2019t foresee how large their community would become. By the next year, organizers, who had formed a nonprofit named the East Plano Islamic Center, realized they had enough practitioners to start a formal place of worship. They moved services to a small trailer, then rented a larger space at a local strip mall. By 2008, tens of thousands of Muslims had settled in the area, drawn to the Dallas suburbs by good schools and affordable housing, and EPIC built its first mosque. In 2014 around one thousand worshippers were attending prayer services, and leaders broke ground<\/a> on a permanent place of worship and community center on land they had purchased ten minutes from the Plano municipal center.\u00a0<\/p>\n For most of its existence, EPIC went largely unremarked upon by the powerful state GOP. But in February 2024 the Islamic center announced<\/a> its largest project yet: a 402-acre development called EPIC City that would include one thousand homes, a school, and retail stores. By April of that year, EPIC shared mock-ups and renderings in a YouTube video: \u201cIt\u2019s a way of life, a meticulously designed community that brings Islam to the forefront,\u201d a voiceover declared.\u00a0<\/p>\n When the right wing caught wind of the project, the backlash was swift. In February 2025 anti-Muslim activist Amy Mekelburg, the Nevada-based founder of an anti-Muslim website, posted about EPIC\u2019s plans on X, calling<\/a> the development an \u201cIslamic stronghold.\u201d Other Republicans soon piled on, calling it a \u201ccompound\u201d and a \u201cradical enclave<\/a>.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n The outrage caught the attention of the governor. \u201cTo be clear, Sharia law is not allowed in Texas,\u201d Abbott responded<\/a> to one of Mekelburg\u2019s posts. \u201cNor are Sharia cities.\u201d A firestorm\u2014leading to at least eight pieces <\/a>of federal legislation and a congressional \u201cSharia Free America Caucus\u201d\u2014had been set off.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the year since the governor got involved, Republican candidates up and down the ballot have campaigned on opposition to sharia<\/a>\u2014Islamic moral prescriptions partly based on the Quran. Vinny Minchillo, a Republican strategist who runs a Plano-based advertising firm, told me that several legislative races he\u2019d consulted on in the March GOP primary became referendums on which candidate more strongly opposed the \u201cIslamification of Texas.\u201d As the furor over immigration receded earlier this year, the party came to believe this could be a winning issue. \u201cNot to put too fine a point on it,\u201d Minchillo continued, \u201cbut it\u2019s a very straight line from \u2018Gee, the Muslims who are in my town\u2019 to \u2018Well, those Muslims over in the Middle East that are causing trouble and being terrorists.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the planned development declined to answer questions, and the president of EPIC, Sameer Siddiqui, and other members of the board did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. Of the more than a dozen community members contacted\u2014congregants, former and current officials\u2014no one would agree to a chat. But according to one of EPIC\u2019s lawyers, Dan Cogdell, what\u2019s happened to the mosque has been \u201cfrightening.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Cogdell has represented some of the most controversial defendants in Texas history\u2014including Attorney General Ken Paxton during his impeachment<\/a> and Clive Doyle<\/a>, a survivor of the FBI\u2019s deadly 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian sect\u2019s compound near Waco. But the target on EPIC and its affiliates, he told me, was worse than anything he\u2019d ever seen. His firm has received \u201ccertified hate mail,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, I\u2019ve represented people on death row and never received this much hostility.\u201d<\/p>\n At first the invective aimed at EPIC was little more than online vitriol. Then in March 2025 came the state\u2019s investigations and Sanders\u2019s cease and desist letter. Suddenly there was force of law behind the attacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Muslim faith holds that the deceased should be buried as soon as possible, and prohibitions against embalming and cremation make prompt interment a practical concern as well. That\u2019s why mosques encourage burials within 24 hours, accompanied by only modest rites for the bodies\u2014cleansing, shrouding, prayer. For years, EPIC had offered those essential services to its congregants. When the Islamic center received the cease and desist order, however, its funerals came to a stop. As Muslims died in east Plano, grieving families were barred from performing some of their most sacred rites in their home mosque.<\/p>\n When former Confederates rewrote the Texas constitution in the 1870s, they sought to roll back<\/a> the centralized government brought about by Reconstruction. Governors in Texas have had quite limited powers ever since. Lawmakers, not the top executive, create new state agencies. Much of the bureaucracy, including the funeral commission, is run by boards whose members serve staggered six-year terms. Though those members are appointed by the governor, they serve for longer than a governor\u2019s four-year term, which theoretically insulates them from undue influence.<\/p>\n Months before Sanders drafted the cease and desist order against EPIC, however, Abbott\u2019s team had begun a push to concentrate executive power. Ahead of the convening of the Eighty-Ninth Legislature<\/a>, the governor\u2019s chief of staff, Robert Black<\/a>, a heavyset man with neatly parted brown hair, had summoned the executives leading Texas\u2019s regulatory agencies for an in-person meeting with no announced agenda.\u00a0<\/p>\n On January 8, 2025, Scott Bingaman walked into the governor\u2019s press conference room in the Capitol for that meeting, eager to build a relationship with Abbott\u2019s team. Four months into his job as the funeral commission\u2019s director, Bingaman still had a lot of cleaning up to do. The agency had burned through five executives and interims in five years, and a scathing March 2023 report from the state auditor had found that unauthorized users had access to sensitive records, among other serious deficiencies. Bingaman, who had served as a mechanic in the Coast Guard and spent fifteen years in various positions across state government, including as a director in Governor Rick Perry\u2019s criminal-justice division, believed he had the discipline to get things in order and the skills to get the commission what it needed from the state: more staff and increased funding.\u00a0<\/p>\n Black (who did not respond to an interview request) delivered two directives, according to Bingaman. First, he ordered state agencies to remove all references to DEI from their websites. Second, he said officials must tell the governor\u2019s office about anything \u201cpolitically sensitive\u201d inside their agencies. Don\u2019t comply, Bingaman recalled the message suggesting, and you\u2019ll lose your job.\u00a0<\/p>\n The directness unsettled Bingaman. He stopped to talk to a few other agency heads after the meeting and asked if this type of briefing was normal. \u201cI got cut off pretty quickly,\u201d he recalled, \u201cand they said, \u2018No, we\u2019ve never done this before; this is a first.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n But Bingaman still believed he could forge a good working relationship with the governor\u2019s office. In the ensuing weeks he periodically sent drafts of press releases to Alex Aragon, the adviser in Abbott\u2019s budget and policy division assigned to work with the funeral commission. He alerted Aragon (who declined an interview request) to cases that might make headlines. He blind copied Aragon when responding to media inquiries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then one weekend in late March 2025, as right-wing activists continued their campaign against the mosque, Bingaman caught wind of the uproar over EPIC. He recalled the commission\u2019s shelved 2024 probe into the mosque and thought it was credibly founded. When Bingaman went to work that Monday, he called Aragon to tell him about the case. Bingaman told me that because this was a regulatory action, he \u201chad a duty to inform\u201d the governor\u2019s office.\u00a0<\/p>\n Aragon\u2019s response, according to Bingaman, was \u201cHoly s\u2014.\u201d The adviser excused himself. When they spoke the next day, Bingaman recalled, Aragon said he had received a text directly from Abbott saying the funeral commission was his new favorite agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n The governor\u2019s machine quickly went to work against EPIC. \u201cThey wanted to coordinate with us,\u201d Bingaman said. \u201cSo I told Alex, \u2018Yeah, we\u2019ll get this taken care of.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n Usually, the governor\u2019s advisers confine their communications to agency heads and top officials. But this time, Bingaman told me, Aragon asked if the governor\u2019s lawyers could work directly with the commission\u2019s lawyer. Bingaman directed Sanders to draft the cease and desist order against EPIC.\u00a0<\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t the only enforcement action the governor\u2019s team seems to have had in mind. Aragon, Bingaman told me, later called with a second request: See if there\u2019s anything about EPIC you can report to the Texas Department of Banking, the state\u2019s financial institution regulator, and its commissioner, Charles Cooper, so it, too, could kick-start a probe. Aragon told Bingaman to blind copy him on the email with the report so that Aragon could print it and share it. Then Aragon called multiple times, according to Bingaman, to check in on behalf of the \u201cpowers above.\u201d<\/p>\n Bingaman wrote a report flagging that EPIC may have been illegally reselling burial spaces. According to a memo from the banking department, the official who oversees cemetery regulations reviewed the allegations and found that none of the six cemeteries Bingaman flagged were owned or operated by EPIC and determined that there was no course for action. Cooper, texts show, shared his department\u2019s findings with the governor\u2019s office.\u00a0<\/p>\n Back in the funeral commission, the day she sent the cease and desist order, Sanders walked into Bingaman\u2019s office to unload. They were friends, she thought\u2014or at least close enough to be honest with each other. She was exhausted from the late-night work and confused about what she was being asked to do. Bingaman explained that the EPIC case had exposed a regulatory loophole that needed closing. He later told me that Abbott had offered an opportunity that he was glad to take, given the agency\u2019s backlog: the chance to push an old case through using \u201cthe leverage in the strong arm of the governor\u2019s office.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n When we spoke in May 2026, Bingaman told me he had been \u201con board\u201d with what the governor was saying about EPIC and was alarmed by the proposed development of EPIC City. He insisted that he never let his opinions influence the commission\u2019s investigation, but he, too, was concerned that the mosque was building an exclusionary compound in North Texas. \u201cWe had this case open before all this nonsense happened,\u201d Bingaman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n After Bingaman addressed Sanders\u2019s confusion, he told her that the funeral commission was going to have to look into other mosques. Sanders pushed back: She believed the commission shouldn\u2019t go out of its way to pursue houses of worship in one religion. Bingaman argued that it was their job to investigate whether facilities with lapsed licenses\u2014in this case, mosques\u2014were breaking the law. \u201cWe wanted to see what other mosques were doing, if they were doing the same thing or not,\u201d Bingaman told me, adding, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just EPIC. We looked up every Islamic center we could find in the state of Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n It was only a matter of hours before Sanders found another reason to be confused by Bingaman\u2019s instructions. Aragon called Bingaman that afternoon, and, according to Bingaman, told him to delete the emails sent between the commission and the governor\u2019s office. Bingaman was okay with the directive because he believed the emails were backed up elsewhere. He instructed Sanders to comply.\u00a0<\/p>\n She hesitated. She had responded to public-records requests in a prior role at the Texas State Board of Pharmacy and believed that destroying emails from the governor\u2019s office would violate records-retention laws.\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, Bill Aleshire, an attorney focused on public transparency and a former Travis County judge, told me that such a directive could violate civil and criminal state law. Texas requires state agencies to certify the amount of time certain communications are maintained before deletion, and the funeral commission in turn requires that administrative correspondence, for one, must be maintained for four years. \u201cTampering with a government record, for example, under certain circumstances is a criminal offense,\u201d Aleshire said. Anyone who had deleted the emails \u201ccould be prosecuted,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n The next morning, the commission got a public information request concerning EPIC. Sanders asked the attorney general\u2019s office to rule on whether the emails needed to be released at all, figuring they might be confidential because of the active investigation. The attorney general\u2019s office would later rule that the funeral commission could withhold the records under attorney-client privilege. Sanders never deleted the emails, though, which got her in trouble. In her official personnel file, obtained via a records request, sits an unsigned draft of a memo\u2014\u201ca formal notification that insubordination will not be tolerated\u201d\u2014listing a series of issues she was to be disciplined for: \u201cScott Bingaman, Executive Director, directed you to delete a particular set of emails at the request of the Governor\u2019s Office,\u201d it begins. In requesting the outside opinion, Sanders had \u201ccaused issue [sic] with the Office of the Governor and placed the agency in a disparaging position.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Bingaman continued searching for other possible offenders. The Monday after the EPIC probe was launched, he came across the Islamic Center of Greater Austin. No one had filed a complaint against it, but Bingaman said he was sure, after researching what it offered for funerals, that it was operating without a license. He told Sanders to write a \u201cnotice of complaint\u201d to the Austin mosque requesting records of its funeral services.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sanders told me she felt queasy about the demand, but that ultimately she had faith in the legal process; if the investigation were handled by the book, the commission would find no wrongdoing, and the Islamic center would be cleared. She wrote the notice. (The funeral commission did not respond to an inquiry about where the probe stands.)<\/p>\n Sanders emailed Bingaman the notice, and he forwarded it to Aragon. Bingaman felt great about the case. The funeral commission was finally doing what he had promised when he took over: cracking down.<\/p>\n Over the next month, Aragon would help the commission think through other ways to ensure that EPIC would not get relicensed, even if it came into compliance after the cease and desist order. On an April call, a recording of which was obtained by Texas Monthly, Aragon told Bingaman that the governor\u2019s general-counsel division was \u201cgoing to look into y\u2019all\u2019s code and see if there\u2019s, like, other ways to not get a license, right.\u201d He added, \u201cThe idea here is you don\u2019t want them operating, period.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d Bingaman responded. \u201cI got it.\u201d<\/p>\n Aragon then raised the possibility that the governor\u2019s lawyers could find a way to use EPIC\u2019s \u201cmoral and ethics code\u201d as a legal basis for permanently denying it a license.\u00a0<\/p>\n Maybe, Aragon added, Sanders could start looking into it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Listen: Scott Bingaman, executive director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, discussed an upcoming meeting with EPIC\u2019s attorneys during an April 14, 2025, phone call with Alex Aragon, one of Greg Abbott\u2019s budget and policy advisers. In this excerpt of the call, which was obtained by Texas Monthly, Bingaman outlines his strategy for that meeting, and Aragon responds that \u201cGC,\u201d or the governor\u2019s general counsel, is going to review the funeral commission\u2019s policies to try to find a way to prevent EPIC from becoming licensed again. \u201cThe idea here is, you don\u2019t want them operating, period,\u201d Aragon tells Bingaman.<\/p>\n They hung up. Bingaman began to have doubts about the direction of the case. He had been hopeful the commission could find a peaceful resolution with EPIC. But the governor\u2019s advisers didn\u2019t seem interested in a peaceful resolution.<\/p>\n Within a few weeks, Aragon would open a direct line with Sanders. In late April he asked if she\u2019d be open to meeting over coffee. He didn\u2019t say what he wanted to discuss. \u201cI talked to my mom and my grandparents and everyone else,\u201d she told me, \u201ctrying to figure out, \u2018Why does this guy want to have coffee with me?\u2019\u200a\u201d Eventually she came to think that Abbott\u2019s team wanted to recruit her. Sanders cleared the meeting with Bingaman, who was slightly annoyed that Aragon was talking to staff behind his back but told her to go nonetheless. Then, just before they met, Aragon called to say that Ezell, the governor\u2019s general counsel, would be joining them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because this would be their first time meeting in person, Sanders restyled her long dark hair in her office, touched up her makeup, and put on a blazer she kept on a coat rack for trials. Then she headed to Sweetwaters, a coffee shop just a few blocks from the Capitol.\u00a0<\/p>\n She arrived early and grabbed a large table by the entrance of the cafe. Aragon, a tall man with neat hair and an easy confidence, showed up right on time. He bought Sanders a small iced mocha; she was too nervous to have caffeine but appreciated the gesture.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ezell walked in a few minutes later. With large, round glasses and buzzed hair, he had a nerdy, disarming look. For a few minutes, the trio\u2019s conversation drifted across different topics\u2014state funding, cases the agency was investigating, and a new attorney the funeral commission was hiring named Christopher Burnett.\u00a0<\/p>\n Halfway through the meeting, the talk turned to EPIC. Sanders had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the case and had stopped attending her Episcopalian church out of shame. Her rationalization of her work had been that from a consumer-protection angle, it was sometimes important to investigate larger religious communities. She recalled telling the lawyers when EPIC came up that she always worried about the safety of little girls.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ezell, she told me, replied that the prophet Muhammad had a child bride and then asked what else Muslims would permit. He kept a slow, calm monotone, she remembered, and they locked eyes. \u201cIt was just so matter-of-fact,\u201d she told me. (Ezell didn\u2019t respond to an interview request. Aragon directed questions to the governor\u2019s press secretary, Mahaleris, who did not answer a list of emailed questions about the Sweetwaters meeting or Ezell\u2019s comments.)<\/p>\n The table fell silent for a few seconds. Sanders was suddenly hyperaware of the customers that surrounded them\u2014how close the tables were, how loudly her group had been talking. She stumbled for a reply. Eventually, she muttered that pedophilia was a concern with all religions, including Christianity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Ezell changed the topic, Sanders said. According to her,\u00a0he told her that she stood out among the bureaucrats the governor\u2019s advisers had worked with on the EPIC case. The job of the governor\u2019s general-counsel division, she remembered him saying, was simple: Abbott decides what he wants done, and the attorneys find a way to do it. Then, she said, Ezell launched into a job offer; the governor was looking for a new attorney\u2014and even if Ezell didn\u2019t like the idea of poaching one from the funeral commission, he was in a hurry.<\/p>\n After, when Sanders told a coworker about her skepticism about taking the job, her colleague was annoyed that she\u2019d even consider passing it up. She wouldn\u2019t really be affecting anything, the coworker told her. (Sanders later told me that wasn\u2019t true. \u201cLawyers are not cogs in the machine!\u201d) She applied the next Monday and was scheduled for an interview that Friday. \u201cAs odd as everything was, all the red flags that were going up, it\u2019s like I didn\u2019t want to believe it,\u201d she later recalled. \u201cI wanted to think that I was just being paranoid because the alternative was just too awful.\u201d<\/p>\n The morning of the interview, she withdrew her application. In an email to the governor\u2019s office explaining her decision, Sanders wrote that she had \u201cprayed on it extensively.\u201d There was more the funeral commission had to accomplish, she added. It would have trouble finding a replacement attorney. She wrote that she \u201cmust put Texas before myself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What Sanders didn\u2019t put in writing was why she really withdrew. She frequently told me about her disagreements with the governor\u2019s policies\u2014the \u201cpeople drowning in the river,\u201d she\u2019d say, referring<\/a> to the migrants who died crossing the Rio Grande because of Texas\u2019s border-enforcement efforts. She was prepared, though, to put those moral qualms aside for the job.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Ezell\u2019s comment at Sweetwaters had unsettled her in a way nothing before had. \u201cI would rather stay somewhere that is stressful and on fire where I know I\u2019m doing the right thing,\u201d she told me, \u201cwhere no one will ask me to do something I don\u2019t believe in.\u201d<\/p>\n Christopher Burnett, the new hire Sanders had discussed with Abbott\u2019s advisers, had just arrived at the funeral commission\u2019s office when he began to sense something was off in the agency. The 65-year-old public servant, who keeps a light stubble and speaks bluntly in legalese, had served in state government for decades, working across nearly a dozen agencies, including Governor Rick Perry\u2019s general-counsel division and the Texas Ethics Commission. As he made the rounds at the funeral commission on his first day, he said, Kristin Tips, the agency\u2019s chairwoman, introduced herself to him with a question: \u201cAre you MAGA?\u201d Burnett responded that he was a three-time Trump voter. This, he said, seemed to satisfy Tips (who didn\u2019t respond to an interview request).\u00a0<\/p>\n Later, Bingaman pulled Burnett into a meeting with Cogdell and another EPIC attorney. The discussion was cordial, and the case seemed straightforward, but Burnett met with Sanders afterward to get a full picture of the probe. As Sanders explained her coordination with the governor\u2019s team, Burnett was taken aback. Under Perry he had done work similar to that of Ezell and Aragon, managing a portfolio of agencies, pushing the governor\u2019s interests. He knew what those jobs normally involved\u2014and did not involve. \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018What the hell is going on here?\u2019\u200a\u201d Burnett remembered thinking, \u201cThis is bizarre! You know, this is not normal\u2014not normal behavior, not regulatory.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n When we talked, Burnett wanted to be clear that he is skeptical about whether Islam \u201cis compatible with Western democracy.\u201d But he was steadfast that it wasn\u2019t the government\u2019s concern. \u201cWhether you like them or not,\u201d Burnett added, \u201cEPIC\u2019s due process rights were violated.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Burnett and Sanders would commiserate about the case often in the weeks to come. He turned his official focus to cases he considered more germane to the commission\u2019s work: an investigation into a Houston mortuary, where families of the deceased had posted videos online of bodies rotting on the floor, and a probe into the Dallas funeral home that had allegedly shipped the remains of the stillborn baby to a laundry facility. \u201cI mean, [the agency] really was a s\u2014 show,\u201d Burnett told me. He added, \u201cDoing any big investigation\u2014you know, snooping around trying to find out, \u2018Oh, did they maybe, kind of, sort of, possibly, do something wrong with these mosques?\u2019\u2014probably was a low priority.\u201d<\/p>\n By the end of his first month, Burnett had come to believe the funeral commission would implode. One evening, as the sun set, he called Sanders. She had just clocked out and was driving home in the Hill Country. \u201cThis is pretty bad,\u201d he told her. \u201cThis is gonna be really bad when this comes out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Burnett didn\u2019t mention EPIC by name. Sanders didn\u2019t have to ask.\u00a0<\/p>\n All the Governor\u2019s Men\u00a0 <\/p>\n Trevor Ezell Alex Aragon Bingaman, too, was coming to believe that the agency would implode, but for different reasons. In April, the commission\u2019s staff had grown concerned that Tips, the chairwoman, was lobbying the Legislature<\/a>\u2014pushing for tort reform in her official capacity as commissioner. When Bingaman reported her to the governor\u2019s office, he said, Aragon told him to rein her in. Bingaman didn\u2019t know how to control his boss, but he met Tips for a one-on-one meeting to discuss the allegations and advised her to avoid going to the Capitol. Tips seemed amenable to the counsel. (Tips has denied the lobbying allegations. She resigned abruptly from the commission in March 2026 without explanation.)<\/p>\n Then, in late May 2025, Bingaman pressed Tips about finalizing a plan they had discussed for months: promoting Burnett to be the agency\u2019s top attorney. Tips accused him of overstepping his authority. In June, when they had another argument about the matter, he got the feeling he was about to be pushed out.<\/p>\n On a Saturday afternoon over text, Bingaman pleaded with Aragon, whom he felt he\u2019d earned respect from, to intervene. Bingaman asked to meet. \u201cI\u2019ve been a stalwart Abbott supporter,\u201d he texted, \u201cand have done everything that Robert Black instructed me to do back in January.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That Monday they got on the phone. Bingaman recalled Aragon assuring him that they\u2019d figure something out. But he never heard from Aragon again, despite ringing him at least three times to follow up.\u00a0<\/p>\n The commissioners, led by Tips, voted to fire Bingaman that Wednesday. They cited poor leadership and communication skills.\u00a0<\/p>\n To this day, Bingaman is outraged that the governor\u2019s team didn\u2019t defend him. He listed to me all that he had done for them: He pursued the EPIC case, he looped in the general-counsel division, and he worked closely with Aragon. In one interview, after an hour of talking, his voice rose: \u201cIs this what happens when you\u2019re loyal?\u201d<\/p>\n Not long after he was sacked, Bingaman sued the funeral commission, Tips, and the other commissioners. His petition alleges that he was fired in retaliation for reporting Tips\u2019s alleged lobbying to the governor\u2019s office. The case is still open, but Bingaman has been unable to find government work since.<\/p>\n The same day he was fired, the governor\u2019s office distributed a press release<\/a>: Abbott had appointed Tips\u2019s husband to the Texas Historical Commission. Two weeks later, campaign-finance records show that the couple had donated<\/a> $5,000 to Abbott\u2019s reelection campaign.<\/p>\n By the summer, the governor\u2019s boasts of twelve investigations into EPIC quickly began collapsing, and he began referring<\/a> to \u201cabout a half dozen\u201d probes. By December, Abbott was flaunting<\/a> \u201cat least 4\u201d active investigations. As of May 2026, not a single criminal charge has been levied against the mosque, and a federal probe into it\u2014launched by the Department of Justice at Senator John Cornyn\u2019s urging<\/a>\u2014was closed with no findings of wrongdoing.\u00a0<\/p>\n In July 2025, EPIC sued the funeral commission, alleging that the state\u2019s order unconstitutionally prohibited religious practices. EPIC\u2019s lawyers argued that the commission\u2019s abrupt shift in enforcement was overreach fueled by political hysteria.\u00a0<\/p>\n The lawsuit, which remains ongoing, triggered the attorney general\u2019s office to take over the commission\u2019s defense in court. Within days Bingaman\u2019s interim replacement sent a letter to EPIC, telling the mosque it could resume funerals; the commission\u2019s policy had apparently allowed religious groups to perform funeral rites, and EPIC could do so provided it didn\u2019t charge.\u00a0<\/p>\n When news broke that EPIC could resume funerals, Sanders said, Aragon called her and patched in Ezell. The general counsel was \u201cpissed,\u201d she told me. Sanders recalled one of the last things she heard from Ezell before Abbott\u2019s advisers hung up: The attorney general\u2019s office had some explaining to do.<\/p>\n Sanders and Burnett both believed they would soon be axed. After Bingaman was ousted, Sanders had even gone to the Travis County district attorney\u2019s public integrity unit with a trove of emails and texts about the EPIC case and Tips\u2019s alleged lobbying in hopes that it might investigate the funeral commission and the governor\u2019s office. Then, the Monday after the call, both attorneys were fired without cause. Sanders took a photo of her termination letter. She sent it to Aragon, but he never replied.\u00a0<\/p>\n A few weeks later, Sanders and Burnett were served with a lawsuit. The commission was alleging that they divulged privileged and confidential information when they spoke to reporters about Bingaman\u2019s firing and the commission\u2019s dysfunction. The suits were dropped a few days later. Then the funeral commission, led by Tips, filed bar grievances against both, trying to strip them of their law licenses. The cases went nowhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n Late last year, Burnett began looking for other work. He felt the governor\u2019s office was exercising too much executive control, but he had devoted his whole life to public service and hoped that he\u2019d just experienced one bad agency. In January 2026, he was hired as the Texas Veterans Commission\u2019s new general counsel. A few weeks after he started, his boss told him to send a proposal for a new rule to the governor\u2019s office for approval. The point of contact, Burnett learned, was Aragon.\u00a0<\/p>\n Burnett reviewed the proposal, signed his name on it, and had a legal assistant email it. Aragon never responded. Then a few days later, Burnett said, his boss told him that they had \u201cdiffering philosophies,\u201d and he was given the choice to resign or be fired.\u00a0<\/p>\n That night, when Burnett wrote his letter of resignation, he didn\u2019t know what his boss had meant exactly. He\u2019s still not sure. In the months since, Burnett hasn\u2019t tried looking for government work. He doesn\u2019t think there\u2019s a place for him anymore.<\/p>\n Sanders also clung to the belief that the government could be a force for good and landed a job working for the Texas Real Estate Commission. At first she kept her head down, but she couldn\u2019t shake her experience at the funeral commission. She spoke with the Houston Chronicle about the agency\u2019s dysfunction. Two days before the Chronicle published its autopsy<\/a>, Sanders resigned to avoid drawing a public spotlight to her new agency.\u00a0She\u2019s not sure when she\u2019ll start looking for work again.<\/p>\n Most days now, Sanders replays the sequence of events with the EPIC probe, considering where she might have made different choices. She thinks back to her college years, when she served in student government, and how idealistic she\u2019d been. She recalls her interview with Bingaman for the job at the funeral commission, when he\u2019d dazzled her with his talk of an agency-wide revival.\u00a0<\/p>\n When we spoke in March, she told me, tearfully, that she had been naive. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize how significant that change was,\u201d she said, referring to the edits she accepted on the cease and desist order. \u201cI should have pushed back. There\u2019s a lot of things in this I wish I had pushed back more on.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n She has repeated that line of regret often in recent months\u2014to friends, to family, and especially to herself. The same shame over the EPIC case that drove her to stop attending church in the spring ultimately pushed her to start attending again in the late summer. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI went in [to the commission] thinking, this is just gonna be so\u2014this is gonna be hard work, but I\u2019m finally gonna get to do something I\u2019ve always dreamed of doing, and it just, it just, it\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d she trailed off. She took a deep breath. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever recover from that heartbreak, of it just turning out to be what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n Since the firings of Sanders, Burnett, and Bingaman, the state\u2019s pursuit of EPIC has persisted. On March 25, exactly one year after the governor\u2019s office edited the cease and desist order, the commission\u2019s interim director issued a broad subpoena to EPIC seeking records of funeral services and how much money had been collected.\u00a0<\/p>\n The agency wanted to know, once again, if the mosque was charging to perform funerals.<\/p>\n This article will appear in the July 2026 issue of\u00a0Texas Monthly\u00a0with the headline \u201cThe\u00a0Death Penalties.\u201d\u00a0Subscribe today<\/a>.<\/p>\n Read Next<\/p>\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-cease-and-desist-fixed.gif\")
The modified cease and desist order for EPIC that Greg Abbott\u2019s general counsel, Trevor Ezell, sent back to the funeral commission, reflecting edits the metadata suggests were made by Anthony Rodregous, a then deputy general counsel.Obtained by Texas Monthly<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-6.jpg\")
The sun sets over the East Plano Islamic Center on May 14, 2026. Photograph by Tamir Kalifa ![\"East](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-5.jpg\")
East Plano Islamic Center congregants praying in April 2025. Ronaldo Schemidt\/AFP via Getty <\/p>\n![\"portrait](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-2.jpg\")
Scott Bingaman, former executive director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, at the Texas State Capitol, where he was invited to an unprecedented meeting with the governor\u2019s chief of staff in January 2025.Photograph by Tamir Kalifa<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-banking-memo.jpg\")
The report Scott Bingaman sent to the Texas Department of Banking, obtained via a public-information request.Obtained via public information request<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-sanders-resignation.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1781038524_376_texas-funeral-commission-sanders-resignation.jpg\")
An unsigned draft memorandum in Sarah Sanders\u2019s personnel file, obtained by Texas Monthly, in which she was reprimanded for not complying with a request from the governor\u2019s office to delete emails. Obtained by Texas Monthly<\/p>\n![\"caption](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-7.jpg\")
The George H.\u2009W. Bush State Office Building, in Austin, which houses the Texas Funeral Service Commission.Photograph by Tamir Kalifa<\/p>\n![\"Christopher](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-4.jpg\")
Christopher Burnett, a funeral commission attorney who was fired in July 2025, says he was taken aback by the governor\u2019s advisers\u2019 involvement in the EPIC case. Photograph by Tamir Kalifa<\/p>\n
General counsel
Served as an assistant attorney general
under Ken Paxton before being hired by the governor in 2023.<\/p>\n
Budget and policy adviser
Worked for Marco Rubio and the casino lobby before joining the governor\u2019s office in 2021. <\/p>\n![\"Texas](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-3.jpg\")
The Texas Funeral Service Commission has been mired in scandal and was the subject of a scathing 2023 state auditor\u2019s report.Photograph by Tamir Kalifa<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/texas-funeral-commission-burnett-resignation-1.jpg\")
Christopher Burnett\u2019s letter of resignation from the Texas Veterans Commission, obtained via a public-information request.Obtained via public information records request<\/p>\n