Aaron Reitz , Paxton endorsed successor , vows to destroy the left if elected Texas attorney general

sacurrent.com · Feb 16, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Aaron Reitz, nominee to be an Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice, speaking at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 26, 2025. Credit: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect The night before Aaron Reitz was supposed to start his new job at the Texas Attorney General’s Office, he got an ominous call from one of his future colleagues telling him not to show up. Since graduating law school three years before, Reitz had aspired to join the agency, which had made a name for itself waging partisan legal fights against the Obama administration. In fall 2020, he’d finally been hired under Jeff Mateer, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s top deputy, but now, he was suspiciously sidelined. And then the news broke. The day before Reitz was supposed to start his new job, Mateer and other senior officials had reported Paxton to the FBI accusing him of bribery and other abuses of office. Reitz knew Mateer, a prominent religious liberty attorney, and considered his conservative legal credentials to be unimpeachable, his character “beyond reproach,” he said. Paxton, meanwhile, operated under a cloud of indictments, misconduct probes and allegations of infidelity, his tenure marked by high-profile departures and agency scandals — even before these new allegations. Reitz’s mentors advised him to stay out of this latest conflict, even if he had to find a different job. He showed up anyway, climbing through the power vacuum to an insider role helping investigate the whistleblowers’ claims on Paxton’s behalf. After poking around, Reitz said he quickly knew where his loyalties lay. “I remember talking to Paxton, I said, ‘Look, I’m all in here. I’m with you. I think you’ve just been done dirty, dirtier than any politician I can recount, other than Donald Trump,’” Reitz told The Texas Tribune. It was a decision that proved prescient. In the years since, Paxton has shaken off scandal after scandal. He won reelection; survived impeachment, indictment and a federal investigation into Mateer’s allegations; and even facing allegations he cheated on his wife, a popular state senator, is gunning to unseat longtime GOP Sen. John Cornyn. Reitz’s loyalty, offered at the lowest moment of Paxton’s tenure, has been rewarded handsomely. He rose to lead Paxton’s most high-profile litigation, trying to overturn the 2020 election and undermine the Biden administration. He was appointed to the Department of Justice under Trump, and now, with Paxton’s endorsement, is seeking to become Texas’ next top lawyer. Reitz believes the nation is at war, a mentality forged as much in those early days at the attorney general’s office as on the battlefields in Afghanistan. The threat is leftists; their allies, moderate Republicans; the battlefield is the courtroom; and the only entity strong enough to hold off these forces of evil is a fully empowered Texas Office of the Attorney General. “Our movement … requires, more than anything, bold, unafraid leadership to step out in front, lift high the banner and charge into battle,” Reitz said. “This is the largest red-state law firm in the country. Texas needs a strong AG. The president needs a strong AG.” Despite Paxton’s endorsement, Reitz is running far behind U.S. Rep. Chip Roy’s name recognition and state Sen. Mayes Middleton’s millions in self-funded ad buys. Where Reitz is trying to stand out is in his fervor, his intensity, his willingness to push further than even the arch-conservative candidates he is running against. Reitz says he is ready, day one, to wage a “civilizational battle with anti-American forces on the left.” He has fantasized about wearing “OAG emblazoned windbreakers” while raiding any public institution “pushing tranny insanity,” “run out all Kwanzaa-aligned elements poisoning our state” and launch “counter-jihad” against Muslim groups. He recently threatened to revoke House Democratic leader Rep. Gene Wu’s citizenship, and sparked pushback for his comments on the “invasion” of Indians to Texas. In more frank terms than any viable candidate before him, Reitz has promised to use the attorney general’s office to advance the goals of one party — and demolish the other. Sameeha Rizvi, Texas policy and advocacy coordinator for CAIR Action, a Muslim civil rights group, said Reitz’s rhetoric only serves to generate fear. “As a Texan myself, I am tired of the political fanfare. I’m tired of the circus,” she said. “It’s not making things better for anyone, anywhere and it’s only creating more division and disunity.” For Reitz, these criticisms are only more proof that he is fighting the right battle. “The best way to serve everyday Texans, the people of Texas who put their vote and their trust in me, from whose delegated power my office rests,” he said, “is to destroy the left.” Enemies foreign and domestic Candidate for Texas Attorney General Aaron Reitz answers a question from a moderator during a Texas Republican candidate debate forum at the Civic Center in Canton on Saturday, January 17, 2026. Reitz was a freshman at Ronald Reagan High School in San Antonio when the planes flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11, inspiring him to join the Marines. After graduating from Texas A&M, he deployed to Afghanistan where he “stared into the abyss of anti-civilizational Islamist rot,” as he puts it. Reitz returned from that experience “just thanking God that I was born in America,” as he said in 2020. He enrolled in law school at the University of Texas, where he led the UT chapter of the Federalist Society. He was editor-in-chief of the Texas Review of Law & Politics, a right-leaning law journal where he worked with future legal luminaries like now-U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock. “I knew exactly why I was going to law school,” Reitz said in a podcast interview with the conservative outlet Texas Scorecard. “To fulfill the spirit of the oath that I had sworn when I was a Marine to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” He went into private practice after graduation, but was itching to get back into the conservative legal combat arena, applying for fellowships, clerkships and government jobs. When Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Blacklock to the Texas Supreme Court in January 2018, Reitz became his inaugural clerk. In 2020, he ran in a crowded primary for an Austin-based House seat. His largest donor was Middleton, his now-opponent for attorney general. Reitz came in fourth, getting just 15% of the vote, for a seat eventually won by Democratic Rep. Vikki Goodwin. Reitz returned to private practice, job-hopping while zealously networking to get back onto the battlefield. He knew Paxton and Mateer through conservative legal circles, and despite just three years of legal experience and one failed House run, he worked his connections hard to get hired. ‘Our soldiers are lawyers’ Then-Deputy Attorney General of Legal Strategy Aaron Reitz speaks during an Attorney General press conference in the William Clements Building in Austin on June 9, 2022. On Reitz’ first day at office, he was summoned to meet with Brent Webster, the brand new first assistant hired after Mateer abruptly resigned. Reitz assumed he was getting fired. Instead, he was invited into the inner circle. “Paxton likes you and knows that you weren’t involved in any of this stuff. His circle of trust is small right now, but we’ve got to figure out whether what [the former employees are] alleging is true, or false, or what happened,” he recalls Webster saying. Webster did not respond to a request for comment. The senior staffers had accused Paxton of abuse of office, bribery and improper influence, alleging he’d used his office to benefit campaign donor and real estate developer, Nate Paul. Reitz’s investigation led him to conclude it was “a coordinated hit job intended to take out Ken Paxton,” he said. After that, he said, it became “me, Attorney General Paxton and Brent Webster against the world.” Less than two months after he started, Reitz was promoted to deputy attorney general for legal strategy, a high-level role that came with a $70,000 pay raise. He helped make the case to fire the remaining employees who had reported Paxton, who he said in an internal report were underperforming and “holding the agency hostage.” Four of them later sued Paxton for violating the Texas Whistleblower Act; in July, Paxton agreed the state would pay them $6.6 million. Reitz had been fiending to get into the conservative legal fight, and suddenly, he was at the center of it. Just weeks after he was promoted, Reitz was in the Oval Office, talking with Trump about overturning the 2020 election by blocking four states from casting their electoral votes for Joe Biden. The Texas-led lawsuit was a shocking gambit, and a failed one: The U.S. Supreme Court immediately rejected the suit, saying Texas lacked standing to bring the case. But it reflected how the agency would pursue litigation during the Biden administration — fast, furious, without worrying too much about the details. Better to lose than not try. On Biden’s inauguration day, Reitz and crew were busy filing the first of over 100 lawsuits the Texas Attorney General’s Office would bring against the new administration. Reitz likes to say his job was “offensive coordinator” to Paxton’s head coach, trading his typical war metaphors for sports. “My job was to identify targets to go after,” he said recently, dipping back into soldier-speak. “Entities, whether governmental in nature, federal, state or local, or private actors who, in the attorney general’s and my judgment, were conducting themselves in ways that were unconstitutional or illegal or thwarting law and order or justice.” He perfected a “plug and play” model for suing the Biden administration, especially over immigration, which he explained at a Heritage Foundation event in Octob