Texas Attorney General and Senate candidate Ken Paxton operates best in the shadows. But his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, is working hard to drag his secrets into the light.

According to The Washington Post, Talarico just filed a motion seeking to make public two depositions Paxton sat for in 2019 and 2022 in a roiling mess of a case from his time as a board member and attorney with the energy firm Unity Resources.

Talarico is digging for dirt, sure, but he’s not wrong to raise the point. Texans should know what their GOP Senate candidate said under oath. What does Paxton have to hide?

We’ve known a little bit about this for a few months, as during Paxton’s primary race against Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the Wall Street Journal got a copy of the 2019 deposition. It reported that Paxton likely violated attorney-client privilege when he turned over a former client’s communications to a lawyer who was suing that former client.

Now, that’s a pretty basic no-no for attorneys—violating about eleventy ethical rules—but it isn’t like Paxton cares about ethics.

In response to the Journal’s report, Paxton whined about how it was all “blatant lies” but didn’t offer any evidence to refute that fairly staggering ethical lapse.

The whole thing is exactly the sort of mess that follows Paxton around everywhere: a lawsuit over securities fraud.

In this instance, Paxton’s money manager accused Unity Resources and two investors of defrauding him. Then, the investors denied it and pointed out that Paxton himself was an investor and attorney at Unity, so he was kinda sorta responsible too.

Paxton, as per usual, is trying to respond to Talarico with a sort of advanced “I know you are, but what am I?” kind of thing.

“This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to hide [Talarico’s] own extremism and Texans will see right through it,” said Paxton’s spokesperson Madison Cercy.

Hmm. Let’s say Talarico is extremist as hell, just for the sake of argument. How would that justify keeping Paxton’s precious words under lock and key, sealed away from the very Texans he demands give him their votes?

All that Paxton has to do to take the wind out of Talarico’s sails is to just say that, sure, the depositions can be unsealed because he has nothing to hide.

But Paxton always has something to hide.

From committing voter fraud by secretly voting where he, well, did not live to secretly and tenderly protecting pedophiles, it’s just who he is.

And who could forget when Paxton surreptitiously filched a $1,000 Montblanc pen after another attorney accidentally left it behind in a security bin at a Texas courthouse?

Even former President George W. Bush’s former adviser Karl Rove knows that Paxton is in trouble, recently telling Fox News that he thinks the seat is a toss-up and that President Donald Trump might need to intervene to keep it red.

Has anyone told Rove that Trump’s endorsements aren’t exactly guaranteed winners these days?

Talarico is approaching this race with the same bare-knuckle brawling show that Paxton always puts on. And honestly, I’m here for it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos