Senate candidate Ken Paxton addressed a leaked clip of him criticizing President Donald Trump, saying “just because they were able to clip a few things doesn’t mean that that’s actually what I meant." The New York Times reported at the end of last month that Paxton, the Republican Texas attorney general who is running against Democratic state Representative James Talarico in November, said Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas in September hurt him politically. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good,” he told a group of conservative donors the week before, the Times reported, citing an audio recording.
Asked about the recording on Fox News The Big Weekend Show on Sunday, Paxton said: “I’m not worried about it at all. You can look at my record, you can look what I’ve done over the last 12 years, I have supported President Trump, I love President Trump, we’ve worked together on many, many issues—he’s been at work extremely hard to help me get elected and I really appreciate him. In my lifetime, no one’s ever…done more.
So just because they were able to clip a few things doesn’t mean that that’s actually what I meant. So let’s just go back to the record, not this little game that James Talarico has played the whole time.” Paxton's team had already dismissed the tape. His senior adviser, Nick Maddux, previously called the story “more manipulated nonsense from The New York Times to create a story that doesn’t exist.” “Every serious pollster will tell you that our numbers have improved since early September,” Maddux told The Texas Tribune.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Cannon and Dave Siminoff.
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