If you live in Texas, you have seen the ads. The race for the open U.S. Senate seat between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is one of the most expensive in the country, and the loudest voice in it right now is not either campaign. It is a super PAC called Lone Star Liberty PAC, which launched a reported $15 million advertising blitz across 18 Texas markets this month. Every ad ends with a disclaimer naming the PAC. None of them tells you who pays for the PAC.
That answer sits in public records that almost nobody reads. So I read them.
Some context on who “I” is, because it matters for what follows. I am a patent attorney in Dallas. Campaign finance is not my field. I have no client in this, no campaign, no committee, and no budget. What I had was a free download from the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”), an AI assistant (Claude, made by Anthropic), and part of a weekend. The result is a 16-page report, linked at the bottom of this post, that accounts for every itemized dollar the PAC raised through June 30, 2026, and reconciles to the penny against its official totals. This post is the short version, and a reflection on what it means that a private citizen can now do this at all.
The method, briefly
The FEC publishes every itemized contribution to every federal committee. For this PAC, that is 158 receipt records: names, dates, amounts, cities, self-reported employers and occupations. I loaded the export into a working session with Claude and we went through a loop that will be familiar to any lawyer who has supervised a junior associate: the assistant aggregated, classified, charted, and drafted; I directed, questioned, and verified. Every load-bearing fact was checked against a primary or near-primary source: Department of Justice (“DOJ”) releases, court records, Virginia and Texas corporate filings, IRS-adjacent nonprofit databases, and contemporaneous reporting from outlets including the Texas Tribune, Houston Chronicle, and CBS News.
One discipline mattered more than any other: every claim in the report is tiered to its standard of proof. A conviction is an adjudicated fact. An indictment is an allegation. A pending FEC complaint is an accusation nobody has ruled on. An opaque LLC name is a disclosure observation, not wrongdoing. The report never merges these tiers into a single scary number, and it includes a language guide stating what the record supports and what it does not. Every person mentioned is presumed innocent of anything charged or alleged.
What the money looks like
Through June 30, the PAC raised $10.29 million and spent almost all of it. It is a big-check operation in the purest sense: 120 itemized donors, a median gift of $25,000, and a grand total of $836 in small-dollar contributions under $200. The top five donor households supplied 42 percent of all the money. Four-fifths came from Texas, and the map resolves to a handful of names: Houston is largely one medical executive and a group of trial lawyers, Midland is one ranching and oil family, Lubbock is one family plus one unattributed corporation, Corpus Christi is a single law firm.
About $3.1 million, roughly 30 percent of everything raised, carries a legal or disclosure flag under one of four distinct standards:
| Tier | Amount | The verified basis |
|---|---|---|
| Adjudicated (conviction, later pardoned) | $600,000 | The household of a businessman convicted by a federal jury of securities and wire fraud in 2022 and pardoned in March 2025. His wife, who gave $500,000 of the total, has never been charged with anything. |
| Active indictment nexus (donor uncharged) | $1,100,000 | The chief executive of a Fort Worth medical company whose former vice president of sales is under federal indictment in an alleged $1.2 billion Medicare fraud scheme. The charges are pending and unproven. Neither the company nor its CEO has been charged. |
| Pending FEC complaint (unadjudicated) | $1,025,000 | A Virginia nonprofit with no website and undisclosed donors, incorporated days after the candidacy announcement by a man who is also the candidate’s own campaign treasurer. A pending FEC complaint alleges the arrangement is illegal; the PAC says it follows all laws, and the FEC currently lacks the quorum to decide anything. |
| Disclosure opacity (no wrongdoing alleged) | $410,000 | Contributions through corporate names that do not identify their source. Two of the LLCs trace through Texas records to a single Lubbock family; one corporation remains unattributed. |
On the donor whose company sits inside an active prosecution, the report states his three gifts and the regulatory calendar that determined his industry’s Medicare revenue as a sequence of dates and amounts, and stops there. Readers can draw their own inferences. That restraint is not timidity; it is the difference between what a record supports and what it does not.
The industry picture held surprises
Classifying all 120 donors by industry produced three findings I did not expect. First, the single strangest fact in the file: about 15 percent of this Republican super PAC’s money comes from Texas personal injury attorneys, a group that overwhelmingly funds Democrats. Thirteen separate plaintiffs’ firms and partners appear in the data. Second, the oil and gas total ($1.87 million, the largest bloc) is mostly one Midland family. Third, nearly every healthcare dollar traces to a business whose revenue depends on government reimbursement decisions or that faces federal scrutiny.
And one lesson about the limits of disclosure itself: the PAC’s largest donor, at $1.23 million, lists his employer in FEC filings as a chamber of commerce. His board service there is real, but his wealth is a century-old ranching and oil fortune. The filing fields are self-reported and unverified. Anyone screening this committee by employer field alone would miss its largest industry bloc entirely.
What the AI changed, and what it did not
Ten years ago this analysis existed, but it lived inside campaign research shops, watchdog nonprofits, and a few newsrooms, because it took weeks of skilled labor. What the AI collapsed was the labor and the distance between fields: the aggregation, the entity tracing across state corporate records, the classification of 120 donors, the charting, the drafting, and the assembly of a professionally formatted report happened in hours, steered by someone whose day job is patent licensing.
What it did not change is the verification burden. The assistant proposed; primary sources disposed. Several early findings did not survive checking and are not in the report. One large donor I fully expected to carry a flag came back clean, and saying so plainly is part of the discipline. If citizen analysis of this kind is going to mean anything, the standard cannot be what AI makes fast; it has to be what the record supports. That is also why the full report ends with a list of open items and the verification steps I would complete before anyone republishes a word of it.
What happens October 15
Everything above covers money raised through June 30. The $15 million ad blitz running now is funded by third-quarter money that has not been disclosed yet. The PAC’s Q3 report is due October 15, and it will answer the question this post opened with: who actually paid for the ads on your television. I will update this post and the full report within 48 hours of that filing.
The full 16-page report, with sources, charts, the flagged-money ledger, and the publication language guide, is here: Lone Star Liberty PAC: Donor and Money Dossier (v.1.0).
About this analysis: I am a patent attorney in Dallas. Campaign finance is not my field. This analysis was prepared in my personal capacity, on my own time, with no client, no compensation, and no communication or coordination with any campaign or committee. It was built from the FEC’s public Schedule A export and public records, using Claude (Anthropic) for data analysis, drafting, and document assembly, with load-bearing facts verified against primary sources. Every claim is tiered to its standard of proof; indictments and complaints described here are allegations, and all persons are presumed innocent. Open items and verification steps are listed in Section 8 of the full report.
