This is one of four profiles the Tribune is writing about the Republican candidates for attorney general. Read our coverage of Sens. Joan Huffman and Mayes Middleton. For more information on the primaries and the voting process, check out our guides and news coverage here.
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.
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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
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”
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 October 2021.
“‘It’s a disaster’ — that’s your opening paragraph in every lawsuit, ‘it’s a disaster,’” Reitz told the audience, describing how to turn any new immigration policy from the Biden administration into a lawsuit. He encouraged other state attorneys general to bring their cases to Texas, where “we have nothing but good courts,” he said.
The Texas attorney general’s office was at war with “the forces that want to destroy the American order, root and branch,” he said on Moment of Truth, a conservative podcast. “If you don’t believe that we’re at war, then I think, you know, you need to wake up to that reality. Here at the Texas Attorney General’s Office … our soldiers are lawyers, and our weapons are lawsuits, and our tactic is lawfare. This is the project that we’re engaged in.”
In April 2023, Reitz announced he was leaving his “dream job” to become chief of staff for Sen. Ted Cruz. After Trump won reelection in 2024, he nominated Reitz to run the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department, calling him “a true MAGA attorney” and “a warrior for our Constitution.”
Democrats had a different term — after Reitz said at his confirmation hearing that there was no “hard and fast rule” about whether public officials must abide by court orders, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, called him a “danger to the rule of law.”
Those titles would become proud calling cards when Reitz left three months later to run for attorney general.
“After candid conversations with trusted leaders in both Texas and Washington, it became clear that the cost of replacing me at DOJ was far smaller than the cost of Texas ending up with an unvetted, unproven lightweight as its next Attorney General,” he posted on social media in August. “So I redeployed home to Texas to do what’s necessary.”
Paxton, Plus
Five years after Reitz chose to stick by Paxton, Paxton returned the favor, endorsing him as “battle-tested, proven, and ready to be Attorney General.”
Reitz has tried to make this campaign a referendum on Paxton, dogging his opponents for insufficient fealty to a man many once believed was days away from being indicted, impeached or voted out of office.
“Chip Roy was the first elected official in America to call for Paxton to be removed from office. Immediately after that, Mayes Middleton started unloading vast sums of money, bankrolling everyone that wanted to take him out,” Reitz said at a forum in East Texas. “I was loyal in that moment.”
Running as an underdog, Reitz has tried to cast his opponents as weak, inexperienced and secretly liberal. In his telling, Roy, who served as Paxton’s first assistant before Mateer, and Middleton, one of Texas’ most conservative legislators, would fritter away the power of the most important attorney general’s office in the country.
“These guys are not fit. They’re not suited. They will screw it up,” he said. “They will not do justice to the position they are seeking.”
All of the GOP candidates lay out similar conservative priorities, like going after the “Islamification” of Texas by suing Muslim-affiliated nonprofits, schools and developments, a hot issue in GOP circles right now. But even next to them, Reitz’s rhetoric about Muslims stands out. He has vowed to create a legal environment “so inhospitable that they’ll self-deport or go to jail,” because, as he said in a post, “Jesus Christ — and none other — reigns over this land.”
He argues that he is best equipped to continue Paxton’s legal fight against CAIR, the Muslim advocacy group that Republicans accuse of working with foreign terrorist organizations to undermine America. Like others targeted by Paxton, including immigrant-serving nonprofits,voter registration groups and Democrat-aligned organizations, CAIR is having to expend a huge amount of time and resources to exonerate themselves from what they say are entirely trumped up allegations.
“If he’s using this kind of language now, what would he do if he got into office?” Rizvi, with CAIR Action, said. “If you’re losing, it’s not holding up in court, it’s because they’re B.S. They’re wasting money, time and resources to try and make a problem out of something that doesn’t exist.”
Reitz is undeterred. He’s hoping that GOP primary voters who love Paxton will love Paxton Plus even more.
“I imagine being even more aggressive and energetic than Paxton,” he said. “Paxton has been tremendous. I think he’s 10 out of 10, but to use the old Spinal Tap reference, we’re going to turn it up to 11.”