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THE FUGITIVE GUEST LIST

2026-10-13

Happy Tuesday. If a law-and-order attorney general rings in the new year with two men who have not come home to face federal fraud charges, is that a party or a lineup?

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday night that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now the Trump-backed Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, spent New Year’s Eve 2024 in Dubai with his extramarital girlfriend, Tracy Duhon, at a celebration that included Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail. Both men had been indicted months earlier in a federal healthcare fraud case out of Chicago. Neither had returned to the United States to face the charges, per the Journal’s reporting as summarized by Mediaite and the Washington Examiner.

The party was in a luxury high-rise overlooking the Burj Khalifa. Footage shows fireworks erupting from the tower to ring in 2025, then the camera pans down to Paxton and Duhon watching from a balcony with Suhail standing behind them, the Daily Beast reports. Watch: WSJ video of Paxton and Duhon at the Dubai fireworks, or the clip as it circulated on X, embedded in the Mediaite write-up.

THE FUGITIVE GUEST LIST is the only fair name for it. Texas’s top cop did not need a warrant to find these two. He needed a balcony.

The guest list

Let’s take the RSVPs, because the Journal already did the homework.

Ken Paxton (R). Texas attorney general since 2015. Running for the U.S. Senate against Democrat James Talarico. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, is divorcing him on “biblical grounds,” per the Daily Beast.

Tracy Duhon. Paxton’s girlfriend, per the Journal. Plus-one, not spouse.

Anosh Ahmed. Former chief financial officer of Loretto Hospital, a safety-net hospital on Chicago’s West Side that serves mostly low-income patients. Indicted in July 2024 on eight counts of wire fraud, four counts of embezzlement and three counts of money laundering in an alleged $15 million scheme against the hospital, Block Club Chicago reported. Separately charged in a fake COVID-19 testing case: an updated indictment alleges a conspiracy to bill the government more than $681 million, with more than $195 million paid to entities controlled by Ahmed and his business partner, per Block Club Chicago. Court records show he had left for Dubai by August 2023, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Sameer Suhail. Ahmed’s friend, business partner and next-door neighbor at Chicago’s Trump Tower. Charged in the same July 2024 indictment with six counts of wire fraud, six counts of aiding and abetting embezzlement and two counts of money laundering. He moved to Dubai in early June 2024, a month before the charges were announced, and opened a luxury plastic surgery clinic there, per the Sun-Times.

Heather Bergdahl (regrets). Their co-defendant, Loretto’s former chief transformation officer, was pulled off a Dubai-bound plane by federal agents in 2024, Block Club reported. She has since reached a plea agreement, per Block Club. Some guests never make it to the party.

Fair is fair. The video puts Paxton on the balcony. It does not establish that he knew about or took part in any alleged fraud, as IBTimes UK notes. Ahmed and Suhail are presumed innocent, and Ahmed has pleaded not guilty. But the July 2024 indictment was public news. The attorney general of Texas has a building full of lawyers and a state police detail. Looking up his own donor would have taken less time than the fireworks.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton delivers remarks at a U.S. Department of Justice event in February 2018. Texas’s top law-enforcement official rang in 2025 with two men under federal indictment, the WSJ reports. Credit: U.S. Department of Justice, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The bar tab

Here is where the party gets expensive. Campaign finance records reviewed by the Journal show Ahmed gave $190,000 to Paxton’s campaigns, including about $25,000 days after his indictment, per Mediaite and the Daily Beast. The Sun-Times reported last year that Ahmed’s giving to Paxton began in October 2022 and that his latest check landed in July 2024, days after prosecutors unsealed the indictment, making him one of Paxton’s top contributors.

For the record, Ahmed’s checkbook was briefly bipartisan. He gave $12,000 to Chicago Democrat La Shawn Ford’s 2019 mayoral run, per the Sun-Times and TransparencyUSA. Ford, who resigned from Loretto’s board in 2021 over how to discipline Ahmed, later told the Sun-Times the pair “duped an entire community.”

Loretto serves Austin, a West Side neighborhood where life expectancy is significantly lower than the citywide average, the Sun-Times notes. Loretto got the bill. Paxton got the checks. Dubai got the fireworks.

Ahmed came back in August after briefly fighting extradition from Serbia, and he is jailed at Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center after pleading not guilty in both cases, Block Club Chicago reported. His lawyers cited family health issues for the delay. Suhail’s lawyer, Adam Sheppard, said civil matters in Dubai limited his travel and that Suhail came back voluntarily once they were resolved, per IBTimes UK’s summary of the Journal.

The Chicago Federal Center, home of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, where the Northern District of Illinois hears federal cases. Ahmed pleaded not guilty in federal court in Chicago in August 2026 and remains in custody. Credit: U.S. General Services Administration, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Want to see who funds the rest of the Lone Star delegation? The new Texas Money Map on hypocrisydemocracy.net follows the money seat by seat.

The host’s excuse

Asked about Dubai, Paxton senior adviser Nick Maddux did not address the trip or the donations. His statement to the Journal: “Like President [Donald] Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas.”

Persecution is the house wine. In 2025, from Dubai, Ahmed rebranded himself a “proud Republican” and a “target of political weaponization,” per the Sun-Times. Same script, different balcony.

The “persecution” file, per the Daily Beast: securities fraud charges filed in 2015 and settled in 2024 without admitting guilt; impeachment in 2023 by a Republican-controlled Texas House over bribery and abuse-of-office allegations tied to a donor, followed by acquittal in the state Senate. Last week, the Texas Tribune and ProPublica found Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a taxpayer-funded security detail since 2015, costing $3.3 million, and could tie only 138 trips and $553,000 to state business. The Journal reported the state’s security records did not include the private Dubai trip, per IBTimes UK.

“Politically persecuted” is not an answer to “who were you partying with?” It is a costume.

The plus-ones

President Trump endorsed Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn, and Paxton won the May runoff. According to the Journal, Trump was told before endorsing that damaging revelations were likely to surface and backed him anyway, per IBTimes UK. Since the endorsement, Republican-aligned groups have spent roughly $206.4 million on the race: $84.4 million backing Paxton and $122 million attacking Talarico, according to PaidForPolitics data cited by the Daily Beast. Talarico leads Paxton 50% to 44% among likely voters in a YouGov poll taken Sept. 28 to Oct. 5, per IBTimes UK.

The party of law and order and family values is spending nine figures to elect a man who watched the fireworks with two men a federal courtroom was waiting on. If a Democratic attorney general had been filmed at that party, the red-pill networks would have a countdown clock on screen by breakfast.

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The blue costume: your guest list has a pardon on it

Democrats, before you frame the Journal story and hang it in the campaign office: you have earned the slogan, not the halo.

Talarico’s line is a good one: “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis,” he said in Arlington in August, per the Texas Tribune. He has vowed an anti-corruption package to ban super PACs, corporate PACs, partisan gerrymandering and congressional stock trading. Nationally, Democrats are now making corruption a pocketbook issue, per Politico. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries promises to “hold the crooks accountable” and says “There is a cost to corruption,” per DNYUZ. Fine messaging. Now the Texas receipt.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo) and his wife were indicted in 2024 on a dozen counts of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy, accused of taking nearly $600,000 in bribes from an oil company controlled by Azerbaijan’s government and a Mexican commercial bank. Two of his political advisers pleaded guilty to conspiring with Cuellar to launder more than $200,000 in bribes from a Mexican bank, the Texas Tribune reported. Cuellar maintained his innocence. Last December, Trump pardoned them both.

Jeffries told CNN, per the Tribune: “The reality is this indictment was very thin to begin with. I don’t know why the president decided to do this. I think the outcome was exactly the right outcome.” The Tribune reported Jeffries was set to be a special guest at a Cuellar fundraiser, and Democratic colleagues hugged Cuellar on the House floor the day he filed for reelection. In March, DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene called him “one of the most effective fighters and advocates that the Rio Grande Valley has ever seen,” per the DCCC. His money is on our Cuellar Money Trail profile.

So corruption is a crisis when it is Paxton’s donor, and a Trump pardon is “exactly the right outcome” when it is your own indicted Texan. You cannot run on a corruption crisis and treat your own bribery indictment like a scheduling conflict.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) in his official House portrait. Indicted on bribery charges in 2024 and pardoned by Trump in December 2025, he is running for reelection with DCCC backing. Credit: Eric Connolly / U.S. House Office of Photography, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

And the stock-trading ban Talarico wants? On Sept. 30, Senate Democrats blocked the House-passed Stop Insider Trading Act on a 53 to 47 party-line vote, short of 60, per CBS News. Their reasons were real: Republicans bolted on a voter ID provision Democrats call a poison pill, and the bill would not have banned trading outright or covered the president, per CBS and DNYUZ. We walked that magic trick in They Designed It to Fail. Now Republicans run Florida ads hitting Democrats on stock trading, Democrats run ads promising a real ban, and members keep trading. Both parties got an ad. Voters got what Chuck Schumer called a “screen door on a submarine.”

Both costumes

The red side has its own Cuellar twist. Trump pardoned Cuellar in December, writing that the Biden administration “weaponized the Justice System” against him for speaking out on open borders, per the Tribune. Last week, after Cuellar stayed a Democrat, Trump wrote that he should be serving a long sentence in a top-level penitentiary with his wife, per the Texas Tribune. Same man. Same indictment. Victim of a “weaponized” Justice Department when he might switch parties, prison-worthy when he did not.

Here is the rule neither party wants laminated. Team Paxton calls every story persecution, skips the question about the donor money, and spend $206.4 million to send him to Washington. Democrats call corruption a crisis, then call their own bribery case “very thin” and cheer a pardon that cleared their nominee. One side brands persecution, the other brands purity, and both treat ethics like a party favor you only hand to the other table.

Own one rule. If a donor is under federal indictment, return the money and skip the party. If your own member is indicted for bribery, do not call the case thin because the pardon helps your majority. If “persecuted” is the answer every time your guy gets caught, it is not a defense. It is a jingle.

So ask one question this week, whether you wear red or blue: show me the principle that survives a change of letterhead. If the answer starts with “politically persecuted,” check the guest list first.

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Originally published on Substack.

Money trail — people named in this piece who funds them, from the public record
Donald TrumpPresident of the United StatesCharles E. SchumerU.S. Senator (NY)James C. JusticeU.S. Senator (WV)John JamesU.S. Representative (MI-10)Hakeem S. JeffriesU.S. Representative (NY-08)Mark KellyU.S. Senator (AZ)Mike KellyU.S. Representative (PA-16)Robin L. KellyU.S. Representative (IL-02)Trent KellyU.S. Representative (MS-01)Henry CuellarU.S. Representative (TX-28)John CornynU.S. Senator (TX)Suzan K. DelBeneU.S. Representative (WA-01)
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