According to the Houston Chronicle, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will work at a food bank to honor his contract and avoid being charged with fraud.

On Thursday, Paxton’s attorney confirmed the type of community service his client will perform, but did not provide details on when or where it will be performed.

“I’m not going to get into it because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” Dan Cogdell told the Chronicle. “I don’t want protesters to show up.”

Cogdell did not immediately respond to a call and email from The Texas Newsroom.

Brian Wice, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined to comment on Cogdell’s statements or provide further details about the community service.

Paxton was charged in 2015 with two counts of securities fraud and one count of acting as a representative of an investment adviser without state registration, both serious felonies. The case dragged on for years, further protracted by the recusal of the district attorney and the appointment of special prosecutors, the dismissal of judges and the transfer of venue between Collin and Harris counties.

Then, in March, just weeks before Paxton was due to go before a jury, his defense team and the special prosecutors handling the case announced that they had reached an agreement to forgo trial.

Under their agreement, charges against Paxton will be dropped if he takes legal ethics classes, pays about $270,000 in restitution to the men he allegedly defrauded and performs 100 hours of community service.

When the deal was first announced, the parties stated that Paxton would perform his community service in Collin County, where he has had a family home for decades.

This month, however, an official with the Collin County Community Supervision Department said Paxton’s case had not been referred there. Even if he had information about Paxton’s case, he would not release it, he said.

“We would decline to release information about an individual’s community service,” Robbin Gilbert, deputy director of the department, said Aug. 9.

Lucio Vasquez

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Public Media in Houston

The Houston court hearing the case appears to have signed the deal between Paxton and prosecutors, a so-called PTI or Pretrial Intervention Contract, on July 12. However, the contract itself is not in the public records.

Prosecutors and Paxton’s lawyers have declined to release a copy of the contract, which would likely contain further details about the deal they struck.

The Texas Newsroom also attempted to obtain additional information about the deal from Harris County, including the court in charge, the district attorney and local municipal supervisors. No one had any details.

When we reached him again by phone this week, Wice said he believed the document could be kept secret.

As the Austin American-Statesman reported, precedent may prove him right.

In 2016 and 2017, the Travis County District Attorney was asked to release agreements his attorneys had reached with defendants in domestic violence cases. The first request came from a woman who wanted a copy of the agreement her ex-husband had reached after she accused him of abuse.

The district attorney declined to release the documents and asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office interprets state records laws, for confirmation. Instead, Paxton’s office ruled that pending contracts where the defendant had failed to meet the terms of the contract should be released.

In response, the district attorney sued Paxton.

His office argued that state law allows law enforcement records to be withheld if the investigation has not resulted in a conviction or a stay of sentencing and if releasing the records would hinder the “detection, investigation or prosecution of criminal offenses.”

The state district court ruled in favor of the district attorney. Paxton continued to fight, but ultimately lost after the Texas Supreme Court declined to overturn the lower courts’ decisions.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office did not respond to questions about whether Paxton continued to agree that such agreements should be made public.

Bill Aleshire, who represented the woman in the Travis County case, said keeping these records secret harms victims and the public’s trust in the criminal justice system.

“I believe that in no case should the prosecutor make deals with defendants that he keeps secret from the public, and especially not when there are victims involved in the crime,” Aleshire told The Texas Newsroom.

The Texas Newsroom has filed a public records request for a copy of the agreement between prosecutors and Paxton’s defense team.