Congrats, Texas! Your Senate Candidate Who Won't Explain this Child Sex Abuse Plea Deal...
Issue No. 10 | May 2026
Meet the Republican Party’s Newest Senate Nominee
On April 16, 2026, in a McLennan County courtroom in Waco, Texas, a prosecutor from the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stood up and proposed that a man accused of repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy should serve a total of one day in jail. One. Day.
The defendant, Waco attorney Adam Dean Hoffman, would plead guilty to two misdemeanors, “indecent assault” and “display of harmful materials to a minor.” He would not have to register as a sex offender. He would not surrender his Texas law license. He would walk out of court that afternoon a free man, having served the day he spent in jail after his original arrest before bonding out.
The judge, Roy Sparkman, stared at the prosecutors. “Somebody want to explain this to me?” After listening, he said it again, slower. “One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it.”
No one could. After a recess, the deal was revised to 30 days and a surrendered law license. The victim’s mother, who had earlier agreed to the deal under pressure from the prosecutors, told the judge at the April 27 sentencing hearing that 30 days was not enough either. “He’s dangerous,” she said. “This isn’t justice, and I can’t do it.” Sparkman pushed the sentence to 60 days. Hoffman was released from the McLennan County Jail in under 30 days, on May 25, for good behavior.
That was the same day, give or take a few hours, that Texas Republican primary voters went to the polls and made the man whose office offered this deal their nominee for the United States Senate. On May 26, with Donald Trump’s last-minute endorsement and a turnout heavy on the MAGA base, Ken Paxton crushed sitting Senator John Cornyn 64 to 36 percent, a margin of nearly 28 points. Cornyn had spent the final weeks of the campaign running ads about Paxton’s handling of this exact case. They did not move the needle.
Let the Republican Party of Texas take a bow. This is whom they chose.
What the Centercratic Party Stands For
The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.”
Underneath that principle sits a simpler idea that any parent in any Texas town would recognize. A child who has been hurt by an adult is entitled to a justice system that takes that hurt seriously. A prosecutor who has accepted the trust of the State of Texas is supposed to fight for that child, not bargain her away to spare an accused man’s law license.
The seventh principle reads: “Truth Over Spin. Decisions should be made with facts. Disagreements should be honest, not deceptive.” The Attorney General has spent two weeks refusing to address basic questions from state legislators, victims’ advocates, and reporters, while his political operation runs on the message that he is the only candidate willing to fight for ordinary Texans. That is not truth over spin. That is the spin.
The Sordid Details
Here is what the Texas Tribune and The Texas Newsroom established through hundreds of pages of court records and more than a dozen interviews, in a deep investigation published May 19.
The case began with a young boy. Texas reporting protocols protect his name, so let it be enough to say he was abused as a child, that he told an investigator Adam Hoffman raped him and showed him pornography, and that he testified about what happened to him at trial in the summer of 2025. The Waco police investigation, by the Tribune’s account, was botched at the start when a regular officer interviewed the boy instead of a trained child abuse expert. The case still produced a trial.
The trial ended in a hung jury after nine hours of deliberation. The lead juror sent a note to the judge that read, “Deliberations are not productive at this point.” Of the twelve jurors, seven believed the boy’s testimony and the forensic evidence proved Hoffman’s guilt. Five were leaning toward not guilty. Under Texas law, the Attorney General’s office, which had taken the case three years earlier after the elected local district attorney recused himself, was free to retry Hoffman on the original charge of continuous sexual abuse of a young child.
It chose not to.
Instead, Paxton’s prosecutors, Brenda Cantu and Dorian Cotlar, approached the boy’s mother. They told her the office could move forward without her consent, because they represent the State of Texas, but that they would prefer her agreement. They proposed the one-day plea. She prayed about it. She agreed. She said later, in a quote that should be carved into the wall of every Attorney General’s office in America, “We were put in an impossible situation. How do you trust the prosecution to go back to a case that they want to plead out when they’re the ones that are supposed to fight for it, and they don’t want to do it?”
The deal might have ended quietly there. It did not, because Judge Sparkman refused to accept it. He pushed for 30 days. By the April 27 sentencing hearing, the mother had changed her mind and told the court that 30 days was not enough. Sparkman raised the sentence to 60 days. Hoffman was out in under 30.
Then the judge said something that would be repeated, in shock, in every newsroom in Texas. “I’m seeing a pattern here that is concerning me,” Sparkman said. “If they get a mistrial, all of a sudden it’s just a little misdemeanor with a slap on the hand.”
He pointed to two examples. Seth Sutton, a Waco attorney charged in 2020 with hiring a hit man on a man he believed had molested his stepdaughter, originally facing a first-degree felony that could have meant life in prison. The AG’s office took the case after the local DA recused. The trial hung. The AG’s office dropped the felony and let Sutton plead to a misdemeanor, “terroristic threat,” with a four-day jail sentence. Rakim Sharkey, charged in 2017 with continuous trafficking of two girls and an adult woman, facing decades. The AG’s office tried it, lost to a mistrial when COVID infected the courtroom, and pleaded the case down to probation with no sex offender registration. Sharkey was rearrested in 2025 for a string of new felonies, his probation revoked. He is now serving 22 years.
A pattern, the judge said. Trial. Mistrial. Misdemeanor. Slap on the hand. Three serious felony defendants, three Attorney General prosecutions, three sweetheart deals.
On May 14, two Republican state representatives, Pat Curry of Waco and Jeff Leach of Plano, the same Jeff Leach who led the Texas House investigation that resulted in Paxton’s 2023 impeachment, demanded answers. “A Texas child was systematically groomed, targeted, abused, and assaulted by Adam Hoffman,” Leach said. “This is totally unacceptable for this to have happened and the people of Texas should be outraged.” Leach had already sent a letter to Paxton’s office calling the deal “incomprehensible.” Curry, whose district includes the courtroom, said it plainly. “It’s certainly not lost on me how suspicious this looks.”
Even John Cornyn, the man Paxton was about to defeat at the polls, called it out. “Predators who commit these crimes tend to repeat them over and over again, until stopped,” Cornyn said. “Paxton could have stopped this one, but instead cut him loose to reoffend over and over again, putting more children at risk.”
Paxton’s office did not respond. It still has not responded. It pointed reporters to a letter the two prosecutors wrote to Leach, which said the boy “preferred to move on with his life and prioritize his mental and emotional health.” That is the entire public defense, as of this writing, from the Attorney General of the State of Texas, for why a man accused of repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy will spend less than a month in jail and will not be on any sex offender registry in this country.
Twelve days after that press conference, Texas Republican primary voters made Ken Paxton their nominee for United States Senate. Within hours, Cornyn-aligned groups quietly scrubbed their attack ads, including ads featuring the Hoffman case, from social media. Within a day, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which had spent the runoff calling Paxton’s behavior “repulsive and disgusting,” issued a statement attacking the Democratic nominee and made no mention of Paxton at all. The party that called him repulsive on Monday endorsed him on Wednesday.
This is the man Texas Republicans now want sitting in the seat once held by Lyndon Baines Johnson. A man under felony indictment for nine of his eleven years as Attorney General. A man impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House on a 121 to 23 vote in 2023, with eight of his own senior aides having reported him to the FBI for bribery and abuse of office. A man whose wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce in July 2025 on “biblical grounds.” A man whose office, the highest law enforcement office in the state, just gave a child sex abuser less than 30 days behind bars and refused, in writing, to explain why.
This is whom Texas Republicans chose. Knowing all of it. Choosing it anyway.
Our Parties Have Failed Us Again
The fourth principle of the Centercratic Party, One Law for All, is not a slogan. It is the load-bearing wall of a republic. When a state’s Attorney General can offer a child sex abuser a one-day plea, refuse to explain it for two weeks, and then have his own party’s voters reward him with a Senate nomination, the wall is cracking.
The Republican Party of Texas has now told the country, on the record, that none of this disqualifies a man from federal office. Not the indictments. Not the impeachment. Not the eight senior aides who reported him to the FBI. Not the silence on the Hoffman case. Not the boy. The party that calls itself the law and order party looked at all of it on May 26 and said yes, give him the Senate seat.
The Democratic Party in Texas has failed too. It has been so weak for so long that the contest for Senate this November is starting roughly even in the polling despite Paxton’s record. A healthy two-party system would have made this race unwinnable for a man like him. Ours did not.
The boy in Waco does not have a party. He has a mother who told a judge that what Paxton’s office did was not justice. He has a judge who said, from the bench, that he was seeing a pattern. He deserved a system that fought for him. He did not get one.
We must save our democracy before it is too late.
That is the wave.
The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com