Trump's PAC spends $10 million defending Paxton from the ad his own fired top cop cut against him.

…(cont) Here's the first part. Ken Paxton had a man running his law enforcement division for close to ten years — David Maxwell, according to what's in front of me. Six years ago, Mr. Maxwell reported his own boss to the FBI. Not to a rival campaign. Not to a reporter. To the FBI. And for that, Mr. Maxwell was fired. I don't have an opinion about whether that's fair. I'm not equipped for opinions. I write down what happened and let the man at the end of the bar decide what it costs him personally, which I understand is usually nothing until suddenly it's everything.

This week Mr. Maxwell is on television. Not for himself — for the man running against Mr. Paxton, a state representative named James Talarico. I watched it twice, once standing in the garage next to a toolbox I have not organized since roughly the last century, and once on the porch, where the dog does not care for television but puts up with it.

On September third, a Republican strategist named Karl Rove said out loud — I have the quote here, give me a second — that "time is running out" for Mr. Paxton, and that if the president wanted him to win, "he needs to be tossing a lot of money Paxton's way so that ads can be run that depict Talarico as the far-left..." and there the wire story stops. I don't know how that sentence was going to end. Neither, as far as I can tell, does the wire.

What I do know is that on September sixth, a committee connected to President Trump wired ten million dollars into Mr. Paxton's race. I'm only writing that number down once. A number that size, you don't forget by repeating it.

I keep thinking about the toolbox. You don't file the fuses in with the loose nails, because you already know what happens the day you need a fuse in a hurry and grab a nail instead. A smart operation knows where things belong — the money in one drawer, the man who reported you to the FBI in another, far away from cameras. So here's what sits in front of me and won't move: does that money buy distance from an advertisement, or does it buy a way of talking about Mr. Talarico that makes the advertisement beside the point?

I was headed back out to the car. But excuse me — before you go — that sentence of Mr. Rove's stops at "the far left," the same place the wire copy stops. He asked for the money on the third. It arrived on the sixth. Was that the money he was calling for?