Harris County, Texas – Two of Judge Lina Hidalgo’s staffers were indicted this week after prosecutors expanded the investigation into an $11 million ‘vaccine outreach contract’ awarded to one of the judge’s political cronies.
Texas Rangers last month raided the office of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and executed a search warrant related to an $11 million ‘vaccine outreach contract’ awarded to one of the judge’s friends.
Recall, radical far-left judge Lina Hidalgo was one of the most aggressive Covid tyrants in Texas during the pandemic.
While she was threatening to jail and fine people for violating her Covid rules, she was secretly trying to award one of her political cronies an $11 million ‘vaccine outreach’ contract.
Hidalgo panicked and canceled the $11 million vaccine contract after questions were raised that it was with a one-person firm with no experience.
Two of Hidalgo’s staffers were indicted this week after Texas Rangers obtained a new search warrant and requested the Google accounts of Lina Hidalgo and 6 of her senior staffers.
Hidalgo lashed out at county prosecutors during an interview with ABC 13, calling the charges ‘partisan politics.’
“At best, this is going forward with a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts and at worst, it is the weaponization of the criminal justice system for political purposes so I’m not going to play into that,” Hidalgo whined to ABC13 on Wednesday. “My staffers are hardworking people. They work day and night for the people of Harris County and we’ve got work to do, like this catalytic converter issue or like childhood education, homelessness, huge wins.”
ABC 13 reported:
In her first on-camera comments about the indictment of two current and one former staffer, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo attacked county prosecutors for weaponizing the system with a “flimsy” case.
Alex Triantaphyllis, who is Hidalgo’s current chief of staff but was her deputy chief of staff at the time the allegations took place; Aaron Dunn, then a senior advisor for public safety and emergency management at the county; and Wallis Nader, who is Hidalgo’s deputy policy director, were indicted Monday. Each one of them was indicted on one count of misuse of official information and one count of tampering with a government record.
Investigators allege Triantaphyllis, Dunn and Nader steered a nearly $11 million COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract to a small Houston-based firm and shared proposal documents with the company before they were made public.
Search warrants include text messages and emails between Triantaphyllis, Dunn and Nader about the contract before it was awarded, but Hidalgo’s legal team has said the snippets of messages in the warrants doesn’t offer the full picture.
“The facts just don’t add up as they’re being presented,” Hidalgo said during her interview. “It’s the middle of an election year and I think it’s very clear that the motivations around this are just to harm me politically and it’s very sad to see the criminal justice system used that way.”
When ABC 13 reporter Steve Campion asked Hidalgo, who still hasn’t been charged, if she’s afraid she will be indicted, she said, “No. I mean, look, I don’t know how far this is going to go and it’s very easy when you present one-sided facts to the grand jury. Everybody knows a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich if that’s all they see.”
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