HARRIS COUNTY, Texas — The Texas Rangers are looking into new tampering claims within Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo's office tied to the 2022 felony indictments against three high-level staff members.
The staffers – Hidalgo’s former chief of staff Alex Triantaphyllis, former senior advisor Aaron Dunn and former policy director Wallis Nader -- are accused of helping steer a nearly $11 million COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract to a local women's company.
Newly unsealed search warrants show that investigators are looking into whether or not evidence was concealed during the initial investigation.
The warrants reference WhatsApp messages deleted from a staffer’s phone and asks for records directly from WhatsApp and other data from phone carriers. It also mentions other records obtained only through earlier search warrants and not handed over by the county.
According to court documents, some of the concealed evidence included:
- Harris County Judge's office employees used their personal phones to communicate about the Targeted Community Vaccine Outreach project with the owner of Elevate Strategies
- Draft documents showing Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo personally edited the scope of the Targeted Community Vaccine Outreach project and mentioned the owner of Elevate Strategies LLC in her editing one day before the scope of work was shared with the owner of Elevate Strategies LLC and more than two weeks before the project was publicly announced
- WhatsApp and SMS messages showing Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and her staff believed that the majority of the Harris County Commissioners Court were going to vote against funding the Targeted Community Vaccine Outreach project and used the County Judge's Emergency Authorization powers to bypass the voting process and award $10,973,000 to Elevate
- WhatsApp messages had been deleted after the initiation of the Grand Jury investigation
The court documents said the state is trying to find out if the felony offense of tampering with evidence was committed. Triantaphyllis, Dunn and Nader were all indicted on charges of misuse of official information and tampering with a government record in March 2022. Their charges are all still pending, and all three still work in county government, according to the search warrant. Triantaphyllis as the managing director for county administration, Nader as senior policy advisor for commissioner precinct 1 and Dunn as the senior resilience planner for Harris County Flood Control.
The owner of the company has not been charged.
The nearly $11 million COVID vaccine outreach contract came under scrutiny after it was discovered some staffers of Hidalgo's office may have helped the vendor obtain inside information about the contract weeks before a request for proposal was open to the public.
The staffers made up three of the five members of the evaluation committee and allegedly worked to ensure another despite rating higher on evaluations and having a lower bid, according to warrants.
The staffers reportedly began communicating with Elevate Strategies CEO Felicity Pereyra about the vaccine community outreach in January 2021, a month before a request for proposal on the subject became public, the search warrant said.
That included editing “firm requirements” and evaluation criteria to benefit Pereyra, according to the warrant.
The search warrant for the new tampering with evidence investigation details the findings of other warrants from March. Some records found through those warrants were also not provided through earlier discovery, according to the warrant.
Comments made to Google Docs drafts of the contract proposal were only obtained by a search warrant and left out of records originally handed over by the county, according to the new search warrant.
Those comments give insight into how involved Judge Linda Hidalgo may have been in the contract. The search warrant details a Google Doc titled, “Strategic approach for vaccines (DRAFT) - Drive File Comments.”
On Jan. 8, 2021, Hidalgo selected "Partner with local non-profit community groups with credibility among vulnerable populations (promotoras, Mexican Consulate, etc.) Timeline: Ongoing" and wrote the comment "@alex.triantaphyllis@cjo.hctx.net Who can drive this? A vendor? Felicity,” the search warrant reads.
The Google Docs comments show Hidalgo actively involved in the drafting process, editing it over a couple of days, according to the warrant, and mentioning Pereyra twice more.
On Jan. 14, she commented on another paragraph that reads “Generate and analyze factual vaccine adoption census data for use in campaign development and messaging” and wrote: “@alex.triantaphyllis@cjo.hctx.net Do we need these folks to generate the data or will there be data that say Felicity finds and gives them to analyze.’”
The next day, another comment from Hidalgo on a paragraph about data reports reads, “do we do this or does Felicity do this?”
Hidalgo had a meeting with Pereyra a week later, on Jan. 22, 2021, according to messages included in the search warrant.
The Harris County Commissioners awarded the contract to Elevate Strategies in June 2021. It was funded when Hidalgo invoked emergency authorization powers in August, according to a search warrant, but later terminated in September 2021 after questions about the one-woman firm began to surface.
Hidalgo was also involved in drafting responses to the contract, once questions were raised in September, according to the warrant.
In one Google Doc titled, “Contract Information” Hidalgo commented on the text, "Did not know three of the five members of the evaluation committee were from the Harris County Judge's office,” on Sept. 7, 2021, and wrote, "How do we not point out here that they hand pick contracts all the time, with no selection committee, for their donors.”
She continued to add edits to the document for another day, according to the search warrant, and then edited another Document called, “Truth Center 2: Elevate Contract” in October.
The search warrant for the new tampering with evidence also details records, emails and text that investigators received from some witnesses, but not others, including draft documents and text messages from staffers that Pereyra handed over, but were not included in the county’s discovery.
Hidalgo held a press conference Friday in which she called out Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg claiming that she leaked the search warrants and that this was a political stunt.
"This is the same dirty politics she's been playing for years," Hidalgo said in her briefing. “She’s abused the power of her officer the way a bully abuses size on the playground. It’s so clear that this has less to do with me and my office or Darrel Jordan, Rodney Ellis, or any of the other people than it has to do with her. With her panicking about her March 5 primary and the fact that she is behind.”
Ogg responded to Hidalgo’s press conference with a statement.
“County Judge Hidalgo’s outburst today was nothing more than an attempted deflection from the facts and evidence that led to the initial indictment of her staffers. She conflated an ongoing Texas Rangers criminal investigation with her political endorsement of my challenger and engaged in a childish exercise in name-calling that has become all too common in our political process. Using her status as county judge to launch this diatribe is an unfortunate attempt to taint the investigative process and to confuse the public. It also serves her indicted staffers very poorly. My office pursues evidence-based prosecutions, regardless of political party, and we look forward to resolving this case in court.”
In her press conference, Hidalgo added that the search warrants could have been handled differently.
“It tells you something when warrants are leaked to the press before they are ever shared with those involved,” Hidalgo said. “I don’t even know how many times this has happened at this point.”
We also reached out to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Here's what they had to say about the investigation:
“In December 2021, the Texas Rangers and Harris County District Attorney’s Office initiated an investigation into criminal allegations against the County Judge’s Office in Harris County. Recently, additional search warrants were served on various service providers for records relevant to this investigation. This investigation is ongoing, and no further information will be released at this time.”
KHOU 11 News has reached out to Ogg for a response to the county judge's comments.