13 Investigates Grand Jury Finds Evidence To Charge Harris County Staffers With Misuse Of Official Information

Alex Triantaphyllis, who now’s current chief of staff at Harris County Lina Hidalgo, but was Aaron Dunn, then deputy chief of staff for public safety and emergency management at the county, and Wallis Nader, who is Hidalgo’s deputy policy director, was charged this morning. An indictment is not a guilty plea, it is simply that a large court, composed of county residents, found that there was enough evidence to prosecute a person. Investigation warrants released last month indicate that Attorney General Harris and the Texas Rangers investigated whether Rose, Dan, and Nider contacted Elevate Strategies founder Felicity Pereyra about possible work for the county before it was made public. tender for the vaccine promotion project. other potential sellers. RELATED: 13 Inquiries: Inquiry into Harris County contract details for alleged benefits In a statement last month to 13 Investigates, Triantafyllis’s attorney said “the allegations against my client are baseless.” “Alex’s service in Harris County has always been guided by making people a top priority. In the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis, Alex has worked tirelessly to ensure that taxpayers’ resources are being used as efficiently and effectively as possible.” , according to Marla Poirot’s lawyer. Calls to Dunn and Nader have not been returned. An additional warrant released last week sought to seize and seize documents from Google’s client accounts for Triantaphyllis, Dunn and Nader, as well as Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Communications Director Rafael Lemaitn and Kath , who serves as an advisor to the county judge’s office. The investigators did not accuse or accuse Hidalgo, Lemaitre or Kase of abusing official information. “This warrant was sought at the same time as the others and merely copied and pasted the same misleading allegations, based on the same excerpts from the same documents,” Hidalgo’s lawyer Eric Gerard told 13 Investigates last. Thursday. “We reiterate our concern that this investigation appears to be proceeding hastily despite a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts.” In a statement to 13 Investigates on Thursday, Lemaitre’s attorney, Murray Newman, told Newman & Chappell Law Firm: in the latest documents released by the Prosecutor’s Office “. Kase’s lawyer, Nick Dickerson, said he was not the target of the investigation, just a witness. “As a member of the judge’s staff and custodian of the files, Ms Kase would certainly have been involved from time to time in drafting and editing documents available in Google Docs,” Dickerson said. “We have nothing to hide. We collected more than two and a half terabytes of data and turned thousands and thousands of pages of documents. These (four) search warrants are a bit strange. They seem to be used as an end to the lawyer-client privilege.” During a nearly 20-minute press conference last month, Hidalgo offered a few details about the allegations and referred questions to her lawyer, but reiterated that what she had done “was completely out of the question, done in the interests of her people.” Harris County in mind, in the interests of fighting COVID 19. ” “Because it’s an ongoing investigation, I can not deal with many of the misleading and sometimes false allegations that swirl as much as I would like and you know I would be the first to want to do this,” Hidalgo said last month. all I can say is that I follow the law. “ Hidalgo’s campaign spokesman Toni Harrison told 13 Investigates’ Ted Oberg this week that Pereyra should never have received the scope of the vaccine promotion contract before it was made public to bid on vendors. When asked why Oberberg received the scope of work for the contract, Harrison said, “As wild as that sounds, human error.” “They sent her a job. That was the wrong document. It was just a human error,” Harrison said. “I send (sometimes) the wrong attachment (to people). I probably do it once a day. (In this case), you will see a trace where this is corrected and another message is sent to (Pereyra) and he says, this is in fact the right field of work approved by the judge. “ The affidavits do not contain messages to Pereyra indicating that the subject matter of the job – which the Texas Rangers say is similar to that for RFP – was mistaken. When asked about it, Harrison said, “this will come out.” RELATED: Harris County Judge Lina Indalgo describes contract warrant search warrants as “misleading.” The search warrant released last week prompted Google to hand over all three links to Google Docs that they believe are relevant to the project, as well as the email addresses of the people with whom Google Docs was notified. Different editions of the same document could give researchers a sense of how the project has evolved and its scope, as Hidalgo executives and a salesman have tackled it. According to the researchers, Triantafyllis, Nader and Dunn reportedly contacted Pereyra in January 2021 and allowed her to review and revise the project’s work almost a month before a bid was publicly available to everyone on 19 February. 2021. In an email on February 25, 2021, “Pereyra stated that she had just been invited to bid on Harris County’s large COVID-19 approach program to reduce vaccine hesitation. “I have a good relationship at home and I feel very good about my chances of landing the project (I was asked to plan the project in advance, but then I was told to go RFP), so I’re just starting to form a team,” according to the research warrant. . Harrison said Pereyra was being considered for the position of data analyst – not for the vaccine approach contract. “Many of these text messages you see in the affidavit were not about RFP at all. In fact, RFP was not under consideration at the time. They were discussing a data analytics position,” Harrison said. “At the time, we need someone who can understand the data and hide it and help us decipher it. Miss Pereyra had done a wonderful job of approaching the Harris and Fort Bent Census, so it was in mind, and that is what the show was for. “ Harrison said Pereyra eventually turned down the position of data analyst. It seems that the job was never covered. Elevate Strategies was awarded the multimillion-dollar vaccine promotion contract in June 2021, but in the midst of the controversy it was canceled three months later. Although the contract was canceled in September 2021, Elevate was paid $ 1.4 million. The county said Elevate was working to get back $ 1.2 million in funding. As part of their investigation, officials seized phones, laptops and desktops for Dunn, Nader and Triantaphyllis. Whenever the offer was finally open to the public, the University of Texas Houston Center for Health Sciences and two other groups also submitted proposals for consideration. Dunn, Nader and Triantaphyllis were on the five-member panel tasked with scoring the proposals. Last month, Hidalgo said, regardless of the investigation, as part of a recent review of the county’s procurement procedures, “No offices will have staff on selection committees in the future.” The committee noted the UT Health Science Center in Houston had the highest at 46.8%, followed by the Elevate strategies at 40.4%, according to the researchers. This has caused some concern among commissioners. A review citing the research warrant said UT Health was approved because the county was unhappy with its work on other projects. In a text between Dunn, Nader and Triantaphyllis on May 7, 2021, Dunn asked Triantaphyllis if he could “make the RFP meeting that is happening now?” Triantaphyllis replied, “No. Remove that. “And do not let UT take it,” according to a research warrant. Harrison said, although affidavits show that UT scored better than Elevate Strategies, that was actually just the score for the first round. “In any competitive bidding process, there are many rounds. The first round is usually a written proposal. The best of these bids comes for a formal presentation. At that point we started to see the difference between Elevate and UT from a point of view. of accountability that UT did not show up in its first round of presentation, “Harrison said. It is not going very well. There are rumors that we may need to make a change to this account. It’s almost like a checkmate if you will, at that point and as you evaluate, we’re talking about a door-to-door promotional campaign going to unserved communities, Elevate came out ahead. Going forward, Harrison said the county is implementing changes to the way documents are named to ensure that potential county contract suppliers will not send RFPs before they are made public, especially by mistake. “(This case) was a human error, a wrong document was sent. Now we have a practice. There is a practice on how we do this to ensure that we send the right document. Look at the name of the document, do you think this can make a a huge difference in such situations, “he said. Harrison said that there have not been …