The Office of the Attorney General dismissed one of two charges that were pending against the last of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s staffers accused of public corruption.
The OAG agreed to pretrial diversion, a program that allows defendants to avoid criminal prosecution, for the final pending charge against Alex Triantaphyllis. This comes a week after the OAG dismissed two charges against the other staffers involved, Wallis Nader and Aaron Dunn.
Triantaphyllis, Nader, and Dunn faced criminal charges for tampering with a government record and misuse of official information after being accused of steering an $11 million COVID outreach contract to a preferred, one-person company owned by a Democrat political operative.
Former Democrat Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg brought the charges forward in 2022 with help from the Texas Rangers. After losing her reelection bid last year, she transferred the cases to the OAG, citing fear that her Democrat challenger, Sean Teare, would drop them as a favor to Hidalgo.
Teare went on to win the general election with Hidalgo’s support. However, the OAG’s office, not Teare, eventually dropped charges.
In a press conference celebrating the dismissal, Judge Lina Hidalgo called Ogg a “dirty cop.”
“These innocent public servants had the Texas Rangers raid their homes before dawn with police lights on … Kim Ogg wasted millions of taxpayer dollars,” she said. “Kim Ogg is a dirty cop.” She continued to say that Ogg and the special prosecutor on the case “lied on search warrants, deliberately leaked information out of context to the press, pursued a personal political vendetta …”
“A joint investigation into public corruption in Harris County conducted by the Texas Rangers and the Criminal Prosecutions Division of the Office of Attorney General has reached resolution in the cases involving Alex Triantaphyllis and two other low level county staffers,” Deputy Attorney General for Criminal Justice Josh Reno told Texas Scorecard.
This joint investigation was rigorous and discovered new information from witness interviews, which was corroborated with physical evidence. This new information, which was not presented to the grand jury, critically affected the ability to substantiate certain elements of the crimes required to meet the State’s high burden of proof. Our fight against government corruption is not over, and we will vigorously prosecute those who abuse our tax dollars when the evidence meets the standard required by law.
District Attorney Sean Teare issued a lengthy statement thanking the attorney general’s office for “having the courage to follow the evidence.”
“I respect their decision and hope that under my leadership, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office will continue regaining the trust of the communities we serve,” added Teare.
The three staffers will be able to be reimbursed for their attorneys’ fees on a timeline determined by the Harris County Attorney.
