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In response to
"can anyone please c&p? I got a firewall. -- nm"
by
Diva🎅🏾
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Here
Posted by
Reagen
Dec 15 '20, 15:57
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A former Houston Police Department captain who in October alleged without evidence a widespread ballot harvesting scheme perpetrated by Harris County Democrats was arrested Tuesday, accused of pointing a gun at a man while attempting to investigate his claims.
Mark A. Aguirre, 63, faces a felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon stemming from the Oct. 19 confrontation. According to the Harris County District Attorney’s office, Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of a truck belonging to an air conditioner repairman he had been surveilling, convinced the truck contained 750,000 fraudulent ballots.
Aguirre then pointed his gun at the repairman, forced him to the ground and put his knee on the man’s back, prosecutors said. No ballots were found in the truck, which was filled instead with air conditioning parts and tools.
Aguirre told police he was part of a group of private citizens called the Liberty Center which was conducting a “civilian investigation” of the alleged scheme, which he said was operating out of the air conditioner repairman’s mobile home. Aguirre also told police the repairman was “using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because the children’s fingerprints would not appear in any databases.”
Affidavits by Aguirre and former FBI agent Charles Marler were part of a lawsuit filed this fall by conservative Houston activist Steven Hotze, who sought to prohibit voters from dropping off mail ballots in person before Election Day.
The two sworn statements alleged that powerful Democrats in Harris County had devised a scheme to submit as many as 700,000 fraudulent mail ballots, representing nearly a third of the entire voter roll.
Citing secondhand sources and videotaped interviews, the pair alleged that several African-American businessmen and elected officials were involved, including Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, State Sen. Borris Miles and Biden campaign Texas political director Dallas Jones.
All said the allegations were false. Aguirre in October hung up on a reporter seeking evidence of the allegations.
The alleged scheme spawned numerous stories on conservative websites reporting Jones had been arrested for voter fraud. The conspiracy theory was widely debunked, and no voter fraud cases were filed against Jones.
After Hotze filed the ballot drop-off lawsuit along with several other Houston-area Republicans, Gov. Greg Abbott declared that counties could designate only one location to collect completed mail ballots from voters during Texas’ early voting period. Abbott said the move would improve election security, though county officials argued that voters already were required to deliver their own ballots, sign in, speak with an assistant clerk and provide identification.
Meanwhile, grand jury subpoenas revealed that Aguirre received a total of $266,400 from Liberty Center for God and Country in September and October, the vast majority of which — $211,400 — came the day after the alleged aggravated assault incident. Former Harris County Republican Party Chairman Jared Woodfill is president of the group; Hotze is CEO, according to the group’s website.
The group raised nearly $70,000 through a GoFundMe page in October. Donors included Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, conservative activist JoAnn Fleming and former Republican state representatives Rick Green and Jodie Laubenberg.
Woodfill said Hotze hired Aguirre’s firm, among other investigators, to look into allegations of voter fraud that others had raised during the election. He said Aguirre was “nothing but professional and perfectly appropriate and good to deal with” during their interactions, and declined to comment on the alleged aggravated assault until speaking with Aguirre.
“There are two sides to every story. I'd love to hear what he has to say, what's his version of what happened,” Woodfill said. “The way it was described to me, it just doesn't seem consistent with what a former captain would do.”
Aguirre was fired from the Houston Police Department in January 2003, over his handling of a street-racing raid in which 278 people were arrested in a Kmart parking lot. Prosecutors dropped all charges, most of which were for trespassing and were unrelated to street racing, after the police department received a flood of complaints and lawsuits. The incident sparked a massive internal affairs investigation that led to disciplinary action against 32 officers.
Aguirre, then a 23-year veteran of the force, was fired after the raid. He unsuccessfully sought to get his job back, accusing HPD leaders of portraying him as a scapegoat to avoid political blowback, though he was unable to present proof to an arbitrator.
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