Mark Aguirre.Photo: Houston Police Department
Prior to last month’s presidential election, former Houston Police captain Mark Anthony Aguirre claimed to authorities that a massive voter fraud scheme was taking shape in Harris County.
On Tuesday, authorities charged him with assault after he allegedly ran a man off the road and pointed a gun to his head in an effort to prove it.
“He crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statementannouncing the charge. “His alleged investigation was backward from the start – first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened.”
Aguirre, 63, claimed the driver of the vehicle was the “mastermind” of the supposed fraud, and was carrying 750,000 fraudulent ballots when Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of the driver’s truck Oct. 19 in order to make him stop, according to a court document describing probable cause for the charge.
The unnamed victim, according to Ogg’s office, “turned out to be an innocent and ordinary air conditioner repairman.”
Aguirre’s claims of voter fraud were “baseless,” investigators concluded.
“I think it’s a political prosecution. I really do,” an attorney for Aguirre, Terry Yates, toldKTRK. “He was working and investigating voter fraud, and there was an accident. A member of the car got out and rushed at him and that’s where the confrontation took place. It’s very different from what you’re citing in the affidavit.”
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Aguirre told police he was affiliated with a group of private citizens called the Liberty Center, and he’d been keeping the driver under surveillance for four days before the incident.
“The defendant stated (the driver) has approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand fraudulent mail ballots and is using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because the children’s fingerprints would not appear in any databases,” according to an arrest affidavit, reports theAssociated Press.
When the driver got out after his truck was run off the road, Aguirre allegedly pointed a handgun at him, forced him to the ground and put his knee on the man’s back, said Ogg’s office. An arriving officer captured that image on body-worn camera.
“[Hotze] did not direct or lead any of the investigations,” Woodfill told theTribune.“The [Liberty Center] employed the investigation team that looked into the allegations.”
Hotze was among those who’d sued unsuccessfully ahead of Nov. 3 to invalidate nearly 127,000 votes deposited at drive-through polling sites in largely Democratic Harris County, theTribunereports.
If convicted on the charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, Aguirre faces up to 20 years in prison.
source: people.com
