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Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said she is referring the prosecution of three former staffers for Lina Hidalgo to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office on Thursday, a major development in the case that has shadowed the county judge for the past two years.

The announcement is the latest development in a high-profile prosecution that began with the April 2022 indictment of three former Hidalgo staffers — Alex Triantaphyllis, Aaron Dunn and Wallis Nader — on felony charges of misusing official information and tampering with government records. 

The trio is accused of unfairly awarding an $11 million vaccine outreach research contract to the consulting firm Elevate Strategies in 2021 after funneling inside information to the firm’s owner, political consultant Felicity Pereyra. Pereyra previously had assisted local and national Democratic political campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.  

Hidalgo adamantly has denied wrongdoing by her office and stood by her staffers, describing the prosecution as politically motivated. Her office did not respond to a request for comment, but she later blasted Ogg’s decision in a tweet, saying the move underscores her assertion that the district attorney’s pursuit of the case is driven by politics.

“True to form, the DA still has only baseless claims and now she wants to keep the story alive by handing her case to Ken Paxton, who routinely targets me and Harris County,” she wrote.

Ogg last month lost in the Democratic primary to challenger Sean Teare, sealing the end of her time as the county’s top prosecutor.

Teare, who received Hidalgo’s endorsement, has promised to recuse the district attorney’s office from the case if he wins the general election in November. Ogg cited that pledge in her remarks Thursday, as well as Teare’s prior employment by the firm that represents Triantaphyllis.

“All of this raises the specter of fixing cases for political support,” Ogg said. “This is no way to prosecute public corruption. It is the same type of conflict of interest that undermines the public’s confidence in our justice system. We cannot have one set of rules for the politically powerful and another set of rules for the powerless.”

Ogg and Paxton’s office described the meaning of Thursday’s announcement in different terms. Asked who would be “the boss” over the case, Ogg said it would be the attorney general’s office, with local prosecutors acting as a “resource.”

Paxton’s office, however, said in a news release that it would “assist” the district attorney in the prosecution. His communications division did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

Teare criticized Ogg’s decision to enlist the attorney general’s office, calling Paxton the “most political prosecutor in the state, who will work in tandem with a politically motivated DA” in a statement. 

Throughout the Democratic primary, Teare said Ogg had politicized the district attorney’s office through the prosecution of Hidalgo’s staffers. 

“By a three-to-one margin, voters rejected the politicized way that our prosecutor’s office has been run,” Teare wrote. “Unfortunately, Kim Ogg ignored the voters and called a press conference to attack her opponents and make clear that fighting political feuds is more important than finishing her term ensuring justice for victims across our county.”

Teare’s statement did not specify whether he could or would jettison state prosecutors if elected.

Fears of politics in a prosecution

While Ogg painted her decision as a move to insulate the prosecution from politics, her choice to refer it to Paxton’s office could incense local Democrats.

Ogg’s critics have accused her of unfairly targeting a fellow Democrat for political reasons, and Paxton is anathema to Texas Democrats.

“For most Democrats, Ken Paxton is a scoundrel. He is seen as the enemy in any number of policy venues, and as someone who is more attentive to his political base than to doing his job,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “His involvement will be perceived as another political dagger that Kim Ogg is attempting to stick into Judge Hidalgo.”

At the press conference, Ogg rejected the idea that politics played a role in her decision. She said she was sending the case to Paxton’s office because it is the best-resourced in the state.

“Evidence is not political, it is simply evidence, and I want this case heard by a Harris County jury,” Ogg said.

In another wrinkle to the case, one of the attorneys who represents Triantaphyllis, Dan Cogdell, also defended Paxton in his prosecution on felony securities fraud charges and his impeachment trial in the Texas Senate.

“I’ve been assured that their office is capable of handling that issue, and I’m not sure what the current status of Mr. Cogdell and the attorney general are,” Ogg said.

Cogdell told the Houston Landing Thursday he currently is not representing the attorney general on any specific matters, but that if Paxton “needs help in the future I suspect I’ll get a call.” He added that the relationship would not present a conflict because he represents “Paxton the person, not Paxton the entity.”

The veteran defense lawyer scorned Ogg’s move to enlist Paxton’s office as a belated effort to maintain the appearance of impartiality. 

“All she’s doing is trying to depoliticize a case that’s been political from the beginning,” he said. “You can put lipstick on a pig, but that don’t make it pretty. The facts of this case still stink.”

Cogdell could not immediately say whether his team would attempt to block the attorney general’s involvement. 

“I don’t have a problem with any objective prosecutor getting involved and reviewing the facts, because I think any objective prosecutor will dismiss this case,” he said. 

Dunn’s attorney, Derek Hollingsworth, said he would consider a legal challenge to Ogg’s move. Cogdell’s role in the case may present a conflict for Paxton and at least one of the charges in the case may not be eligible for a referral, he said.

“Candidly, I feel like Kim is just trying to dance on the edge of a razor by effectively recusing her office without calling it a recusal, and then inviting the attorney general’s office in on some kind of theory of concurrent jurisdiction,” he said.

Still, Hollingsworth said that his strategy would not change if Paxton’s office takes over the case.

“No, my strategy is to represent my client, because he’s innocent, this is a political prosecution, and there is no evidence that my client did anything wrong,” he said. “Hopefully, somebody over there will understand that there’s no evidence here of a crime.”

Nader’s attorney, David Adler, declined to comment on the announcement.

Ogg’s office hired Republican lawyer

The case against the Hidalgo staffers has been lingering for years with scant signs of progress in public court records.  The trio’s next date in front of 174th Criminal Court Judge Hazel B. Jones is May 13.

In 2022, attorneys for two of the three staffers filed an as-yet unresolved motion to disqualify the Harris County District Attorney’s Office from the case, claiming that a “months-long, highly public feud” between Ogg and Hidalgo over funding for Ogg’s office created a conflict of interest. 

Bolstering the staffers’ argument was the revelation, detailed by The Houston Landing in January, that Ogg had enlisted a lawyer for the state Republican Party to assist her office’s investigation of the case. 

Rachel Palmer Hooper, then-assistant general counsel of the Texas Republican Party, began work on the Elevate Strategies investigation in October 2021. Hooper, now general counsel of the Texas Republican Party and a partner at the BakerHostetler law firm, is married to conservative blogger Dan Hooper, who has described Hidalgo and other Democratic officials as “Marxists.” 

Invoices show Hooper was paid more than $174,000 between February 2022 and March 2023 for her work on the case. Ogg’s critics have condemned Hooper’s involvement, arguing that it creates the appearance of political motivation. 

In November, unsealed search warrants revealed that Texas Rangers were conducting a public corruption investigation into claims that Hidalgo’s staff concealed evidence subpoenaed during the initial grand jury investigation into the Elevate Strategies contract. The probe included a review of  draft documents on the vaccine outreach project’s scope, personal cellphones and deleted WhatsApp messages among staffers.

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