Ogg turns criminal case against Hidalgo aides over to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office

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.

“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.