Three senior staffers at the Harris County Judge's Office have been indicted following an investigation into an $11 million contract.
HARRIS COUNTY, Texas -- Three senior staffers at the Harris County Judge's Office have each been indicted on one count of misuse of official information and one count of tampering with a government record following an investigation into allegations they steered a nearly $11 million COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract to a small Houston-based firm.
Search warrants made public last month indicate the Harris County District Attorney's Office and Texas Rangers were investigating whether Triantaphyllis, Dunn and Nader communicated with Elevate Strategies' founder Felicity Pereyra about possible work for the county before a bid for the vaccine outreach work was made public to other potential vendors.Derek Hollingsworth, an attorney for Aaron Dunn, said in a statement on Monday that"Aaron Dunn is innocent.
An attorney for Hidalgo said on Monday that they have not received a copy of the indictments and would provide a comment once they had a chance to review them. "As a member of the judge's staff and custodian of the records, Ms. Kase certainly would've been involved from time to time in drafting and editing documents available in Google Docs," Dickerson said."We have nothing to hide. We've collected more than two and a half terabytes of data and turned over thousands and thousands of pages of documents. These search warrants themselves are a little odd.
When Oberg asked why she received the scope of work for the contract, Harrison said,"as wild as this may sound, human error." According to investigators, Triantaphyllis, Nader and Dunn allegedly communicated with Pereyra in January 2021 and allowed her to review and revise the project's scope of work nearly a month before a bid for proposals was publicly available to all on Feb. 19, 2021.
Harrison said Pereyra eventually declined the data analyst position. It appears the job was never filled. "These trusted employees of the taxpayers, guardians of the taxpayers' dollars, should not be in that position until the judicial system has done its job now that the indictments are there," Cagle said."I will keep looking and digging and trying to get a grasp on everything that took place and everything else that comes out. But right now, I don't believe is warranted," Hidalgo said last month.
As part of the investigation, officials seized phones, laptops, and desktops for Dunn, Nader and Triantaphyllis.
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