Hotze Defense May Be Doomed
By Phone Pitch to Patrick's Son
Capitol Inside
May 7, 2022
Several years after alienating Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in a fight on gay marriage, Houston far right crusader Steve Hotze revealed his plans for a bizarre election ballot heist after the 2020 election in a telephone conversation with a federal prosecutor who's the son of the Texas Senate president.
According to a recording that the Houston Chronicle described in a story Friday night, Hotze called Ryan Patrick in an attempt to enlist his support in a proactive voter fraud vigilante scheme that culminated in the activist's indictment last month in connection with an attack on an air conditioner repairman two weeks before the 2020 general election.
The audio of the discussion with Patrick - the U.S. attorney for the southern district of Texas at the time - has all the makings of a smoking gun in the case of Hotze who faces felony charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and unlawful restraint. Hotze has been accused of hiring a former Houston police captain who ran an AC repair truck off the road and held the driver at gunpoint on the ground before searching the vehicle for thousands of ballots that the two believed he was hauling to an unspecified destination two weeks before the 2020 general election.
While Mark Aguirre has been charged with the same offenses as an alleged co-conspirator, Hotze had pinned his defense on his denial of being aware of such a scheme until he heard about it on television. But Hotze lawyer Jared Woodfill claimed to find a silver lining in the call to Patrick that appears to leave little or no doubt that the activist plotted the attack.
“It is shocking that the Harris County DA would attempt to prosecute Dr. Hotze based on an incomplete recording that proves Dr. Hotze’s innocence,” Woodfill said in the Chron report. “The Ryan Patrick tape further demonstrates that the indictment of Dr. Hotze was politically motivated and that Dr. Hotze is innocent of any criminal or civil wrongdoing.”
Woodfill chaired the Harris County GOP when Hotze was in his heyday 20 years ago as the most influential Republican on the hard right in the state's largest city. Hotze, a medical doctor in Houston, built a political action committee called Conservative Republicans of Texas into a local grassroots machine that issued candidate slates that his followers followed religiously when they flocked to the polls.
Hotze's was the elder Patrick most prominent ally when they both had veteran GOP strategist Allen Blakemore as their chief advisor until the first year of the lieutenant governor's first term when the activist alienated him with criticism on his leadership during a fight on a gay marriage bill in 2015. Apparently forced to choose loyalties, Blakemore ended the relationship with Hotze that the two had cultivated over the course of 20 years.
Hotze asked the Senate chief's son in the call in October 2020 to arrange for a federal law enforcement official to accompany ex-policeman Mark Aguirre to the ballot piracy bust where he planned to make a citizen's arrest. Patrick told Hotze that he had no authority to do such a thing. There's been no information up to now - however - if Patrick advised Hotze that the plot that he'd orchestrated and shared on the phone would be highly illegal.
“We’ve surveilled them for the last two nights and still my, my, Mark Aguirre, he said he wants to capture them when they bring (the ballots) out and leave tonight to deliver them but he needs a federal marshal with him,” Hotze told Patrick.
Hotze laid out the alleged plan in the admission to Patrick, who was appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 and replaced after Biden took office early last year. Aguirre "told me last night, hell, I’m gonna have, the guy’s gonna have a wreck tomorrow. I’m going to run into him and I’m gonna make a citizen’s arrest,” according to a transcript of the recording.
It also appears to still be a mystery on how the recording of the call with Patrick ended up in the hands of prosecutors in Harris County Democratic District Attorney Kim Ogg's office. Did one of the Patricks alert the DA that Hotze had implicated himself in the assault, which turned up a tool box in the back when Aguirre searched the vehicle for ballots that failed to materialize.
The AC repair technician is suing Hotze in a civil case as well.
“I can’t just send marshals," Patrick the federal prosecutor said in response to the strange request. "That’s not, the marshals don’t work for me,” Patrick said. “I don’t have any, there are no federal agents that work for me. I don’t have officers, I don’t have investigators, like a DA’s office. I don’t have any peace officers or federal agents that work for me.”
Hotze appeared to be buying into Trump's baselelss allegations and lies on the election being stolen and breathless claims by the ousted president's lawyers on the discovering of hundreds of thousands of ballots that Democrats were pirating in a worldwide conspiracy to cheat him out of the presidency.
Hotze hasn't said where he got the notion that the target of the attack that he told Patrick he plotted was transporting ballots. The source of the bogus information could be vulnerable to criminal prosecution as well. |
