Wild West Story
We have a guy here in Houston who goes by the name of Steven Hotze, because the name Satan T. Devil was already taken.
Hotze
Hotze is a rightwing activist and bears more than just a little responsibility for the increase in marketing for tin foil hats. Hotze is also famous for being armpit deep in anti-homosexual hubbub.
Hotze got it in his head that there was all manner of illegal voting scams going on in Houston. The problem was, he had no proof. So he hires a former Houston Police Department Captain to “investigate” all these rumors he’s hearing. The investigator’s name is Mark Aguirre.
Then the damnedest thing happened.
Mark Aguirre is accused of running a man off the road and threatening him at gunpoint. The ex-cop was hired as a private investigator by a group whose CEO is GOP activist Steven Hotze.
Mark Aguirre put a surveillance team on the air conditioner repairman (and we’re not going to use his name because … we’ll get to that) for four damn days, watching him 24 hours a day. Then, finally, he pulls the guy over and points a gun at him.
.[Aguirre] believed the technician was behind a huge voter fraud scheme in the Houston area. Aguirre told police that he believed the technician to be transporting fake ballots in his vehicle and to have as many as 750,000 in his possession.
I think we might have noticed an extra 750,000 ballots arriving on election night.
“There were no ballots in the truck,” according to a Harris County district attorney’s office press release. “It was filled with air conditioning parts and tools.”
I’ll leave it to one of yew Texans to explain how this guy was not arrested in October when this happened……….Oh,,, and how the AC guy got bullied into a “consent search” of his house.
Also be warned – the DA is a Dem so that will automatically become the first pillar of the defense teams argument for dismissal.
1“Hotze got it in his head that there was all sorts of voting scams going on.” These voices in the head aren’t exclusive to the Houston area. They play loudest in Trumpf’s head. These voices are rampant in the repugnantican party, halls of congress, WH, the community of Trumpf lawyers and followers and is a pandemic of delusions. Luckily when the voices went to court, they were just voices in hollow heads. Judges didn’t hear the voices. And 80+ million voters for Biden were the real voices, thankfully.
2So, Holtze paid someone to commit these felonies? (As one accomplice apparently drove off with the HVAC guy’s truck, we can add grand theft auto to the list.). Any chance of nailing Holtze for, say, incitement?
3I’m wondering, after watching the AC repair truck for four days, when exactly did the crack surveillance team see the repairman load or unload 750,000 ballots? Would 750,000 ballots even fit in a van? That’s a number that sounds like it would take up a fair amount of space.
This entire voter fraud controversy is one case of I-can’t-count after another.
4I initially read about this on the Daily Kos. But the article^ had an intriguing mention to why the perp is a *former* police Captain: The Great Texas K-Mart Raid^^!!!
Just when you thought they couldn’t be fascistic enough…
^ https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/16/2002323/-Former-Texas-policeman-arrested-after-holding-a-man-hostage-in-voter-fraud-conspiracy-delusion
^^ https://www.convolutedbrian.com/the-great-texas-kmart-raid.html
5$266,400 for 4 days @ 24 hrs/day minus $100/day for meals and mileage, plus another $100/day for donuts equals…
$2767/hour.
Do they get to keep all that or are there finder’s fees for such a sweet gig?
6John @6 … the math is a bit more complicated. Apparently, the suspended Captain had a whole band for investigating. The $266,400 was for the entire effort. “The company contracted approximately 20 private investigators to work on claims of fraudulent ballots in Harris County and other places in Texas.”
So I suspect it went something like… skim a third off for company expenses and profit, leaving about $175,000. divide by 20 is $8,750 per person. It’s been 35 days since the election, dividing that up means $250 a day for pay and expenses. Figure $50 for expenses, gets to 200, divided by 8 hours a day is $25 per hour. Not bad, but if they are “independent contractors,” they have to pay their own deductions and taxes, which would take it down further.
7I’m sure this person would argue that committing crimes in the pursuit of stopping other crimes is justified.
I don’t agree. I want to see Mr. Hotze (hot-zee, as in totsy?) in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash on the side of a road, under the watchful eye of someone with a firearm. I want to see the others involved in this doing the same kind of work.
8Which would suit your white entitled soap butt best, Hotze: a diminished capacity defense or a$$et forfeiture? The conspiracy charges are multiple with your craziness. Nah. You have already made your choices. In a just system you’d receive a 120 day psyche eval, stand trial with a sentence in the 10-20 range including asset forfeiture to cover court costs and victim reparation.
9Ima just leave this right here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aguirre,_the_Wrath_of_God
Klaus Kinski plays Aguirre and his descent into madness in this Werner Herzog film seems eerily prescient in this instance.
10Elizabeth Moon says:
“I want to see Mr. Hotze… picking up trash on the side of a road”
He’d have a better chance of finding fake ballots there too, on the side of the road than with his own harebrained scheme. Plus, in the spirit of Ladybird Johnson he’d beautify America and accomplish something of value for a change.
11Does anyone know what made them think the AC repairman doing anything?
12My guess: Aguirre just grabbed a prosperous looking Black or Hispanic male driving his own van (small business, not a big chain of AC repairs)…maybe one with a Democrat sticker on it. The repairman would’ve gone to different houses, carried in a box or two, carried out a box (with AC parts in it, of course) and Aguirre thought he could make that stick stick as “transporting ballots.” I hope they searched Aguirre’s SUV, because it’s not beyond belief he’d have had fake ballots to put in someone else’s vehicle.
13So I notice that Stephen Hotze is CEO of Hotze Health and Wellness Center, which has on on-site compounding pharmacy and onsite large shiny machines with which to treat a variety of chronic ailments that supposedly respond to holistic methods, alternative medicine and “natural” hormone replacement. In an expensively and more or less tastefully decorated set of show rooms Dr. Hotze and his colleagues and staff will sell you their homemade snake oil and assure you of their high moral standards and principles as they explain a whole lot of things you never heard of before. (Yes, I looked at their website until my woo-woo siren was deafening.) If you’re going to fall for holistic, alternative, pharmaceutical companies and conventional medicine doesn’t want you to know….go to Dr. Oz, who’s just as woo-woo but handsomer than this guy.
14That story got up to here in the local news in D.C. papers. Could not understand a word of it. Air conditioner repairman? Votes? Crazy ex-cop posing as a PI? what the hell? OK. Now we know. I think its pronounced Hot-zee. Explains everything. Even explains Ron Johnson and Rand Paul.
15You can not make me believe that “Holtz” is not a Republican!
16I can’t even imagine how terrified that AC repairman was. Just going about, doing your job, and suddenly some nut job runs you off the road, points a gun at you, puts his knee on your back, steals your van. I am sure he thought he would be murdered at any moment. I hope he sues all those SOBs for everything they have, have had, and ever hope to have. Any goes to visit them in prison while driving the Mercedes he bought on their money. Karma can’t come soon or hard enough for these people.
17Len Deighton wrote “The Billion Dollar Brain”, later a Michael Caine movie, in the sixties about a wealthy Texan plotter named Midwinter. He and his employees drowned through the ice while invading a Baltic country.
18Sounds as though this generation’s Midwinter is plotting on, and doing a bang up job of similar ineptitude. Lots of money really makes people smart, eh?
Mr Hotze, IIRC, was one of those who sued Gov Abbott, trying to overturn one of the rare things Abbott did right: extending early voting by a week. Luckily that suit failed. Meanwhile, my lovely neighbor, who is very right wing, told me that her husband had been investigating voter fraud cases (he’s a legit investigator who works for the constable’s office). And, she said, “they all pretty much turned out to be nothing”. Go figure.
19This type of tomfoolery is going to get someone killed. Lots of folks keep guns in their vehicle for self-protection. Running people off the road and pulling a gun on them seems like a sure-fire way to get yourself in a whole lot of trouble or dead.
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