Origins murky in ballot-scheme case
New details emerge in Houston repairman’s 2020 assault over Hotze’s vote conspiracy
More than two years after Steven Hotze bankrolled a private voter fraud investigation that led to an armed confrontation with an innocent repairman, the Houston doctor was back in court earlier this month reiterating claims that Harris County Democrats are engaged in a massive election conspiracy.
Hotze, a Republican megadonor and fierce supporter of the debunked theory that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, faces felony charges related to the episode and separately is being sued by the repairman. His lawyers this month accused the Democratled District Attorney’s office of retaliating against him for exposing the election-rigging, even though no substantive evidence of such a scheme has ever emerged.
The criminal case against Hotze, who runs a lucrative health clinic in Katy and a vitamin retail business, isn’t likely to go to trial anytime soon in the county’s overburdened court system; Hotze faces charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and unlawful restraint, as does Mark Aguirre, the investigator Hotze hired.
But a Houston Chronicle examination of documents in the civil proceeding reveals new details about the bizarre October 2020 attack — one that became a nationally known example of how an election fraud theory could put an unsuspecting civilian in danger.
The documents include extensive comments from that civilian, a Mexican immigrant named David Lopez who has worked fixing air conditioning systems in Houston for more than five years. He said he con
tinues to fear for his life ever since Aguirre allegedly crashed his SUV into his box truck and pointed a gun at him, all under the false pretense that Lopez’s truck contained hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots.
“I am afraid because the people who did this to me are very powerful. I have no power,” Lopez said. “I do not know why they attacked me. These people did not find what they were looking for so I am afraid they will attack me again. I don’t know what they are looking for.”
The documents also show that Hotze and his attorneys continue to insist that Lopez could have been a main perpetrator of voter fraud and that he received payments from Harris County Democratic officials. “We’ve got the goods,” Hotze said in a 2022 deposition. “It’s so complicated I can’t — I can’t comment on it right now, but we do.”
Hotze’s political reach
Once considered the darling of the Houston area’s ultraconservative movement, Hotze, 72, has become less influential in recent years. None of the local Republican candidates he endorsed last year made it past their primary elections, and most Republican leaders also ignored a protest that he helped lead in November to allege more voter fraud in Harris County during the Nov. 8 midterm election.
Still, Hotze remains close to a few powerful conservatives, including Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas’ top law-enforcement officer. Paxton and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, along with conservative megadonors Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilk, contributed generously last year to two political action committees that Hotze controls.
Hotze is also continuing to fundraise for the Liberty Center for God and Country, a not-forprofit organization he founded that is referenced in the civil and criminal cases against him. Last year, Hotze hosted a “Freedom Gala” for The Liberty Center along with Mike Lindell, the pillow company CEO and Trump ally who has been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of election denialism. The gala, which Paxton also attended, raised funds to hire “private detectives to investigate, identify, and expose the criminal vote fraud scheme in Harris County and across Texas.”
This month, on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, more than a dozen Republican candidates who lost their November races in Harris County filed lawsuits challenging the results. Jared Woodfill, Hotze’s longtime attorney, is representing two of those candidates.
In a phone interview, Woodfill said he is not working with Hotze on the current election challenges. But he said the Liberty Center’s investigation into the purported vote-harvesting scheme run by Democrats in Harris County is ongoing, and that once it’s finished, it will prove that Hotze and Aguirre are both innocent.
“There are some connections that I really don’t want to go into right now,” Woodfill said. “There are some things that will be coming out.” He declined to elaborate. Terry Yates, who is representing Aguirre, said in an email, “There are two sides to every story. We choose to present our story to the jury and not get entangled in politics. We are confident that the jury, after hearing all the facts, will deliver a true and just verdict” in Aguirre’s favor.
Murky origins
Ever since news of the attack on Lopez became public in December 2020, the details of its origins have been murky. In a news conference around the same time, Hotze claimed that he had paid 20 to 30 investigators a “proprietary” amount of money to look into claims of voter fraud in Harris County and that he knew nothing of their specific activities. He said he paid them through the Liberty Center for God and Country — but for years his lawyers refused to disclose the group’s financials.
Now, the documents made available as part of the civil lawsuit against Hotze, including a tax return for the Liberty Center and a deposition that forced him to answer questions under oath, offer more clues.
According to the Liberty Center’s 2020 tax documents, the nonprofit collected more than $800,000 that year and spent it on “lawsuits to defend the constitutionally protected right of individuals to attend religious worship services, to protect the right of all businesses to stay open, and to ensure that elections in Texas were and are conducted in accordance with the Texas Election Code.”
The first two activities likely refer to Hotze’s lawsuits against mask mandates and other COVID-19 pandemic public health measures. The document also specifies that $379,000 went to “legal services,” while $342,000 went to “investigation services.”
In the deposition, Hotze said he decided to start funding investigations into voter fraud when Aguirre, a former Houston police officer, approached him in 2020. He said he only paid Aguirre, but knew of two other investigators who participated in the probe — Charles Marler, a former FBI agent, and Mark Stephens, also a former Houston cop.
Aguirre received more than $250,000 from the Liberty Center for his efforts, court records show. But Hotze said he never sought much information about how Aguirre used the money. “He would contact me periodically and say, we have got people looking around, seeing what’s going on,” Hotze said in the deposition. “You know, it was somewhat nebulous.”
All Hotze knew, he said, was that Aguirre had apparently discovered that undocumented Hispanic children were filling out hundreds of thousands of phony ballots in locations across the county to swing the 2020 election results in favor of the Democrats.
“From what he told me, it appeared that he was on a hot trail,” Hotze said of Aguirre, who had been fired from the Houston Police Department in 2003 before he became a private investigator.
Aguirre and the other investigators approached the Houston police and local prosecutors with their findings, but law enforcement agencies were skeptical. The investigators took the lack of interest as a sign that authorities were in on the scheme.
“Election fraud is seemingly the only crime whose very existence is denied because of the difficulty and refusal to investigate the allegations,” Stephens wrote in a document obtained by the Chronicle. “In Harris County, it may well be that political expediency is valued far greater than public pressure to prosecute election fraud.”
That 84-page report alleged that a witness overheard a Democratic political staffer bragging about the ability to “harvest 700,000 illegal ballots”
in 2019. Another witness later told the private investigators that she’d been approached at a grocery store and offered $50 gift cards to fill out the ballots, the report said.
It’s still unclear how the investigators decided that Lopez could have been involved. His name does not come up in Stephens’ report, which is dated October 16, 2020 — just days before the confrontation between Aguirre and Lopez. Hotze also said in the deposition and in previous public statements that he’d never heard of Lopez or Aguirre’s plans to target him.
Bombshell evidence
But last April, prosecutors released a bombshell piece of evidence in court: a partial transcript of a phone call Hotze made to Houston’s then-top federal law enforcement officer, U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick, on October 17, 2020. During the phone call, Hotze asked Patrick to send federal marshals to help Aguirre and told him that Aguirre had been surveilling “this guy named Perez” —— near the trailer park where he lived.
“(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,” Hotze told Patrick, according to the transcript, which was first reported by the Houston Chronicle last spring.
Two days later, Aguirre crashed his black SUV into Lopez’s box truck in South Houston, police say.
In a deposition in the civil case, Lopez described the attack this way: “I stop. I get out of my car. I go look at what happened to my car, and at that moment (Aguirre) yells at me for me to help him out. I asked him if he’s all right. He tells me to sit down on the ground. When I tried to grab him, he pulls out his hand with a gun and he points it at my head and he tells me to sit down.”
Lopez continued, “Out of fear
I obeyed him, and I put myself down on the ground. And once I was laying there facedown, he places his knee on my back and places the gun on my neck — the back of my neck.”
Aguirre told authorities who arrived on scene that they would find hundreds of thousands of ballots in Lopez’s truck, according to a police affidavit. They found only air conditioning parts and tools.
In court hearings on Jan. 11 and Jan. 13, Hotze’s attorneys continued to argue that the civil and criminal proceedings against him are all part of a conspiracy. They accused prosecutors, who are led by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a Democrat, of colluding with Lopez’s civil lawyers “to infringe upon Dr. Hotze’s constitutional rights.”
Hotze’s attorneys also sought approval from a judge to subpoena Ogg and Patrick as part of the civil proceeding, in which Lopez is seeking financial damages for the attack.
Lopez’s lawyer, Dicky Grigg, declined to make his client available for an interview. But he said his client’s trauma is very real. “We live in America, and you can believe whatever you want to believe, doesn’t matter how wacky it is,” Grigg said. “But when you go out and arm somebody, you need to be held accountable.”
Woodfill said the impact of the incident on Lopez has been overblown.
“Did he see a counselor? No. Did he see a psychiatrist? No. Did he see any type of mental healthcare professional? No. Did he have any medical bills? No. Did he have any lost wages? No,” Woodfill said of Lopez in a court hearing last year. “So really, we’re talking about a minor fender bender in this particular case.”
In the 2022 deposition taken as part of the civil lawsuit, Hotze himself echoed those sentiments.
“Would you like to take this opportunity to apologize to David Lopez and his family?” Grigg asked him.
“For what?” Hotze answered. “For what Mr. Aguirre did.” “Let Mr. Aguirre apologize,” Hotze said.
“You don’t think you have any responsibility in that?” the lawyer asked.
“I have no responsibility.” “Would it bother you that somebody you paid pulled a gun on an innocent man? Would that bother you?”
“I don’t really have a comment about that,” Hotze replied.