13 Investigates: New docs reveal county investigation spreading, Rangers turn to Google for more
HARRIS COUNTY, Texas (KTRK) -- A fourth search warrant made public Thursday provides more details into the evidence law enforcement is seizing as part of an investigation into how a nearly $11 million COVID-19 outreach contract was awarded to a small Houston-based firm.
The new warrant demands Google turn over documents accessed by Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and six other senior staffers. Warrants unsealed last month did not seek anything directly from Hidalgo.
Last month, three search warrants indicated the Harris County DA and Texas Rangers were investigating whether three senior staffers at Hidalgo's office helped steer the contract to Elevate Strategies by communicating with the company's founder about possible work for the county before a bid for the vaccine outreach work was made public to other potential vendors.
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13 Investigates first broke the story last month when search warrants showed Alex Triantaphyllis, who is now Hidalgo's current chief of staff but was her deputy chief of staff last year, as well as Aaron Dunn, then a senior advisor for public safety and emergency management at the county and Wallis Nader, who is Hidalgo's deputy policy director, being investigated for possible misuse of official information.
No charges have been filed as part of this investigation.
The warrant released Thursday seeks to search and seize documents from the Google customer accounts for Triantaphyllis, Dunn and Nader, as well as Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, her Communications Director Rafael Lemaitre and Kathryn Kase, who serves as counsel for the county judge's office.
"I believe that Google LLC is in possession of electronic data that will show that Dunn, Triantaphyllis and Nader created, edited, commented on and/or viewed multiple scope of work documents," according to the search warrant. "I also believe it is probable that the above Google Docs were subsequently sent to (Elevate Strategies' founder Felicity) Pereyra on January 13, 2021 and January 15, 2021, which is prior to the first public release of the Vaccine Outreach RFP on February 5, 2021, and well prior to the first time a vendor could download a copy of the Vaccine Outreach RFP on February 19, 2021."
The search warrants do not allege that Hidalgo, Lemaitre or Kase misused official information. The newest unsealed warrant is dated March 10, 2022, the same day as the two of the three released last month.
"This warrant was sought at the same time as the others and simply copies and pastes the same misleading allegations, based on the same cherry-picked excerpts of the same documents," Hidalgo's attorney, Eric Gerard, said in a statement to 13 Investigates on Thursday. "We reiterate our concern that this investigation appears to be rushing forward despite a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts."
In a statement to 13 Investigates on Thursday, Lemaitre's attorney, Murray Newman, with Newman & Chappell Law Firm, said, "Since the inception of this investigation, Mr. Lemaitre has been fully cooperative with investigators and is merely referenced as a witness in the latest documents released by the District Attorney's Office."
In a statement last month to 13 Investigates, Triantaphyllis' attorney said, "the accusations against my client are baseless."
"Alex's service to Harris County has always been guided by making the people the top priority. In the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis, Alex has worked tirelessly to ensure that taxpayer resources are utilized as effectively and efficiently as possible," according to the statement from his attorney Marla Poirot.
Kase's attorney, Nick Dickerson, said she is not a target of the investigation, just a witness.
"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 (four) search warrants themselves are a little odd. It seems they may be used as an end-around of the attorney-client privilege."
Calls to Dunn and Nader have not been returned.
During a nearly 20-minute news conference last month, Hidalgo offered few details into the allegations and referred questions to her attorney, but reiterated that everything she has done "has been completely above board, has been made with the interests of the people of Harris county in mind, with the interests of fighting COVID 19."
"Because it's an ongoing investigation, I can't address many of the misleading and sometimes false allegations that are swirling around as much as I'd want to and you guys know that I'd be the first one to want to do that," Hidalgo said last month. "What I can say is this, I follow the law."
Hidalgo's campaign spokesperson, Toni Harrison, told 13 Investigates' Ted Oberg this week that Pereyra was never supposed to receive the scope of work for the vaccine outreach contract before it was publicly released for vendors to bid on.
When Oberg asked why she received the scope of work for the contract, Harrison said, "as wild as this may sound, human error."
"She was sent a scope of work. That was the incorrect document. It was simply human error," Harrison said. "I (sometimes send) the wrong attachment (to people). I probably do that once a day. (In this case), you'll see a trail where that is corrected and another message is sent to (Pereyra) and it says, this is actually the correct scope of work approved by the judge."
The affidavits do not include any messages to Pereyra indicating she was sent the scope of work - that Texas Rangers say is similar to the one for the RFP - by accident.
When asked about it, Harrison said, "that will come out."
The newly released search warrant calls for Google to turn over all versions of three Google Docs links which they believe are related to the project as well as the email addresses for the individuals who the Google Docs were shared with. Different versions of the same document could give investigators a sense of how the project and its scope evolved as Hidalgo's senior staffers and an eventual vendor pored over it.
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.
In a Feb. 25, 2021 email, "Pereyra states she had just been invited to bid for Harris County's large COVID-19 outreach program (campaign) to decrease vaccine hesitancy. She stated that she has 'really solid relationships in house and I feel really good about my chances in landing the project (they asked me to design the program beforehand but then were told to go RFP), so I'm just starting to build out a team,'" according to the search warrant.
Harrison said Pereyra was being considered for a data analyst position - not the vaccine outreach contract.
"Many of those text messages you see in the affidavit were not with any regard to the RFP. In fact, the RFP wasn't a consideration at the time. They were discussing a data analytics position," Harrison said. "At the time it was, we need someone who can understand data and crunch this data and help us decipher through it. Miss Pereyra had done a wonderful job on the Census outreach in Harris County and Fort Bend, so she was considered, and that's what the outreach was for."
Harrison said Pereyra eventually declined the data analyst position. It appears the job was never filled.
Elevate Strategies was awarded the multi-million dollar vaccine outreach contract in June 2021, but amid the controversy it was canceled three months later.
Even though the contract was canceled in September 2021, Elevate was still paid $1.4 million.
Harris County Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle, who was the sole commissioner who voted against the Elevate contract in 2021, has advocated that all taxpayer funds paid to Elevate should be paid back to the county.
The county said that Elevate will have to pay the county back $1.2 million of the $1,425,237 it was paid.
Elevate paid the county back $207,524 in the fall. A county attorney said last Thursday that $500,000 will be paid back to the county "soon" and another $500,000 will be paid back "later."
As part of their investigation, officials seized phones, laptops, and desktops for Dunn, Nader and Triantaphyllis.
Whenever the bid was finally open to the public, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and two other groups also submitted proposals to be considered.
Dunn, Nader, and Triantaphyllis were on the five-person committee tasked with scoring the proposals.
Last month, Hidalgo said irrespective of the investigation, as part of a recent review of the county's purchasing procedures, "No office will have staff members on selection committees going forward."
The committee scored UT Health Science Center at Houston the highest with 46.8% followed by Elevate strategies with 40.4%, according to investigators. That raised some concerns among commissioners.
A review cited in the search warrant said UT Health was passed upon because the county wasn't happy with its work on other projects.
"In a text between Dunn, Nader, and Triantaphyllis on May 7, 2021, Dunn asked Triantaphyllis if he could 'make the outreach RFP meeting that's happening now?' Triantaphyllis replied, 'No. Take it away. And don't let UT get it,'" according to a search warrant.
Harrison said although the affidavits indicate UT scored better than Elevate Strategies, that was actually just the score for the initial round.
"In any competitive bid process, there are multiple rounds. First round is usually a written proposal. The best of those bids comes in for a formal presentation. It was at that point we start to see the difference between Elevate and UT from maybe an accountability standpoint in that UT did not show up for their first presentation round," Harrison said. "Here you have a vendor who hasn't shown up for the next round, who's also managing another project within the county. It's not going very well. There are some rumblings that maybe we need to make a change on that account. It's almost like a reference check if you will, at that point and as you're evaluating, we're talking about an outreach campaign door knocking, going into underserved communities, Elevate came out ahead."
Hidalgo's attorneys have called the release of the search warrants a "misleading storyline (that) is the latest act of political theater from a politically motivated investigation."
Moving forward, Harrison said the county is implementing changes to how documents are named to ensure potential vendors for county contracts aren't sent RFPs before they're public, especially by mistake.
"(This case) was human error, the wrong document was sent. Now we have a practice. There's a practice on how we do that to ensure we're sending the right document. Look at the document name, thinks like that can make a huge difference in these types of situations," she said.
Harrison said there have been no staffing changes as a result of the search warrants.
"We are not rushing to any sort of judgment because we know there was no manipulation of this bidding process," she said.
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