Far-left corrupt Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo admitted she used encrypted messaging apps for official government business as the investigation into her bid-rigging scandal intensifies.
Texas Rangers opened a new tampering investigation into far-left Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s $11 million no-bid vaccine contract earlier this month.
Hidalgo’s office is embroiled in a bid-rigging scandal.
Lina Hidalgo’s top three staffers were indicted in April 2022 after prosecutors expanded the investigation into an $11 million ‘vaccine outreach contract’ awarded to one of the judge’s political cronies.
While Hidalgo was threatening to jail and fine people for violating her Covid rules, she was secretly trying to award one of her political cronies, Felicity Pereyra, who founded Elevate Strategies, an $11 million ‘vaccine outreach’ contract.
Hidalgo ultimately panicked and canceled the $11 million vaccine contract after questions were raised that it was with a one-person firm with no experience.
Hidalgo’s Chief of Staff Alex Triantaphyllis and Policy Director Wallis Nader along with co-defendant Aaron Dunn were charged with misuse of official information and tampering with government documents in connection with the canceled vaccine outreach contract.
According to Click2Houston, Texas Rangers, the same agency that initially conducted a raid of Hidalgo’s office, opened a new public corruption investigation after Hidalgo “concealed” records subpoenaed in a grand jury’s probe of the judge’s $11 million no-bid contract.
The search warrants were unsealed earlier this month according to the outlet.
The outlet reported that one of the Texas Rangers wrote in the search warrant that “it was discovered that numerous documents and communications that were ordered to be produced by Grand Jury subpoena had been concealed and made unavailable during the earlier Grand Jury proceedings.”
“WhatsApp messages had been deleted after the initiation of the Grand Jury investigation,” the outlet reported.
Lina Hidalgo told Fox 26 Houston that she hadn’t used the encrypted app ‘Signal’ for official county business.
The outlet pressed Hidalgo and asked if she used the encrypted app ‘WhatsApp’ to communicate with her now-indicted chief of staff about the $11 million no-bid contract. Hidalgo obfuscated and said she already answered the question, referring to her May 2022 statement admitting she indeed used the encrypted app.
Fox 26 Houston reported:
Six days after FOX 26 broke the news of five additional search warrants granted to Texas Rangers investigating “bid-rigging” at Harris County, we reminded Judge Lina Hidalgo of this very public statement back in May 2022.
“Man. I have Slack, I have Signal, I have WhatsApp. I haven’t used them in years,” said Hidalgo at a press conference.
“Don’t you want to avoid even the potential that you could be having government conversations in basically a technological black box?” asked FOX 26.
“I told you, I don’t have governmental conversations on Signal,” said Hidalgo.
Fast forward to last week’s filing of search warrant affidavits by Texas Rangers and the revelation, that contrary to Hidalgo’s claim that “she hadn’t used” encrypted messaging apps “for years”, she was in fact, communicating with her chief of staff on WhatsApp regarding not just County business, but more critically, the controversial, multi-million dollar Covid communication contract, which led to the criminal indictment of three of her top aides.
