Ex-cop followed and pulled a gun on an air-conditioning repairman who he falsely accused of voter fraud, prosecutors allege

• A former cop in Houston was charged Tuesday with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after being accused of taking part in a vigilante scheme to uncover voter fraud in Texas.
• The man, Mark Anthony Aguirre, is accused by the police of assaulting an air-conditioning repair technician who he falsely believed was harvesting fraudulent ballots for Democrats.
• Prosecutors allege that the vigilante plot was funded by a conservative group, the Liberty Center for God and Country.
• A fundraiser launched by the Liberty Center describes an effort similar to that alleged by prosecutors.
• "We are working with a group of private investigators who have uncovered this massive election fraud scheme," the fundraiser said.

A former police captain in Texas has been arrested and accused of taking part in a vigilante scheme to expose voter fraud that prosecutors say culminated in an armed confrontation with an air-conditioning repairman falsely accused of harvesting fake ballots for this year's US election.

As the Houston ABC affiliate KTRK reported, Mark Anthony Aguirre was arrested Tuesday and charged by the Harris County district attorney's office with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

A police affidavit says that Aguirre, a former member of the Houston Police Department, spent four days in October as part of a team surveilling the mobile home of a man the team believed had 750,000 fake ballots and was "using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because the children's fingerprints would not appear in any databases."

The surveillance is said to have culminated in an October 19 attack on the repairman, who at 5:30 in the morning "noticed the driver of a black SUV pull into his lane and almost strike his vehicle," the police said. The repairman told the police that the SUV then rammed his vehicle, with Aguirre accused of pointing a gun at the driver, forcing him to the ground, and planting a knee on his back.

Two other vehicles then pulled up, the affidavit said, and another, unnamed person searched the truck, finding nothing. Indeed, police officers who arrived at the scene during the incident said the truck contained "equipment consistent with DL's occupation as an air-conditioning repair technician." (DL was the alias in the affidavit for the repairman.)

According to the affidavit, the police also searched the repairman's mobile home and shed, with his consent, finding "no evidence of voter fraud or ballot harvesting."

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, in a press release Tuesday, said Aguirre confessed to being part of a larger group investigating right-wing claims of voter fraud. As part of this effort, bank records show Aguirre received more than $266,000 from a Houston-based group, the Liberty Center for God and Country, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the vast majority received a day after the October 19 attack.

"He crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed," Ogg said. "His alleged investigation was backward from the start - first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened."

A fundraiser on GoFundMe, launched October 10 and still active hours after the news of Aguirre's arrest, shows that the Liberty Center raised just under $70,000 for an effort to uncover voter fraud before Election Day.

"The socialist Democrat leadership in Harris County has developed a massive ballot by mail vote harvesting scheme to steal the general election," the organizer, Dr. Steven Hotze, says on the page. "We are working with a group of private investigators who have uncovered this massive election fraud scheme…. You can help us expose and stop this massive election fraud scheme by donating here."

GoFundMe removed the page, saying the fundraiser violated its terms of service, after Business Insider contacted it.

Hotze is a well-known right-wing activist and promoter of holistic medicine, described by The Texas Tribune as a "Houston GOP powerbroker." In July, Hotze urged Gov. Greg Abbott to deploy the Texas National Guard against Black Lives Matter protesters, asking that they be given orders "to shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting… That's the only way you restore order. Kill 'em."

Hotze appears to no longer see Abbott as a political ally, having since launched another fundraiser aimed at underwriting legal challenges to the governor's COVID-19 public-health orders. The Facebook page for the Liberty Center also calls for Abbott, described as a "tin pot dictator," to be "tarred and feathered."

Another post, in between discredited claims of voter fraud, calls for violence against leftists, who the group and its founder have previously conflated with Democratic officials. "Christians, there is no compromise between Christianity and Communism," it says. "The only good Communist is a dead Communist."

The Liberty Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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