If you still don’t believe that certain people are empowered to operate with violence indiscriminately in this country or that the repeated claims of voter fraud pushed by President Trump pose a danger to society, the case of former Houston Police Captain Mark Anthony Aguirre’s arrest on Tuesday for his alleged assault on a civilian in October should clear it up for you.
According to a release from the Office of the District Attorney in Harris County, Texas, 63-year-old Aguirre is accused of going on a mission on Oct. 19 to reveal supposed evidence of massive election fraud, a mission which ended with him running an innocent air conditioner repairman off the road and putting a gun to his head on the sketchy claim that he had 750,000 fake ballots hidden in his truck.
Court documents referenced in the DA’s statement said that after Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of the AC technician’s truck to force him to stop and get out, he forced the repairman to the ground and put his knee on the man’s back. All of this was captured on the body cam worn by a patrol officer who witnessed Aguirre crashing into the truck of the victim who he told cops he had been conducting surveillance on for four days.
When it was revealed that the man Aguirre had accosted in front of the cops was just an “innocent and ordinary air conditioner repair technician,” the former police captain then directed them to search the victim’s truck—which the DA’s statement said was filled with nothing but air conditioning parts and tools.
“He crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said of the incident. “His alleged investigation was backward from the start – first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened.”
After still going on to probe Aguirre’s election fraud claims and finding them baseless, the police found that the right-wing group Liberty Center for God and Country had deposited upwards of $266,000 in his account after the incident—information which he had not shared with them. Liberty Center is headed by Steven F. Hotze, a Texas conservative who has been behind other messy election interference attempts, and has been generally denying the reality that Trump lost the election.
Unsurprisingly, Aguirre’s lawyers are now trying to claim that he is the victim of political persecution for being charged with assaulting somebody because of what seems to be a well-funded right-wing fantasy.
“I think it’s a political prosecution. I really do,” Aguirre’s attorney Terry Yates told ABC 13. “He was working and investigating voter fraud, and there was an accident. A member of the car got out and rushed at him and that’s where the confrontation took place.”
Working? Aguirre was no longer employed as a cop! He had absolutely no authority to chase down a random repairman and reportedly hold a gun to his head due to delusions of a huge fraud cover-up.
Luckily, the authorities in Harris County finally seem to agree with that assessment of the situation and charged Aguirre this week with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony, which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. A judge set his bail at $30,000, which Aguirre is likely to be able to easily cover with that windfall of money he was allegedly paid by the Liberty Center. If that’s not evidence that some people still have the benefit of a more permissive justice system, I don’t know what is.
Correction: 12/17/2020, 1:45 p.m. ET: A previous version of this story incorrectly said a police officer accompanied Aguirre in his attempt to apprehend the victim after crashing into his truck. According to a statement by the Houston Police, a patrol officer witnessed the alleged assault after observing the crash while responding to an unrelated call. The story has been updated.