Fort Bend County Judge KP George charged with money laundering
The Brief
Current Fort Bend County Judge KP George has been charged with two counts of money laundering, according to jail records.
It's unclear what led up to the recent charges filed against George.
George has been in the public spotlight several times in the past year from him being charged with misrepresentation of identity back in September 2024 to possibly switching to the Republican Party.
HOUSTON - Current Fort Bend County Judge KP George has been charged with two counts of money laundering, according to the Fort Bend County District Attorney.
What we know
Fort Bend County Judge KP George with two counts of money laundering, according to the district attorney. Officials said the charges are a felony.
Jail records state his charge as money laundering over $30,000 but less than $150,000.
According to court documents, the offense occurred between January 12, 2019, and April 22, 2019.
Jail records state his bond amount has been set at $10,000 for each count.
Punishment range is two to 10 years in prison, if convicted.
What we don't know
It's unclear why George has been arrested as charging documents have not yet been released. The District Attorney's Office has not yet released any additional information.
What they're saying
Wesley Wittig with the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office released a statement on Friday saying, "The Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office filed a misdemeanor charge of Misrepresentation of Identity/Candidate against KP George last year, which is pending in County Court at Law No. 5. This came after an investigation into an associate of Mr. George was expanded to implicate George himself.
The District Attorney's Office has continuously stated that the investigation was ongoing, and that investigation has now led to two 3rd-degree felony indictments for Money Laundering, which were made public today. These charges are unrelated to the pending misdemeanor and are assigned to the 458th District Court.
Our office remains committed to the integrity our public deserves, and the ethics to which all prosecutors are sworn to. And our investigation remains ongoing."
The backstory
KP George has had several big stories in the public eye over the past year or so.
As FOX 26 has reported, George could be changing parties to the Republican Party.
George was also indicted on a charge of misrepresentation of identity back in September 2024. It was previously alleged that he allowed his consultant at the time, Taral Patel, to post social media comments impersonating people online to threaten others. George was charged with a Class A misdemeanor. Records accused the county judge of posing as "Antonio Scalywag" in a campaign post on his Facebook page.
George released a statement on the matter back in February.
However, it's unclear if either of these items are what led up to George being charged on Friday.
The other side
County Judge KP George issued the following statement on Friday:
"As an elected official, I have always operated with integrity and transparency. Let me be absolutely clear—there is nothing illegal about loaning personal funds to my own campaign and later repaying that loan. This is a standard and lawful practice.Unfortunately, this is a continued example of Fort Bend County District Attorney's office weaponizing the government with an obvious political witch hunt period. Allegations and accusations are being made without full context or disclosure of the facts—deliberately manipulating the narrative to tarnish my reputation and character.I have full confidence that the truth will prevail, in the meantime, I remain committed to serving and fighting for the people of Fort Bend County with the same passion and dedication as always."
This is a breaking news story. We're working to get the very latest.
The Source
Information above is according to jail records as well as previous FOX 26 reporting.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Chicago Tribune
11 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
‘Dreadhead Cowboy' accused of running illegal bar in unincorporated Gary
A Chicago man who gained notoriety for riding a horse on the Dan Ryan Expressway was charged with setting up an illegal bar and strip club in Calumet Township. Adam Hollingsworth, 37, is charged with maintaining a common nuisance, a Level 6 felony, and misdemeanor selling alcohol without a permit, according to the probable cause affidavit. In October, Indiana State Excise Police received a complaint about The Cowgirl Den, located at 3985 Cleveland St. On Nov. 1, the Lake County Sheriff's Department arrested an individual at the location for public intoxication, court records state. Police interviewed Lake Ridge Volunteer Fire Department Assistant Chief Dennis Carlotto, who said that the department is tasked with issuing occupancy permits for businesses in their fire district. He requested assistance from the Lake County Sheriff's Department when they made a fire inspection of the business on Oct. 31, records state. Dozens of people were present. Carlotto said the interior resembled a nightclub, with a counter staffed by bartenders and stocked with alcoholic beverages, a dance floor and a DJ. He said Hollingsworth identified himself as the operator of the business, the affidavit states. Carlotto told him that the business was ordered closed due to violations of state fire code. The business was granted an occupancy permit the next week and allowed to reopen, court records state. Police received photos of the Cowgirl Den's drink menu and fliers for events, saying it's '420 Friendly, Full bar and Hookah'. In searching its records, the Indiana Alcohol Tobacco Commission found no evidence indicating the address had a valid alcohol license or had a valid permit to sell tobacco products, records state. As of June 16, there are no signs of Hollingsworth applying for a license or permit. Hollingsworth advertised the Cowgirl Den under his 'Dread Head Cowboy' Facebook page. The nickname originated from a September 2020 incident where he rode his horse NuNu seven miles without horseshoes on the Dan Ryan Expressway to protest gun violence against children, according to Chicago Tribune archives. He later faced animal cruelty charges as the horse collapsed on the pavement near 95th Street and was overheated, bleeding from the hooves, and had dilated eyes. He pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and was sentenced to one year in prison in January 2022, court records state. He was also arrested in Hammond in May 2023 after police caught him riding his horse in the 7000 block of Indianapolis Boulevard, court records state. Police tried to prevent him from getting back on his horse again and Hollingsworth hit one of the officers with his elbow, resulting in battery of a police officer, resisting law enforcement and disorderly conduct charges. A jury found him guilty on the battery and resisting charges in May 2024, and he was sentenced to 30 days in jail, records state. In January, there was a domestic disturbance call at the Cowgirl Den, and when police responded, Hollingsworth informed them that he had paid dancers performing inside. Individuals were seen drinking alcohol, the affidavit states. In April, a video was sent to police that showed a nude woman dancing inside the club, with nearby patrons drinking alcohol. An undercover Gary Police officer went to the club on June 14 and requested a tequila drink and he later ordered another drink, records state. Officers later executed a search warrant that turned up a beverage menu and more than 70 bottles of liquor and beer. Hollingsworth was arrested at that time and said, 'Why am I being arrested for a private party with alcohol?' court records state. He has since posted a $1,495 bond and his initial hearing is scheduled for July 8.
Time Magazine
13 hours ago
- Time Magazine
Why Trump May Ignore 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Donald Trump expected his first face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama would be all of '10 or 15 minutes.' After all, the pair had spent years circling each other, trading barbs from afar and using the other's political movement as a blend of punching bag and strawman. The mutual enmity was hardly a secret; Obama's trolling of Trump at a White House correspondents' dinner set in motion the New Yorker's serious contemplation of Redemption By White House Win. [time-brightcove not-tgx='true'] The 2016 summit between the President-elect and the incumbent ended up going 90 minutes, during which North Korea was, to Trump's mind, the big takeaway. (Obama's team recalled the conversation differently.) The message was pretty clear: that rogue nation was one of the biggest problems Trump was inheriting as he rose to power after the 2016 election. The election clearly did not go as Obama had hoped so he had this one set piece to convey to his successor just how fraught the situation on the Korean Peninsula was, and how any misstep could be fatal to millions. The outgoing President's concern was that Trump, or some of his top advisers, might want to try to swap regimes. But history is lined with examples why these trades have never gone as planned. And Obama wanted to convey the risks of both a nuclear-armed free agent and a country decapitated without a clear next step. Obama hated the threat of a nuclear North Korea but also understood how things might escalate in some pretty terrible ways if unchecked emotions and amateur gut sense took over. Maybe—despite his own instincts—Trump understood that regime change was not compatible with this worldview. Instead, he courted the North Koreans and broke a half century of protocol in visiting with the reclusive regime's chief. In fact, as a candidate, and even well before that, Trump resisted any suggestion of intervention. That positioning helped Trump remake the Republican Party by elevating its isolationist wing. It's why the current moment is such a challenge for Trump: Israel's strikes on Iran lure dreams of a time after an Ayatollah runs the Islamic Republic. But dreams can easily turn into nightmares, and this particular lullaby is more than a little discordant. 'Regime change' has become shorthand in national-security circles the same way 'nation building' and 'mission accomplished' have devolved from well-considered policy goals into collapsed folly. U.S. intervention into foreign nations' governance in pursuit of friendlier—if not less-lethal—regimes has proven a loser. In recent years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya have all provided proof of the model's overly optimistic lens on the map. Going back in the post-World War II era, history has shown the United States very capable at both toppling governments and then promptly getting the sequel disastrously wrong. For every regime change at the hands of Americans that went well—think Adolf Hitler's exit from Germany and Benito Mussolini from Italy—there are multitudes that went off the rails: six overt attempts during the Cold War and another 64 in covert operations. And just about no one on the political stage this century has been more clear-eyed on that reality than Trump. Dating to his days as a celebrity host of a reality show, Trump hated foreign adventurism, although he did tell Howard Stern he supported the Iraq war a month before Congress voted on it. After launching his presidential bid in 2015, he campaigned endlessly against so-called 'forever wars' and creeping American meddling. He blasted decisions to engage beyond U.S. borders as simply stupid. He called regime change a dangerous precedent that violated sovereignty and wasted cache. For Trump, the ability to topple rivals was enough of a threat without taking it out of the safe. 'Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?' Trump said in a February 2016 debate. Months later, after he won election but before he took office, Trump seemed to redouble his skepticism of the military's reach into other governments. 'We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with,' the President-elect said in December of 2016. There's a reason why regime change has been a non-starter. Democrats hated it when George W. Bush tried it, particularly with Iraq. Republicans hated the blowback they faced for Bush's errors. Independents loathed the fallout. Swing-state voters hated that their kids were sent onto battlefields they didn't understand. Fiscal conservatives hated the costs. Fiscal liberals hated the opportunity costs. In Iraq alone, 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. Trump gets that. He may not have a grasp on the nuances of the foreign policy but he certainly gets the zeitgeist. And, as has been the case for two decades, the patience for a thrust beyond U.S. borders is limited. Want proof? Look at the post-WW2 landscape. South Korea, Greece, and Syria all fell to U.S. meddling before 1950 even got here. Burma, Egypt, Iraq, Guatemala, Indonesia, Syria (again), Cambodia, and Cuba all followed. Far-flung efforts in the Dominican Republic, Laos, Brazil, Chile, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Afghanistan, and even Poland followed. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti left U.S. administrations in the political muck. Vietnam was the biggest catastrophe to most Americans' memories. Put in the crudest terms, the United States is really good at ignoring what Washington has coined the Pottery Barn Rule: you break it, you own it. Yes, we can break a whole lot, and have. But the United States does not exactly have total control over what it knocks off the shelf. Which brings us back to Iran, which sits dangerously close to the ledge's edge. In public comments, Trump is being very cagey about what he does next. 'I may do it, I may not do it, nobody knows what I'm going to do,' Trump said Wednesday about the prospect of launching an air strike on an Iranian nuclear facility. Read more: A New Middle East Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes Yet undermining that cautiousness is Trump's apparent acceptance of Israel's view that Iran is racing toward building a nuclear weapon. That assessment is at odds with the U.S. intelligence community's view, which remains consistent that that's not the case. 'I don't care what she said,' Trump said on Tuesday, referring to recent testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Iran isn't actively trying to build a bomb. Trump may have been brutal about Bush getting the intel wrong on Iraq, but it seems he may not have learned the risks of rushing into the mix with incomplete or manipulated facts. Trump is, at his core, a gut-driven figure who has proven adept at finding voices that confirm his instinct—and banishing those who challenge it. Trump might despise the existing regime in Tehran, but he also does not want to be left with another shattered nation in that region with little more than epoxy as a plan. Yet even members of his own base fear he may be about to do just that, dragging the country into the very kind of boondoggle he won office by denouncing and abandoning the isolationism that he inserted into the GOP's new DNA. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
EXCLUSIVE. Pavel Durov on his arrest in France, Macron, Russia, the FBI — and the fight for Telegram
Who really knows Pavel Durov ? Arrested in France and facing charges as explosive as they are controversial – complicity in drug trafficking, money laundering, organized fraud among others –, the creator of Telegram, the encrypted messaging app used by more than a billion people worldwide, including Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron, denounces a conspiracy, a denial of justice, and claims to be already punished without having been tried. In this extensive interview, the longest he has ever given, the man who founded VKontakte (the "Russian Facebook") before leaving Russia in 2014 to preserve his independence reflects on his fight for freedom of expression, his categorical refusal to sell Telegram, his concerns about the future of democracy, his deep attachment to France. He reveals information about several state powers and intelligence services, including the FBI and DGSE. He also shares his views on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT. For the first time, Pavel Durov opens up about his admiration for Malcolm X's battles, the readings that shaped him, the figures that inspire him, and reveals intimate family memories, long kept secret. A hunted man, who claims to be ready to die rather than betray his values. Le Point: You are charged with 17 very serious counts related to child pornography, drug trafficking, money laundering... Do you understand what you are accused of ? Pavel Durov: It's totally absurd. Just because crim [...] Lire la suite
