Aided by Attorney General Ken Paxton, Houston conservative activist Steve Hotze is planning to again enlist private sleuths to uncover evidence of voter fraud in Harris County this year, even after one of his own investigators was indicted last year for allegedly holding an air conditioning repairman at gunpoint while in search of phony ballots.

The investigator, former Houston police captain Mark Aguirre, said he was surprised to find the A/C repairman’s truck contained only parts and tools, and not thousands of phony ballots, after allegedly running him off the road in the run-up to the 2020 election. The repairman later sued Hotze and his organization, Liberty Center for God and Country, for hiring and paying Aguirre.

Undeterred, Hotze is raising money to again support his group’s so-called voter integrity efforts. On Saturday, Paxton and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who has spread incendiary false conspiracies about the 2020 election, are headlining a Freedom Gala at the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Houston that will fund, in part, the hiring of “private detectives to investigate, identify, and expose the criminal vote fraud scheme in Harris County and across Texas.”

The funds also will go toward hiring poll watchers for the midterm elections in November, broadcasting radio ads offering rewards for evidence of voter fraud, and funding “legal defensive and offensive efforts to Stop Vote Fraud,” according to a website for the event. It is unclear if that includes Hotze’s own legal fees, though in a video previewing the event, he mentioned the lawsuit stemming from the Aguirre incident.