An attorney for Fort Bend County Judge KP George said Tuesday he’s preparing for a mid-May preliminary hearing on allegations that the judge laundered campaign money, suggesting the claims are a politically motivated vendetta by the district attorney.
Jared Woodfill, a former Harris County GOP chair who made an unsuccessful bid for the Texas House last year, raised eyebrows when he announced he and Terry Yates are representing George, prompting speculation that the judge, a Democrat, may be switching parties before seeking re-election in next year’s primary. George was first elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022.
Woodfill said District Attorney Brian Middleton, a Democrat, doesn’t like the way George has been voting at Commissioners Court and wants to grab headlines in an attempt to unseat the judge in a ‘26 primary.
George is accused of a misdemeanor charge of identity misrepresentation, with prosecutors alleging he worked with a staff member to fake racist attacks against his own campaign on social media in an effort to gain favor with the public. He appeared in court earlier this month and the case was postponed to June 13. George’s former staffer, Taral Patel, pleaded guilty April 15 to two counts of misdemeanor misrepresentation of identity by a candidate and was sentenced to probation.
Separate from the social media hoax, George has been charged with money laundering, a third-degree felony. He was arrested April 4 on two counts of laundering between $30,000 and $150,000. He bonded out of county jail and presided over a Fort Bend County Commissioners Court meeting days later. Woodfill said a preliminary hearing on that case is set for mid-May but was unsure of the exact date.
As for Middleton’s vendetta, it appears he wants the judge out of office, Woodfill said.
The DA filed a complaint with the Texas Ethics Commission and got a grand jury indictment against George related to the social media hoax before the judge had a chance to respond, Woodfill said.
“Judge George has never even been found liable by the Texas Ethics Commission, the body responsible for investigating alleged violations of the Texas Election Code,” Woodfill said in a press release. He added Tuesday that the alleged ethics violation is being appealed and a precedent was set by a previous case in which a court found an indictment was invalid because “they didn’t exhaust their administrative remedies, meaning going through the TEC. For election code violations, you have to go through the Texas Ethics Commission first,” Woodfill said.
Woodfill claims the DA said he would dismiss the charges if George would resign, but George refused.
“He’s going to run for office and he denied the allegations,” Woodfill said. “When he refused to resign, they looked through six or seven years of campaign filings and found what they thought was a mistake, a loan to himself from the campaign that he paid back that they didn’t think was properly documented. They found two mistakes in six or seven years of filings. That was just in retaliation for him refusing to take the plea deal they had offered.”
Middleton acknowledged Monday that his office is “prosecuting indictments returned by a Fort Bend County grand jury against KP George that allege his commission of criminal misconduct.”
“For many good reasons, Texas legal ethics rules limit the kinds of public statements a prosecutor and defense attorney can make about a pending criminal case,” Middleton said in an emailed statement. “To that end, the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office has been very careful to do its talking in the courtroom and not on the courthouse steps.”
Woodfill said he believes the DA rushed to judgment instead of allowing the process to play out through the proper channels.
“If he had waited, he wouldn’t have had the headline he needed to influence an election,” he said. “This is all about dirty politics. I think the DA’s office is being weaponized to take out a political opponent. The judge has not voted in lockstep with the Democratic Party on budgets, redistricting, and things of that nature. There’s a schism in the Democratic Party in Fort Bend and Judge George is on one side and Middleton is on the other.”
