Enyinna Isiguzo
A Houston activist was fined $12,438 last month for allegedly sending misleading mailers to disrupt a high-profile Houston City Council race among Tony Buzbee, Enyinna Isiguzo and incumbent council member Mary Nan Huffman in the fall of 2023.
The mailers, which supported long-shot candidate Isiguzo and opposed Huffman, cost at least $7,438 to make and mail, according to Texas Ethics Commission investigators, and raised “dirty pool” accusations from local political experts. Isiguzo received 11% of the vote, forcing a runoff between Buzbee and Huffman, who ultimately won the race.
In previous interviews with the Houston Chronicle, Isiguzo said he didn’t know the mailers existed and did not know the person who formed the political action committee that allegedly paid for them. The mailers made no mention of Buzbee.
Ethics commission investigators called it a “deceptive mailer scheme” and alleged that without campaign finance information filed and publicly available, the alleged respondent, Daysi Marin, “shielded the PAC’s backers from accountability,” and “deprived (the public) of disclosure,” according to the hearing notice.
“Deceitful campaign tactics like this have no place in our elections, and the Texas Ethics Commission seems to agree,” Huffman said Tuesday. “I am grateful to the TEC for the work that they have put into investigating this matter and am pleased that those who sought to mislead Houston residents will be held to account.”
Investigators said Marin evaded all contact with the commission and did not show up at any hearings on the case, so they were not able to conclude who the financial backers were of the political action committee and therefore who else may have been involved in the mailers. Still, the ethics commission voted unanimously to approve the investigator’s proposed fine of $12,438 at a June 12 hearing.
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The mailers were initially publicized in a December 2023 article in the Chronicle, which was the basis for a community member’s complaint to the ethics commission, according to the documents. The complainant, John Cobarruvias, has filed dozens of ethics complaints, some of which resulted in fines for other elected officials such as Eric Dick, a trustee on the Harris County Department of Education board. Dick owes the ethics commission $40,000 that he has said previously he does not plan to pay and blamed politics for the fines.
The City Council race in which the mailers were filed became heated in the fall of 2023, when just before the deadline to file, Buzbee, a prominent Republican and well-known Houston attorney, threw his hat in the ring to challenge the incumbent Huffman, also a Republican, in the wealthiest Houston City Council district with a Republican-leaning voting majority.
The race pitted area Republicans against each other, especially because Buzbee had just prevailed while defending Attorney General Ken Paxton in his impeachment trial, which may have both helped and hurt his chances. Some mailers claimed that Huffman cared only about conservative constituents of District G and was aligned with Steve Hotze and President Donald Trump. They attempted to show Isiguzo as the progressive choice for District G’s City Council election.
Isiguzo said he campaigned by word of mouth and flyers he designed, spending only $150 on his campaign. He told the Chronicle at the time that he was pleased with the election results given his grassroots effort. But the runoff almost didn’t happen, as Huffman was just a couple hundred votes shy of avoiding it altogether. In a city election with multiple candidates, low turnout and limited polling, it is tough to know whether the mailers influenced voters.
Cobarruvias said he was not satisfied with the fines as an outcome for his ethics complaint, mostly because he believes they will not be paid, like in the case of Dick.
“I appreciate the work the (ethics commission) investigators perform. Unfortunately, they do not have enforcement capabilities, and the Texas Attorney General’s Office has refused to collect these fines,” he said. “If this activity is not investigated and stopped, others will be able to illegally try to influence city elections with no consequences.”
I’ll be honest, I don’t remember Enyinna Isiguzo at all. I tagged him on a couple of posts, and in the comments to this post, you can see that one of my readers received the deceptive mailers in question. CM Huffman got over 49% of the vote in November and almost certainly would have won without a runoff (she got 56% in the runoff that did happen) had it not been for this guy. I do not find his claims that he knew nothing of the mailers being sent out on his behalf to be credible. If you really didn’t know, you should have known. Don’t go running for office if you’re that out of touch with what is happening in your own race.
As for John Cobarruvias, whom I have known for about 20 years, he’s still out there blogging, and wrote about this last month. I support his actions to keep candidates in compliance, and I share his frustrations with the enforcement process.