UPDATE: Find an updated version of this article here.
The bribery and wire fraud case against Daniel J. Garcia, an attorney and Rio Grande City school board trustee, will no longer move forward after federal prosecutors announced their intentions to drop the charges against him.
The announcement came during a status conference before U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez Tuesday morning.
“We intend to file a motion to dismiss charges against Mr. Danny Garcia, your honor,” said Marco A. Palmieri, a prosecutor with the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice.
“That approval was received after close of business yesterday, so we have not yet had an opportunity to formally file, but we wanted to make that announcement and do so orally,” Palmieri said.
Palmieri said the government would officially file its motion to dismiss the charges against Garcia by the end of the day Tuesday.
Garcia was originally charged with seven counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering after a grand jury handed up a 74-count superseding indictment in April 2019 in connection with the multimillion dollar bribery scheme allegedly at the center of a project to rehabilitate Weslaco’s water treatment facilities.
The indictment alleged that Garcia used his attorney trust account, also known as an IOLTA account, to launder bribes from the alleged scheme while keeping some of the proceeds for himself.
But from the beginning, Garcia — through his defense team — has alleged that the government’s case against him is not only weak, but completely deficient.
Over the course of numerous status conferences where prosecutors and the cadre of defense attorneys representing Garcia, as well as his codefendants, Garcia has maintained that little — if any — of the evidence turned over in discovery has applied to him.
Three other men were originally named in the indictment along with Garcia, including former Hidalgo County Precinct 1 Commissioner Arturo “A.C.” Cuellar, former Weslaco City Commissioner John Cuellar, and Weslaco businessman Ricardo Quintanilla. The two Cuellars are cousins.
Since the superseding indictment was unsealed, one defendant — John Cuellar — has since reached a plea deal with prosecutors. Cuellar, who had been charged with the bulk of the counts in the indictment at 61, agreed to plead guilty to count one of the indictment in August 2019. In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the remaining charges against him.
Meanwhile, in another discussion held Tuesday, the court determined that the trial against the remaining two defendants will be further delayed until June due to the rising threat of the COVID-19 omicron variant.
Background info here:
