Gary Grief, former executive director of the Texas Lottery Commission, was reindicted by a Travis County grand jury after a previous indictment was dismissed by an assistant district attorney in mid-April.<\/p>\n
The new indictment is identical to the previous one<\/a>, court records show, and alleges Grief misused his office to defraud the state during the Lotto Texas drawing on April 22, 2023, a first-degree felony. A court summons was also issued Wednesday. <\/p>\n The 2023 Lotto drawing drew scrutiny after a group led by an international gambler used several lottery ticket printers to buy almost all of the 25 million possible ticket combinations to win the $95 million jackpot, a Houston Chronicle investigation revealed. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the jackpot was \u201cstolen\u201d from Texans, investigations<\/a> followed and the Texas Lottery Commission was ultimately dissolved<\/a>, its duties transferred to another state agency.<\/p>\n In a written statement to the Houston Chronicle, Sam Bassett, Grief\u2019s attorney, called the indictment \u201cthe product of politics, not facts demonstrating a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGary cooperated with the Texas Ranger investigation but neither he nor his counsel had input with the Grand Jury. The Rangers had their direction from politicians searching for a scapegoat,\u201d Bassett said. \u201cWhen all facts are revealed in court, the public will see that Gary\u2019s leadership at the Lottery Commission generated millions of dollars for Texas schools and veterans and there was no crime.\u201d<\/p>\n The Travis County district attorney\u2019s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Grief resigned from the lottery in February 2024 before scrutiny over the jackpot had mounted. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gary Grief, former executive director of the Texas Lottery Commission, was reindicted by a Travis County grand jury…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2314,1864,287,107109,1564,27,29,293,26232,28,394],"class_list":["post-293286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-criminal-justice","tag-dan-patrick","tag-politics","tag-sam-bassett","tag-state-government","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-legislature","tag-texas-lottery-commission","tag-texas-news","tag-travis-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}