What we know about Charles Schwertner's arrest and a past incident involving UT student

Sen. Charles Schwertner was arrested and booked in the Travis County Jail overnight Tuesday after being charged with driving while intoxicated. The Republican from Georgetown has served in the Senate since 2012, representing House District 5, which includes Williamson and Bastrop counties. He previously served in the Texas State House for a single term.

On Tuesday morning, Schwertner was scheduled to preside over a Senate committee meeting on the state's power grid and recent winter power outages. As of 10 a.m., it is unclear if the meeting would proceed in his absence.

Schwertner has previously faced allegations of sending explicit text messages to a University of Texas student in 2018. Here's what we know about this previous incident and Tuesday's arrest.

Charles Schwertner was arrested in Austin, taken to Travis County Jail

According to Austin police spokesman Brandon Jones, police stopped Schwertner at West 45th Street and Avenue B in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Central Austin.

Police said the senator was stopped around 12:45 a.m. and was arrested at 2:12 a.m. He was then taken to the Travis County Jail. As of 8:30 a.m., he remained in custody as bail had not been set.

What investigation into sexually explicit text messages found

In 2018, Schwertner met a UT graduate student who, according to three senior university officials, said she had interest in working at the Legislature. Following the event, Schwertner, an alumnus of the university, exchanged messages on LinkedIn with the student before beginning to send text messages.

Two sources said the student said in those messages, Schwertner interrupted an otherwise professional exchange with a sexual proposition and an image of a man's genitalia. After multiple messages were sent, the student replied, "Please stop. This is unprofessional. I'm a student interested in learning about Healthcare Policy. These advances are unwanted."

Schwertner denied sending the messages, saying he shared a password with a third party to his LinkedIn account, but did not disclose their identity. The number used in the text messages was hand-written on a Schwertner Senate business card that was shared in a report conducted by the university.

The investigation deemed the evidence to be inconclusive in finding that Schwertner had violated school policy or Title IX.

The following year, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not to reappoint him as chairman to the Health and Human Services Committee for the 2019 legislative session, as per the senator's request.

What Texas Senate committees does Charles Schwertner chair and serve on?

Schwertner is chairman of the Senate's Business and Commerce Committee. He is also a member of the Finance and State Affairs Committee.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Charles Schwertner: What we know about arrest, texting incident