March 18, 2010 08:49 PM UTC

The Continuing Story of "Our 527"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Back in January, we discussed the Scott McInnis gubernatorial campaign’s replacement of their relatively inexperienced campaign manager with Nancy Hopper. Ex-manager George Culpepper had, as the tale was told to us, not exactly distinguished himself during his tenure, and the switch to Hopper was an attempt to reorganize and professionalize McInnis’ campaign.

But as the Colorado Independent reported late yesterday, there may be more to the story of Culpepper’s “departure,” with a familiar twist–did he just move over a spot on The Diagram?

Colorado campaign watchdog groups are keeping a close eye on a Virginia nonprofit group with a Littleton address, which they suspect may be the smoking gun gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis alluded to on a cryptic voicemail nearly a year ago.

Before he had even filed his paperwork to run for governor, the former six-term GOP congressman from Colorado’s Western Slope left a voicemail for a potential campaign contributor referring to a 527 group set up by Republican political operative Sean Tonner.

Late last year, McInnis campaign director George Culpepper resigned, later phoning a Montana newspaper to tell them he still supported McInnis but quit to “form Western Skies, a political strategies organization based in Colorado.”

Tonner, president of the conservative lobbying firm Phase Line Strategies, in 2008 registered the Western Skies Coalition, a 501(c)4 nonprofit “dedicated to promoting issues that make our nation great.” Western Skies drew criticism from the left for trying to “green wash” Republican state Senate candidates in ad campaigns during that election cycle that painted them as pro-environment.

“We’ve got Sean Tonner on board. Sean’s doing our 5-uh, or a 527,” McInnis said on the infamous voicemail first posted on the Complete Colorado website in April of 2009. “We’ve got lots of support in the oil and gas industry.”

…”[McInnis] said Sean Tonner is setting up our 527, so maybe he was talking about Western Skies,” [Colorado Ethics Watch’s Luis] Toro said. “And then when his former campaign manager [Culpepper] quits or leaves and goes to run that very same organization, that’s a red flag, so we’re certainly going to be watching this closely.”

It’s interesting, because when we posted the version of events surrounding Culpepper’s replacement as McInnis campaign manager relayed to us, a number of Republicans jumped to Culpepper’s defense (see comments), asserting that he was in fact quite competent, et cetera, contrary to our summary of Culpepper as “long on antics and short on substance.” We’re not so vain as to rule out the possibility of being wrong about Culpepper, particularly in light of his apparently continued employment by widely-suspected McInnis campaign assets–but that would seem to invite a few questions of its own.