April 05, 2007 04:20 PM UTC

GOP Answers Coordination Charge With Middle Finger

• 0 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports:

The right-leaning blogger who uncovered Democratic Rep. Michael Merrifield’s e-mail damning charter school supporters says his connection to a website for Senate Republicans is minimal.

Brad Jones, a 23-year-old political consultant, helped get ColoradoSenateNews.com online and was the site’s registrant – until this week.

His name was removed after the left-leaning ColoradoConfidential .org questioned Jones’ ties to the Senate minority’s communications office.

Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany, R-Colorado Springs, said there is no connection between Senate Republicans and the open-records request Jones filed to get Merrifield’s e-mail.

“Nobody in this office knew anything about it until after it happened,” he said. But, McElhany added, it wouldn’t matter if they did…

Fair enough. Presumably it won’t matter who files CORA requests against every Republican legislator, will it? That’s our read of their response, and we predict that there will be disgrace enough for both parties by the time this is over.

As we’ve said before, every legislator’s “private” email is potentially vulnerable to a CORA demand because of the manner in which “official” messages are forwarded to the same private inboxes. While some more savvy officials may have taken steps to separate official from private emails, most of them have no idea how screwed they could be at any moment.

But thanks to Brad Jones, they’re about to find out.

The Rocky Mountain News has more, including discussion of how GOP legislative staff are capitalizing on Jones’ actions:

“If the liberal blogs want to spin their wheels looking for conspiracies that don’t exist, they’re free to do so,” said Jones, who has worked for a variety of Republican campaigns, including gubernatorial bids by Marc Holtzman and Bob Beauprez.

But ColoradoConfidential blogger Jason Bane said that the Senate Republicans appeared to be piggybacking on facethestate. com’s Merrifield expose.

He noted that a Senate Republican press aide used his state e-mail account to distribute a press release bearing the state seal titled “Incendiary e-mails backfire on charter school foes.” The Republican release linked readers to the Merrifield e-mail bearing the “Face the State” logo.

[Senate President Joan] Fitz-Gerald was alarmed to hear that a state employee was using the Colorado seal while distributing a partisan attack…