June 27, 2008 11:27 PM UTC

"The Lords of Payback"

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• by: JeffcoBlue

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Mike Zinna’s war against Jefferson County: he’s crazy, but the officials he went up against are much worse.

The Lords of Payback

Jefferson County officials show Mike Zinna that what goes around comes around.

In the endless muddle of battle between Mike Zinna and The Powers That Be in Jefferson County, moments of truth have been hard to find. But once in a while there’s a burst of light over the benighted trenches, like a flare from heaven, that offers a glimpse of the absurdity, the outrageousness, the possibly criminal nature of what’s going on. Such a moment took place in the federal courtroom of U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch a few weeks ago, during a hearing to decide whether one of Zinna’s serial lawsuits against the county could proceed to trial…

Shortly before the hearing, Zinna had filed a slew of documents with the court, and Matsch had read them with great interest. One was a 21-page summary of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the use of county funds to conduct surveillance on Zinna. Another was the latest in a series of witness affidavits suggesting possible involvement of county officials in the creation of an anonymous website, now defunct, that had defamed Zinna and made use of confidential e-mails hacked from Zinna’s own computer. Much of the material’s connect-the-dot allegations about outrageous, vindictive conduct seemed to lead back to Jim Congrove.

“We have a broader case now,” Matsch said. “This is a circumstantial-evidence case, for sure…[but] you can’t use the power of government to chill the speech of a political critic.”

Matsch didn’t think there was any point in hearing Tooley’s plea to throw out the claims against Congrove. He wasn’t inclined to find that, as a government official, Congrove had any immunity from liability, either. “I think this case has to go forward,” he said. “It’s clear to me that Mr. Congrove needs to go in front of a jury in this room.”

Matsch may be the first public official in Colorado to agree with Zinna on that point. Since Congrove and two other commissioners took office in 2005, the board and the county attorney’s office have been the targets of numerous ethics complaints and law-enforcement investigations, most of them revolving around alleged retaliation against Zinna. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office spent months puzzling over the disappearance of 8,000 pages of Zinna-related documents from the county attorney’s office. The Arvada Police Department and a grand jury looked at possible bank fraud after someone forged Zinna’s name on documents dealing with business transactions involving Congrove. A special prosecutor and the CBI poked around the hiring of a private investigator to tail Zinna. But while the investigations have uncovered what one prosecutor calls “troubling” behavior, to date no one has been charged with doing anything illegal…

Whatever ax Zinna has to grind, the guys on the other side seem to have a much more impressive collection of cutlery. Recently released CBI interviews, internal county memoranda, witness affidavits and court records stemming from the Zinna litigation suggest that a culture of payback is still thriving at Jeffco’s Taj Mahal, where the three elected commissioners control an annual budget of $382 million. The documents may not amount to a smoking gun – the case against Congrove, as Matsch noted, is highly circumstantial – but they do present a dismal picture of backroom deals and backstabbing intrigue, cronyism and petty vendettas, snitches and “confidential informants” and veiled threats. And running through it all is a dangerous level of Zinna obsession, something you might find in a weird little art-house film.