October 15, 2009 05:06 PM UTC

Burying The Lede, Just Enough Rope Edition

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

The ongoing story of gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry’s alleged use of the resources of the state-funded Senate Minority Office for his campaign takes an interesting turn this morning–at first glance, you might think that the sagely Lynn Bartels of the Denver Post has missed the point of this budding little controversy.

We, on the other hand, think she’s allowing the Penry campaign to talk itself right into a corner:

Colorado lawmakers who save e-mail addresses from constituents and others can send campaign-related messages to those accounts, according to a 2008 legal memo.

Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry, one of three Republicans running for governor, last year asked for clarification about using the e-mails for campaign purposes…

Several Democrats who had not signed up for Penry’s campaign e-mails recently received messages from him on their official state Capitol e-mail accounts. They surmised he got their addresses because they signed up to receive updates from ColoradoSenateNews.com, operated by Senate Republicans.

Penry, of Grand Junction, oversees the minority office.

Mike Britt, Penry’s campaign manager, would not say whether Penry used the SenateNews e-mail database.

“We’ve received lists from all kinds of different sources,” Britt said Wednesday. [Pols emphasis] “And there is no reason for us to release that kind of information to the Democrats and their liberal allies.”

We’ll let the reader decide if that’s basically an admission that the Penry campaign did pull the email list from the Senate Minority Office’s website–we’d say if Penry campaign manager Mike “RNC.com” Britt was sure they hadn’t, he’d have no problem telling that to Bartels. And apparently they’ve got this memo that says legislators can use lists collected on their websites for campaigns, empowering them (they think, anyway) to get kind of snippy about it.

Here’s the problem: individual legislator’s websites are not state property. A typical state legislator’s website serves as both a campaign website and in a general information role, depending on whether or not it’s election season. The two functions are really not separable and the memo’s conclusions are justified as it pertains to those sites.

The state-funded Senate Minority Office’s website, on the other hand, is state property and is subject to entirely different rules. Former Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany discovered this, much to his embarrassment, when he tried to use Republican Party funds to pay for developing the site a couple of years ago. It’s certainly not covered by this memo concerning the lists of individual legislators, and if it is? Why, doesn’t that mean that Gov. Bill Ritter can hit up Colorado.gov for every email address it’s ever received? You see where this is going, don’t you?

Chantell Taylor of Ethics Watch said Wednesday she had not reviewed the 2008 memo but said she believes Penry used a list compiled by ColoradoSenateNews.com, and the memo appears to cover only databases established by individual lawmakers.

Something tells us the next story isn’t going to be as “balanced.”