August 06, 2025 11:44 AM UTC

House GOP's Vile Signal Chats Exposed To "Boxwine Brandi's" Dismay

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark sums up the common problem with X and the Colorado House GOP:

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Longtime state house reporter Bente Birkeland at Colorado Public Radio brings us a story we’ve heard the periphery of but hadn’t yet been privy to the full nauseating details. If you think the state of interparty relations in Washington is strained, and of course it is, it might not be quite as personally ugly there as it appears to be in the private Signal chat room of the Colorado House Republican minority caucus:

Democratic Rep. Yara Zokaie, a first-term lawmaker from Fort Collins, stood next to the podium waiting to speak before a final vote on one of her bills. The chamber was relatively quiet, with members in their seats, as is the protocol when the House is taking recorded votes.

It was at that moment that the number three House Republican, Minority Whip Ryan Armagost, lifted his cell phone to subtly take a picture of Zokaie from his seat in the front row of the chamber. House floor security footage reviewed by CPR News captured a quick flash of light from the phone before he angled it back down.

Armagost immediately shared the photo of Zokaie, who was wearing a black blazer over a short dress and knee-high leather boots, in a group chat with the rest of the Republican House caucus on Signal, with a comment he has since deleted…

From the House GOP’s Signal channel, the photo in question of freshman Democratic Rep. Yara Zokaie quickly made its way to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where as most readers know but now any residual standards of decency have long since worn away. Although the photo did not depict anything inappropriate or in violation of the House’s dress code, Rep. Zokaie was subjected to a wave of very personal insults that ultimately escalated to threats:

A day after the initial picture was posted, a user commented on one of Zokaie’s own posts on X, writing that it took him 5 minutes to find her address. He followed up with, “I recommend just staying inside, if not a confrontation is inevitable.”

Zokaie said the level of harassment she’s experienced from the photograph isn’t something anyone should have to put up with just because they want to serve their community. It led her to take safety precautions and request security for her home and at her son’s elementary school after someone sent a threat about the school.

But from the discussion on Signal about the photo that was leaked to CPR by an unknown source, Republicans responsible for spreading the photo have no interest in making things right by their freshman colleague:

“I thought it was come in Jeans day not in just your underwear day. That’s horrible and we need a professional dress code! And NO I don’t mean the “oldest profession” style!” said Rep. Rebecca Keltie in response to Armagost’s picture.

Rep. Brandi Bradley responded with three nauseated face emojis and a face-palm.

“That’s awful. I didn’t know it was dress like a stripper day,” Bradley typed in the group chat.

Screenshots show Armagost responded to Bradley, but he has since deleted his message.

“Wellllll, we ARE on Colfax….” Rep. Lori Garcia Sander wrote.

“Goes by the name of ‘Barbie Q’,…” Rep. Chris Richardson wrote.

“Those boots weren’t made for walking,” Garcia Sander wrote.

“Might be your best meme ever,” Bradley wrote.

“Armagost-more leg shots??” Garcia Sander wrote.

“Oh hell no,” Rep. Anthony Hartsook wrote.

At this point, Rep. Ryan Armagost reportedly posted a message he then deleted, followed by one additional message that wasn’t, asking his colleagues to “please stop.” Armagost by a twist of irony actually served at the time on the House’s Workplace Harassment Committee, giving him even less of an excuse for his atrocious behavior against his colleague. We assume by this point the inappropriate nature of what he’d started had penetrated even Rep. Armagost’s heavily armored conscience–but of course, the damage was done.

And where was the oversight in the form of Republican minority leadership, you ask?

Pugliese belongs to the caucus-wide group chat where Armagost originally shared the photo, but did not tell [Majority Leader Monica] Duran about it…

The morning after her conversation with Duran, Pugliese wrote in the GOP caucus’s Signal group chat: “Just a friendly reminder that the messages here may be subject to CORA.”

Minority Leader Pugliese appears to have been more concerned about disclosure than the original sin.

Of course, confronted with the leaked chat log, Pugliese insists she did indeed take some kind of unspecified action following this incident, and takes the harassment and disrespect for other legislators by members of her caucus in some respect “seriously.” Several Republican legislators also apologized for their remarks above after they learned of their imminent exposure, which you can read by clicking through to the original story. Now that Armagost is saying his long goodbye from elected office and moving to Arizona, the problem in Pugliese’s view is solved by laying the entire ugly episode at his feet.

But for Rep. “Boxwine” Brandi Bradley, true to form, the real problem is not the mistreatment of a fellow representative at all, but the as-yet unknown rat bastard in the Republican caucus who leaked their Signal chat to the press:

Based on this, we cannot feel hopeful that the lack of bipartisan professional respect and courtesy in the Colorado General Assembly will improve anytime soon. This story pairs unfavorably with the recent disclosures of alleged serial sexual harassment and other sketchy misconduct on the part of GOP Rep. Ron Weinberg, another questionable disciplinary case in the Republican House minority that came to light via other than official channels.

The world doesn’t always get to see it, but what they say in private tells you more than anything they say in public.