January 20, 2026 12:34 PM UTC

Report: Dave Williams Dropped Digital Bomb on Way Out of Colorado GOP

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• by: Colorado Pols

For years there was a running joke on the Get More Smarter Podcast that former Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dave Williams might have been a secret plant by the Democrats because of all of the damage he inflicted on the State GOP.

Williams was such a nightmare as the GOP Chair that fellow Republicans spent much of their time in 2024 on trying to figure out a way to remove him from power before his term expired in March 2025. Between using the party apparatus to settle personal and political grievances and diverting funds into his own pockets, Williams was a disaster for a State Party that was already plenty familiar with poor leadership.

Williams may be gone, but he is not forgotten. Victor Marx, one of two dozen Republican candidates running for Governor in 2026, on Monday linked to an anonymous Substack post detailing a bunch of alleged misdeeds by Williams on his way out as Chair in March 2025.

The Substack post written by “Montanus Vigilans” outlines in detail allegations that Williams methodically purged a bunch of information from GOP servers before his two-year term as Chair expired in March 2025. Williams did not seek re-election and was replaced by Brita Horn, which is an improvement only if you really squint your eyes; he has since moved on to an obscure posting in the Trump administration.

As his grip on power slipped away in the spring of 2025, Williams and those acting in concert orchestrated a calculated digital purge of the Colorado Republican Committee’s (CRC) records. Emails, documents, and calendars. Years of institutional knowledge vanished in a deliberate export-then-delete scheme, timed to evade any chance of recovery. This wasn’t an accident. It was a final act of defiance against the incoming leadership, ensuring they had to start from scratch in a party already reeling from division…

…In the weeks leading up to and immediately following his ouster, administrative accounts linked to him, primarily dave@cologop.org and later dave@colo-gop.org, began a systematic dismantling of the party’s Google Workspace infrastructure. This wasn’t mere housekeeping. It was a premeditated effort to export sensitive data to unknown destinations before erasing it entirely, leaving the CRC digitally crippled.

We can’t say why this is only being publicly discussed now — some 10 months after Horn took over as GOP Chair — and there’s no way for us to independently verify the accusations against Williams. But the post by “Montanus Vigilans” contains plenty of apparently-corroborating information pulled from audit logs of the Google Workspace platform:

Exactly 20 days after the handoff should have occurred, coinciding with Google’s permanent deletion window for recovered data, the new leadership finally received credentials. By then, all traces were gone. From ~20 active users and 200GB of data to one empty account under 5GB.

Throughout this period, 9,252 file deletion events were logged in Google Drive. The bulk, 7,718, came from info@cologop.org, with contributions from Williams’ accounts. This export-then-delete pattern ensured copies might exist elsewhere (perhaps for leverage), while the originals were irretrievable…

…The wipe’s impact reverberates. In internal updates, the new chair described uncovering “unsanctioned access and deletion of data” after the election, prompting emergency safeguards such as 7-year retention policies, dual-admin approvals, and external AWS backups. These reforms, detailed in party documents, aim to prevent future sabotage, but they can’t undo the damage. Years of voter contacts, financial records, and strategic plans are gone, hampering the CRC’s ability to compete in the 2026 elections. [Pols emphasis]

Wait…there were “strategic plans”? To the extent that Williams had any “plans” for helping Colorado Republicans win elections in 2024, it’s probably better for the State GOP that those are now lost to history.

It was also widely reported that the Colorado GOP struggled to raise enough money to even keep the lights on during Williams’ tenure; financial records and donor contacts likely didn’t constitute a very large digital file anyway.

Regardless, the accusations against Williams contain a certain irony to them, given that the actions described are not dissimilar from the approach of a certain President of the United States:

This fits Williams’ pattern. From extorting presidential candidates to filing frivolous lawsuits, which accumulated legal debts owed by the Party, his leadership prioritized personal vendettas over the Party’s success. [Pols emphasis] The data purge was his parting shot, a bid to undermine successors and maintain shadow influence.

We’d also disagree with this conclusion:

Colorado Republicans deserve better than this cycle of destruction.

Handing control of your political party to Dave Williams is like giving your car keys to a drunken middle-schooler; you can be mad that they totaled your car, but…what did you expect?

Nobody who had been paying any attention to Colorado politics would have considered Williams to be a thoughtful, loyal, and selfless politician. In fact, the real surprise would have been if Williams had NOT focused on self-dealing and indifference toward the Republican Party.

As with Donald Trump, Republicans got what they paid for when they elected Dave Williams. They’ll be paying off those debts for years to come.