February 06, 2013 08:22 AM UTC

"Honey Badger" Doesn't Care, He's On The Cover!

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• by: Colorado Pols

​We got the tip a couple of days ago about an upcoming fundraiser for embattled Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler. Apparently for $50 donated to his re-election campaign–we assume it's his re-election campaign and not his legal defense fund–he's giving out signed copies of the recent Westword issue featuring himself on the cover done up as the "Honey Badger." We've been meaning to get to this for the appropriate good-natured ribbing.

Westword's Patricia Calhoun, however, isn't quite as pleased–and for a pretty understandable reason. 

Yes, the Honey Badger has allegedly been flaunting this state's newspaper-theft statute — by taking more copies of Westword than he is entitled to…

The nine-year-old law that makes it a crime to take more than five copies of free-distribution newspapers in certain circumstances has been in the news lately; after a legislative commission recommended repealing Colorado's newspaper-theft statute this summer, sixty papers around the state ran editorials objecting to such a move. Instead, Representative Claire Levy and Senator Mike King are now sponsoring a proposal that would change the name of the existing statute to "interference with the lawful distribution of a newspaper" and move it to a different section of the criminal code; HB 1014 has already passed out of the judiciary committee.

The proposal would retain the language that makes it unlawful to take more than five copies "with the intent to prevent other individuals from reading that edition of the newspaper."

And Gessler hangs his defense on those words. "I'm distributing the papers," he points out. "Of course we intend to have people read them."

Presumably, Gessler intends donors to read the story about him, not the Back Page ads for "happy ending massages" or the finest weed directory in the state of Colorado. But he's right that's probably enough for the purposes of this state law. Calhoun continues: 

And because he responded to our queries so promptly — after we put in a call to his attorney, David Lane (yes, that David Lane) — we're going to forget the fact that every copy of Westword also includes these words: "No person may, without prior permission of Westword, take more than one copy of each issue."

Which is, we suppose, Westword's prerogative–call it a thank-you for Gessler providing them with such excellent material. Or, mayve David Lane was just his usual persuasive self on the matter. Either way, since they're not sufficiently angry with the misuse of copies of their paper to throw a stink about it, there's really only one thing to add–the actual content of Sam Levin's story that Gessler will be handing out.

On the eve of Election Day, in one of the most important swing states in the country, news broke that Gessler would be facing both criminal and ethics investigations — by the Denver District Attorney's Office and the state's Independent Ethics Commission, respectively — for his alleged misuse of funds, giving the secretary, who is no stranger to controversy, the worst headlines he'd ever received on his most important day on the job. He'd already spent a lot of time arguing that he was not suppressing voters; now he had to prove that he hadn't broken the law.

Call us old fashioned, but this story has a lot of stuff in it we wouldn't hand out at a fundraiser.