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80%

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(D) Phil Weiser

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50%↓

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October 06, 2009 06:39 PM UTC

Inside Penry's Spam Problem

1 Comments
by: Colorado Pols

We know some of you are wondering why we’ve taken such an interest in gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry’s recent unsolicited campaign email troubles. For one thing, the state-funded Senate Minority Office’s website, ColoradoSenateNews.com, has always been a little shady, running afoul of the law more than once. And as Senate Minority Leader, there’s a very clear chain of custody for that website’s email list, with Penry at the top. When people started complaining about spam from the Penry campaign, this was one of the first locations they thought of where their addresses might have been obtained.

But as the Colorado Independent reports this morning, there’s more to this story worth considering:

In September, the Denver Post reported that government employees were receiving campaign emails from Penry for Governor- employees that subscribed to the Minority Office list but not to the Penry campaign list.

Mike Britt, Penry’s campaign manager, told The Post that the campaign “asked supporters – including lawmakers and lobbyists – to share their distribution lists. That could be how the campaign ended up with e-mail addresses to state government accounts.”

This is not the first time, however, that political operative Mike Britt has been involved in an email scandal. Britt was one of Karl Rove’s acolytes in the Bush administration and he was one of the targets in 2007 of the congressional investigation into violations of the Presidential Records Act, also known as the White House email scandal, where Rove and Britt and other strategists conducted official government business on their Republican National Committee email accounts instead of on White House email accounts.

White House email is part of a public record archived for future researchers. The RNC emails, though, were mysteriously deleted when investigators began asking for them.

Observers remain skeptical of the Bush administration’s use of the RNC email accounts and particularly of Rove’s defense in the matter. Colorado Ethics Watch is likewise unconvinced by Britt’s explanation in the matter of Penry’s email distribution campaign… [Pols emphasis]

ColoradoSenateNews.com, the Minority Office website, drew similar scrutiny two years ago. In an investigation conducted by media outlets including the Colorado Independent, then-Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany revealed that the site came to life through a “handshake agreement” he made with GOP operative Brad Jones, the man behind now-suspended conservative blog Face the State. The two sites were originally both registered to Jones.

At the time, Colorado Ethics Watch reported that McElhany broke the law in paying Jones $2,700 with contributions from a political action committee to create the site. Political contributions, mostly campaign funding, may not be used for official purposes, including building a Senate party site.

The Mike Britt RoveGate angle is scintillating, of course, but for the present discussion it’s more just an indicator–of a culture of blurred lines between officialdom and electoral politics, a macro example from the Bush/Rove White House applied in the first person to the Josh Penry campaign. As it turns out, there’s this fascinatingly ugly little narrative about the bad old Bushies lurking just beneath this seemingly innocuous story of Penry’s political spam: not to mention the exact sort of political misuse that was, as the Independent’s brief recap explains, the problem with “Colorado Senate News” all along.

Quite the “clean break from the politics of the past” for our boy Penry, wouldn’t you say?

One thought on “Inside Penry’s Spam Problem”

redstateblues says:

October 6, 2009 at 6:55 pm

when I wrote about this earlier this year, if Josh Penry was really interested in differentiating himself from the Republicans in Washington that he’s been railing against, he would have hired someone to manage his campaign who wasn’t so closely associated with Karl Rove.

The fact that Mike Britt is at the center of yet another e-mail scandal shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.

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Inside Penry's Spam Problem

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