December 03, 2009 07:20 PM UTC

Sorting Through the Villafuerte Hype

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• by: Colorado Pols

Adams County Deputy DA Paul Nitze with the best analysis of the brouhaha over U.S. Attorney nominee Stephanie Villafuerte we’ve seen, laying out the unspun facts in a column today:

Late in Gov. Ritter’s 2006 campaign, when GOP candidate Bob Beauprez knew he was on the ropes, he took a cheap shot at the governor, then Denver’s district attorney. Based on information he obtained from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent by the name of Cory Voorhis, he ran an ad claiming that Ritter cut sweetheart deals to illegal aliens charged with serious crimes…

Had it not been for Voorhis’ concerted effort to funnel the Ramo information to Beauprez’s campaign, it never would have aired. Voorhis accessed this information for an improper, political purpose, and most likely violated federal law in doing so. But Voorhis wasn’t the only person who accessed the National Criminal Information Center (NCIC) database that fall.

Just after the Beauprez campaign launched its attack on Ritter, someone in the Denver DA’s office also ran Ramo’s name through the NCIC database. And that background check coincided with a series of calls from Villafuerte and others in the Ritter campaign to their old office. While we don’t know exactly who requested that the check be run, the evidence strongly suggests that Villafuerte called First Assistant DA Chuck Lepley and a press officer about Ramo.

Since then, both Ritter and Villafuerte have denied contacting the Denver DA’s office about Ramo. They claim that the flurry of calls to their old office was limited to a possible security threat to Ritter, despite evidence to the contrary. Rather than simply admit the contact, they’ve stonewalled. As seems to be a pattern with the governor through his first term, the cure has turned out to be worse than the disease.

Dick Wadhams, Congressman Mike Coffman, and a substantial chunk of the Republicans in the state Legislature are now out for blood. With its breathless, scoop-a-minute coverage of the Ramo/Voorhis affair, the Post is eager to help them kill the nomination. Lost in all of this is the basic question of what’s best for the state.

We’ve been without a U.S. attorney since January, when Troy Eid stepped down. Dave Gaouette, the acting U.S. attorney, is a very capable interim head, but he doesn’t have the mandate of a Senate-confirmed appointee. Major policy decisions and new hiring is frozen until a nominee is confirmed…

I welcome a serious debate about Villafuerte’s qualifications as a nominee, her judgment during her long tenure at the Denver DA’s office, and her position on the policy issues a U.S. attorney must navigate. If there’s a pattern of deception or misconduct, let’s hash it out.

But let’s not follow the Post’s lead by allowing state Republicans to use Villafuerte as a pawn to air out their grievances against Ritter or weaken him for the 2010 campaign.

One of the few issues we’d take with Nitze’s analysis is his description of Denver Post reporter Karen Crummy’s coverage as ‘scoop-a-minute.’ Most of her stories could more accurately be titled “Dick Wadhams sends press release on Villafuerte” or “Republicans even more bombastic than yesterday about Villafuerte” than whatever she calls them, very little actual ‘scoop’ to be had here. Add in the practically identical cut-and-paste from Crummy about how her read of this three-year-old Beauprez hit job ‘doesn’t comport’ with the FBI’s conclusions, which appears in each breathless ‘new’ article, and you could pretty much write these stories for her.

Folks, we do make every effort to be fair in these situations–we still wonder why, given the glacial pace of U.S. Attorney confirmations and the relative ease with which they can be stalled, somebody didn’t do a better job pushing back on this stuff before it became a problem. We’re still baffled that Villafuerte ever made it this far in the process, because it was obvious (or should have been) that these questions would continue to be a problem for Ritter if she was the nominee. We agree with Nitze that the lack of communication from the Governor’s office doesn’t really help them extract from the situation.

But we’ve read all these stories from Crummy, and if there’s not a really big unreported fact lurking that somehow makes what the Ritter campaign may have done in self-defense worse than the Beauprez campaign’s original act of misusing law enforcement resources for political purposes, it’s just a load of Wadhams’ spin that the Post is subsidizing.