September 24, 2024 10:55 AM UTC

Dave Williams Loots Colorado GOP During His Everlasting Goodbye

• 7 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Yesterday, we discussed the conspicuous lack of the usual pre-election organizing operations normally carried out by the Colorado Republican Party this year, the result of gross mismanagement of dwindling resources under state party chairman Dave “Brandon Who?” Williams and a growing division between candidates who remain loyal to the state party and others including some national GOP interests aligning with pretender-chairman Eli Bremer. After unsuccessfully trying to convert the state party into a vehicle to promote favored primary candidates starting with Williams personally, nobody in charge at the state party seems to care about the all-important organizing work for the general election in November.

Williams remains in control of the Colorado Republican Party’s office and bank accounts pending the results of a trial set to begin in mid-October to sort out which of the competing processes and votes for and against Williams are legally binding. Until then, Republican candidates from municipal to congressional races are either on their own or working around the state party to organize their get-out-the-vote campaigns.

But as the Colorado Sun reports in today’s Unaffiliated newsletter, there is one thing the Colorado GOP under Dave Williams’ unshakable grip that isn’t skipping a beat–and that’s the cash payments to Williams and his closest cronies:

The Colorado GOP paid embattled Chairman Dave Williams’ consulting firm $34,000 in August, the party’s single biggest expense last month.

The party categorized $26,000 of that as “deferred payment of services.” The remaining $8,000 was categorized as “chairman consulting.”

…The Colorado GOP reported spending a total of $103,000 in August, none of which appears to have gone to help any Republican campaigns in the state. [Pols emphasis] The party raised $26,500 last month and started September with $354,095.80 in cash on hand.

If you’re part of the faction of the GOP opposed to Williams, watching Williams drain the party’s bank account into his own as “deferred payment” while he pushes off the court battle over his fate as chairman as long as possible has got to feel like outright theft. And if that’s not enough, the only party cashing in as handsomely as Williams is the law firm defending Williams from pretender-chairman Bremer, another $25,000 going to no productive purpose. All told it could be one of the worst cases of insult piled on injury in Colorado political history.

And until a judge says otherwise, there’s no one to stop Williams from continuing to loot the party financially while contributing basically nothing toward the election of Republican candidates in November either directly or in kind–and hurting more than they help when they do. If we didn’t know better, we’d say Dave Williams is intentionally running the Colorado Republican Party into the ground as revenge for the intraparty backlash against his singularly controversial chairmanship.

Honestly, we don’t know better. It’s as good an explanation as any.