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April 05, 2007 07:03 PM UTC

Robocall Scandal Compounded By Apparent Dishonesty

  • 13 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

It’s almost always worse than the “crime,” after all, as the Rocky Mountain News reports:

E-mails contradict a lobbyist’s claim that his well-heeled organization had nothing to do with a deceptive phone-call campaign conducted in March.

The calls warned voters that a construction-defects bill in the legislature favored trial lawyers and would raise taxes.

The e-mails, obtained by the Rocky Mountain News, are between a Virginia company that produced the calls and William Mutch, lobbyist and director of Colorado Concern.

“Thank you for the call yesterday regarding the pending legislation that Colorado Concern may want to try and influence in Colorado,” the Virginia executive wrote to Mutch. Later e-mails include ideas for scripts for the calls. Mutch last week told the Rocky that Colorado Concern, a consortium of the state’s most powerful business leaders, had nothing to do with the calls. He said a developer who is chairman of the group was behind the calls, but was acting independently.

Mutch did not return calls or e-mails on Thursday.

Both Mutch and Steve Durham, lobbyist for the Colorado Association of Home Builders, have been named in an ethics complaint filed with legislative leaders over the calls.

In March, the calls went to senior citizens in certain Democratic districts. The seniors were told their local lawmaker supported a bill that would increase taxes. No such bill existed at the time. The bill eventually introduced, House Bill 1338, does not increase taxes.

Where before it just looked like garden-variety political hardball, lying about who is behind the calls stands to make many more people look bad — from Bill Mutch and Steve Durham to those who hire them.

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13 thoughts on “Robocall Scandal Compounded By Apparent Dishonesty”

  1. Apparently we’ve gotten to the point where these kinds of dirty tricks are so common and expected from the big money lobbies, nobody’s interested enough to comment.

  2. Jared Polis hired a sleazy Republican lobbyist to fight for ethics reform.
    That lobbyist than goes on to attack good Democrats by telling lies and scaring senior citizens.
    Everyone knows Steve Durham is sleazy and Jared Polis hired him anyway.
    Will Jared Polis do the right thing and fire Durham and apologize to Representatives Borodkin and Todd.

    1. Durham has been let off the hook.

      “Durham said lawmakers who were upset with the calls, which began on March 5 and abruptly ended after lawmakers complained, had repeatedly been told that neither he nor the home builders had anything do with them.

      Durham said he was pleased the complaint against him won’t proceed, but frustrated that he had been named in the first place.

      “It’s hard to see how this complaint was filed in good faith,” Durham said.

      The home builders and Colorado Concern were working together to defeat the bill once it was introduced, said Rob Nanfelt, government affairs director for the home builders association.

      That’s why home builders were included in e-mails about the calls.”
      http://www.rockymoun…

      From the last sentence in this article I take it that Durham was still involved in crafting the message for the robo-calls, but Mutch was the driving force behind it.

      1. What evidence do you have that Pollis hired durham? I have only seen a RMN reporter suggest that. But there is ABSOLUTELY no evidence of such.
      2. Is this guilt by association that we are not discussing? If so, then every last one of the  current congress is guilty since he was a congressman and knew most, if not all, of them.
      3. Have you read anything coming out of the post and the news? If I read it correctly, Durham was supposedly cleared of this

      I guess something is brewing. But it smells like methanol rather than ethanol. And I suspect that you have drank far too much of it.

    3. Durham does work for someone who is sleazy, for something that has nothing to do with Polis, and somehow that is Polis’ responsibility?  If you want to bash Polis, do it directly.  Don’t use this “degrees of separation” nonsense.

  4. I think this is great. Not the initial action but the blowback. Why is everyone so concerned about corruption, heavy handed lobbying, etc? It seems like every time someone tries it it blows up in their face and hurts them.

    As long as we have a government of human beings we will have varying degrees of corruption. But as long as the odds are good of it being counter-productive, you not only have the efforst failing, but you have others not trying it because it can make things worse.

    Love how this is playing out

    1. Why does this always seem to be Repubs with their hand in the till??? I’m starting to see enough data that one can fairly claim a correlation.

      Come on everyone, don’t we have one crooked legislator on the Democratic side?

      1. What legislator was involved?  Only, apparently, lobbiest Munch and his overseers, who, by the way are attached to the Governor not any repub legislature.

        Let’s see, Sen. Hanna (oops, former Dem senator) last year lost her fingers trying to reach into the till.

        1. You mean you don’t see any connecton between the bullying tacts used by the homebuilders, Minority Leader May and Rep. Balmer?
          http://www.coloradop…

          While those legislators didn’t write the robo-call scripts, more than likely there were discussion on how this bill would be used for election campaigns between the Homebuilders and the House Republicans (see Balmer’s threats towards Rep. Stafford of her becoming a target in 2008).

          The Senate Minority Office got the same memo from those writing the robo-call script to paint the picture of the bill benefitting trial lawyers. http://www.colorados…

          Don’t tell me there is not attachment between the Homebuilders and the Republican in the General Assembly.

          1. The robo-calls were before there was a bill.  Also, robo calls have been used by both sides since Robo and Call got together years ago.  The question is (which your partisan brain is not really interested in) is weather the content of the calls were illegal – that remains to be seen.  If they were not – end of story (other than Munch lied to the press about his involvment – also not a crime but stupid). 

            Free speach is still the law of the land (I think) and unless specific lobbiest restrictions were violated, this Democrat-backed (yes a Ritter guy actually funded the calls) will rightly be exonerated – whether you criminalize speach folks like it or not.

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