CBI speeds campaign probe

Governor wants answers on whether Beauprez camp broke law to make attack ad

By Beth Potter, The Denver Post
November 8, 2006

The head of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation said Saturday he expects to determine within a week whether Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez's campaign broke the law in its research for an attack ad against Democrat Bill Ritter.

CBI director Robert Cantwell said Republican Gov. Bill Owens asked him to move as quickly as possible on the investigation into whether Beauprez's campaign illegally accessed the highly restricted National Crime Information Center database.

The campaign insists it did nothing wrong.

"We didn't break any laws," said Beauprez spokesman John Marshall.

Meanwhile, the two candidates continued to spar in a Saturday debate over Ritter's record of plea bargaining illegal immigrants when he was Denver district attorney. A Beauprez ad highlighting one of those cases prompted the CBI investigation Friday.

Beauprez's campaign ad accuses Ritter of giving illegal immigrant and accused heroin dealer Carlos Estrada Medina a plea bargain and probation. The ad says Medina was later arrested for sexually abusing a child.

But neither the Ritter campaign nor news outlets trying to verify the facts of the ad have been able to find the court cases cited.

Beauprez's campaign contends that Medina used aliases in both cases. Spokesman John Marshall said the sexual assault occurred in California.

After extensive research, The Denver Post has been unable to independently verify that the California case exists or whether Medina's aliases match the cases alluded to in the ad....

Beauprez has pressed Ritter on 152 cases where immigrants were given plea-bargain arrangements. And Ritter's campaign said Saturday it has turned over the names of those immigrants at the request of the CBI, spokesman Evan Dreyer said.

During the debate Saturday, Ritter insisted the cases in question be measured against the 12,000 people he put in prison over 12 years....

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