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Attorney in Beauprez ad flap: Others who tapped data not charged

By Karen E. Crummy
The Denver Post November 7, 2007

During the time Bob Beauprez's gubernatorial campaign ran an ad criticizing Bill Ritter and his record of plea-bargaining with illegal immigrants, two people accessed a confidential federal database looking for the information used in the ad.

Workers from the Denver district attorney's office and the Harris County district attorney's office in Texas both looked up information on a particular illegal immigrant portrayed in the ad, according to a court records filed Tuesday.

But when the dust settled, only Cory Voorhis, a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent said to be the Beauprez campaign's source, was charged with a crime.

"It appears that, in the same time frame, Voorhis, the Harris County investigator and the Denver DA employee engaged in precisely the same conduct by accessing the database," wrote Voorhis' attorneys in a motion to dismiss the case based on selective prosecution. "Voorhis, alone, has been singled out for prosecution."

The Beauprez campaign ad, which ran in September 2006, claimed that during Ritter's tenure as Denver district attorney, an illegal immigrant charged with heroin possession was allowed to plead guilty to the manufactured charge of agricultural trespassing. After receiving probation, the man went on to commit a sex crime in California, according to the ad. He used different names in each case, making it difficult to establish whether it was the same person.

That's where the National Crime Information Center came in. Federal law restricts NCIC access to law-enforcement officers, federal workers and, in limited cases, members of Congress. It includes non-public information, such as aliases used by a person and all the charges that may connect to a single fingerprint.

Voorhis ran a number of names given to him by the Beauprez campaign through the database, including the man in the ad. He believed he was not doing anything wrong, according to his attorneys, because supervisors had told him that unlawful foreign nationals aren't protected by the privacy act.

A week after the ad first ran, a "senior, long-time" Denver deputy district attorney asked an employee to access information about an illegal immigrant featured in the anti-Ritter ad, according to federal and state investigation records cited by Voorhis' attorneys.

The employee could not find the information in the Colorado database and so the NCIC "had to have been accessed in order to get information" on the illegal immigrant, according to her statement to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation cited in Voorhis' motion.

The NCIC information was then printed by the employee and given to the "current district attorney," Mitch Morrissey, for "informational purposes," according to the employee....

Both CBI and the FBI interviewed Ritter and a campaign staff member, who had made "inquiries" related to the Beauprez ads. Ritter told investigators that the staff member had told him that the only way the Beauprez campaign could have accessed that information was through the national crime database.

In Texas, an investigator with the Harris County District Attorneys' Office also made an inquiry through NCIC about the same illegal immigrant. He was working for a private investigator, who said he was hired by the Colorado GOP....

Although the Texas investigator agreed to provide his file regarding the search, investigators never picked it up, according to Voorhis' attorneys.

Voorhis, 38, was charged Oct. 25 in Denver federal court with three misdemeanor counts of exceeding his authorized access to a government computer by retrieving "criminal histories of various individuals." He was immediately suspended by the immigrations and customs agency.