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Pushing the envelope for politics

Voorhis trial shows Beauprez camp stretching the law

By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News, April 12, 2008

Bob Beauprez's campaign for governor was faltering badly in the fall of 2006 when a miracle showed up.

An immigration agent was offering explosive information.

In the frenetic following weeks, laws were stretched, legal counsel ignored, reputations trashed, and secret government information was given to the campaign at least three times - all in the rush to get an ad on the air that might have turned it all around.

Immigration agent Cory Voorhis told the campaign that the Denver district attorney's office, under the administration of Beauprez's opponent Bill Ritter, had plea-bargained illegal immigrants accused of major crimes down to the charge of trespassing on agricultural land.

"There are very few things in this business that are a silver bullet, and this was the closest I had ever seen to one," testified Richard Beeson, a campaign consultant from Parker who is now political director of the Republican National Committee.

Suddenly, saving the election seemed within reach, even with Beauprez behind 17 points in the polls.

Coordination barred

On Wednesday, a jury acquitted Voorhis on charges of illegally passing secret information to the Beauprez campaign.

But evidence in the case gave a rare look at a campaign in crisis, pushing the envelope to turn the race around.

Testimony and evidence from the trial said the Trailhead Group, a "527" issue organization barred from coordinating with a campaign, paid more than $15,000 to research Voorhis' tip. That information was used by the campaign in two ads.

Such 527 organizations, named for the section of the tax code that created them, are barred from giving even in-kind donations to a campaign.

Testimony showed Trailhead paid researcher John Wasilchick to collect a list of cases plea-bargained to trespassing on farmland. He in turn paid researcher Bill Winkler $15,000 to do the rest of the work.

Ryan Call, attorney for both Trailhead and the state Republican Party, got in the middle of the next step, according to testimony. Call's interns collected court files of the plea bargains on Trailhead's list. Then his firm sold the court files to consultant Beeson, who in turn sold them to the campaign.

While testimony indicated that the list of plea bargains went from Trailhead to Call and then to the campaign, Call said that is not necessarily so.

Call said his firm did do research for both Trailhead and the state GOP, but "We don't pass any information from one client to another."

Trailhead researcher Winkler communicated with Beauprez campaign manager John Marshall about the Voorhis tips about six times, according to Winkler's testimony.

Call said Winkler had a second employer, the state GOP, which was allowed to help the campaign. But Winkler said the work he did for the party had nothing to do with the Voorhis tip.

Winkler himself told the FBI he knew his direct contacts with the campaign were a problem. The FBI report of the interview quotes Winkler saying, "There was a great deal of hiring of the same consultants by the Trailhead Group, the Republican Party of Colorado, and the Beauprez campaign. This was 'highly unusual,' created 'issues of coordination' and was a 'vulnerability.' "

Among the revelations in the case: Voorhis never told the campaign he had accessed a restricted database for key facts about the illegal immigrants. And the campaign never told Voorhis that it planned to run a $250,000 ad campaign based on his information.

Voorhis provided the fact that Walter Ramo, accused of heroin dealing in Denver and plea bargained on a guilty plea to trespass on agricultural land, was the same person as Carlos Estrada Medina, later accused of a sex crime on a child in San Francisco.

Problems with the ad

By early October, with Beauprez running far behind, the campaign was having "conniptions" trying to confirm Voorhis' tip that Medina and Ramo were the same person, Winkler said.

They could not, because only the FBI had connected the two names through fingerprints. This was reported only in the National Crime Information Center database, accessed by Voorhis and a Texas man who was helping a friend paid by Trailhead.

On Oct. 6, court records from California arrived. But the names didn't match, and they said that the sex charge was dropped.

Winkler arranged a conference call.

The Trailhead researcher testified he told Beauprez's campaign manager he wanted the ad pulled. Attorney Call also advised against running it, Winkler testified.

Marshall ran it anyway.

Winkler said he and Call advised that without public records to back up the ad, it would blow up in their faces.

In addition, saying Medina was arrested for sexual assault on a child - without saying the charge was dropped - was false political advertising, Winkler advised. In Colorado, that risked criminal charges, he said.

On the stand, campaign manager Marshall said political speech in ads had leeway and only had to be "largely" accurate.

Beauprez said in an interview this week that no one ever told him attorney Call had recommended not running the ad. He laughed when asked about Winkler's concern for accuracy. "It's a true statement" that the illegal was arrested, even though the charges were dropped.

"It was a plea bargain!" Beauprez said.

Who was behind campaign ad

* Beauprez for Governor Campaign: Manager John Marshall ran anti-Ritter ad about Carlos Estrada Medina despite advice from attorney Ryan Call that it could backfire without public records to back it up. Researcher Bill Winkler also warned Marshall he risked criminal charges for running a false political ad, for implying Medina had sexually assaulted a child, even though the charge was dropped.

* Trailhead Group: This Republican "527" issues organization run by Alan Philp was legally barred from aiding the Beauprez campaign, but paid for the research that became basis of the Medina ad. It was founded by then-Gov. Bill Owens and oilman-now-President of the University of Colorado Bruce Benson; neither was involved in Voorhis case.

* Ryan Call: Attorney for both the Trailhead Group and the state Republican Party. His office received a list of plea bargains from a Trailhead researcher, had interns pull the case files, then sold the files to a consultant who sold it to the Beauprez campaign.

Illegal immigrant left long trail of criminal complaints

Carlos Estrada Medina is a 29-year-old, scrawny, heavily tattooed illegal immigrant from Honduras with two years of schooling. In 2002, then-Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter's office couldn't make a heroin-sale case stick because Estrada Medina wasn't caught holding heroin. He was accused by his alleged customer of dealing. Ritter's office allowed Estrada Medina to plead guilty to trespassing on farmland, and released him on probation.

He soon disappeared.

Immigration agent Cory Voorhis said he was upset by the plea because it meant Estrada Medina would not be deported.

In 2003, Estrada Medina was charged in San Francisco with misdemeanors, including lewd and lascivious conduct and sexual battery involving a 10-year-old girl. The sex charges were dropped, and Estrada Medina pleaded to misdemeanor bodily harm/public nuisance. He was released for time served, 23 days.

Nothing in the record supports widespread reports in Denver that the case was dropped because the victim was an illegal immigrant who left the country.

At that point, Estrada Medina was deported. Ten weeks later, he was back. He served 75 days for illegal entry, then was caught entering the U.S. at least twice more in 2006.

He was in federal custody when Voorhis looked him up in September 2006. Estrada Medina is now serving a five-year sentence for illegal entry into the U.S.

Comments Posted by Bill_Winkler on April 12, 2008.

Dear Ann,

Overall, let me compliment you on a good piece of writing.

There are a couple things that I have to take issue with. The first is this line from your story:

"But Winkler said the work he did for the party had nothing to do with the Voorhis tip."

This statement is incorrect.

You probably misunderstood my testimony. I am, as you heard, a somewhat meandering talker. My apologies. While my contract with the Colorado GOP was primarily for vulnerability studies, it did note that I was to provide "assistance in reviewing and analyzing records and documents." Please remember that I was on retainer and not tied to a specific work product.

Then there is this paragraph:

"Winkler himself told the FBI he knew his direct contacts with the campaign were a problem. The FBI report of the interview quotes Winkler saying, "There was a great deal of hiring of the same consultants by the Trailhead Group, the Republican Party of Colorado, and the Beauprez campaign. This was 'highly unusual,' created 'issues of coordination' and was a 'vulnerability.' ' "

The document you took this from is a redacted version of a conversation I had. It is not a word-for-word transcript. In three pages it contains just 19 words attributed directly to me, and these are in quotes of no longer than three words. I noted several mistakes in the document, including a missing word that entirely changed the meaning of one statement (but which was corrected later in the document by a repetitive, but correct re-statement).

As you know, I am not an attorney. I have no qualifications with which to interpret a highly complicated subject like election law. My comments merely addressed potential problems faced in the context of a political campaign, as issues with which our friends in the opposing campaign -- and the media -- could attack us. If you remember it, they did. So it was not a law court but rather the court of public opinion I was speaking about.

In closing, let me remind you that you have my telephone number and that I'm always available to assist journalists with their writing. You probably should have contacted me about this new story, and I would remind you of the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which I'm a member:

Again, a good job overall. Fine writing.

-- Bill Winkler