Colorado Senate News Monday post:

Assistant Senate GOP leader Greg Brophy said Ritter’s latest attempt to distance himself from the growth of the state’s bureaucracy is “salt in the wounds for the many Coloradans who have lost jobs in the private sector.”

Brophy also said it underscores the Ritter administration’s lack of focus and lack of leadership in the wake of successive economic forecasts that consistently point to plummeting revenue. The administration repeatedly has been caught off-guard by those forecasts, with its budgets often “out of balance before the ink is even dry,” Brophy said.

“The governor is spending too much time splitting hairs over which new employees he has hired and not enough time trying to balance the budget, which is the real challenge,” said Brophy, a corn farmer from Wray. “I get this picture of him hiding under his desk waiting for the next revenue forecast and praying that it will be better.”

The talking points belong to Senate Minority Leader and gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry, who has been claiming for weeks that Ritter has been on a “hiring spree” since he was elected, inexcusably growing big government in recession-wracked Colorado. But the Post’s Tim Hoover ran the numbers and reported that the claim is just not true. More than that, a lot of the hiring that has been done came as a result of legislation Penry co-sponsored. In other words, the talking points about Ritter and big government amount to a disingenuous stretch at best and hypocrisy at worst, i.e., politics as usual.

So why didn’t Penry himself defend or apologize for the debunked talking points? Why is Brophy defending them from Wray, where he’s not reading the paper. And why is the defense of the debunked talking points appearing on the pages of the tax-funded state Senate Minority Office website, already a target of a Penry Campaign-centered Open Records lawsuit? Why are we paying for Josh Penry’s campaign with our tax money in recession-wracked Colorado?

Brophy has been busy watching the Amazon sales of the books “authored” by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck when he should be reading Tim Hoover.

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Josh Penry (Jason Kosena: TCI)

In September, the Denver Post reported that government employees were receiving campaign emails from Penry for Governor– employees that subscribed to the Minority Office list but not to the Penry campaign list.

Mike Britt, Penry’s campaign manager, told The Post that the campaign “asked supporters — including lawmakers and lobbyists — to share their distribution lists. That could be how the campaign ended up with e-mail addresses to state government accounts.”

This is not the first time, however, that political operative Mike Britt has been involved in an email scandal. Britt was one of Karl Rove’s acolytes in the Bush administration and he was one of the targets in 2007 of the congressional investigation into violations of the Presidential Records Act, also known as the White House email scandal, where Rove and Britt and other strategists conducted official government business on their Republican National Committee email accounts instead of on White House email accounts.

White House email is part of a public record archived for future researchers. The RNC emails, though, were mysteriously deleted when investigators began asking for them.

Observers remain skeptical of the Bush administration’s use of the RNC email accounts and particularly of Rove’s defense in the matter. Colorado Ethics Watch is likewise unconvinced by Britt’s explanation in the matter of Penry’s email distribution campaign.

“The fact remains that there are people who had not given the Penry campaign their email address but they had [given it to] the Senate Minority Office,” Ethics Watch Director Chantell Taylor told The Colorado Independent. “Those kinds of situations make you wonder ‘How did they get those people if not through the [Senate Minority Office] list?’

“If indeed the Senate Minority Office provided their list of emails to any candidate campaign that would be tantamount to a contribution, because a list has value,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the CORA request, while a response to The Post report, was also inspired by what she called a local history of misusing public funds for partisan purposes.

“It is not limited to just Penry’s campaign,” she said. “This issue has come up before with the Senate Minority Office. We brought a complaint to the District Attorney’s office and Mitch Morrissey about their use of partisan funds to create the website in the first place.”

Taylor said that case raised a lot of questions about how both the minority and majority office websites were funded.

ColoradoSenateNews.com, the Minority Office website, drew scrutiny two years ago. In an investigation conducted by media outlets including the Colorado Independent, then-Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany revealed that the site came to life through a “handshake agreement” he made with GOP operative Brad Jones, the man behind now-suspended conservative blog Face the State. The two sites were originally both registered to Jones.

At the time, Colorado Ethics Watch reported that McElhany broke the law in paying Jones $2,700 with contributions from a political action committee to create the site. Political contributions, mostly campaign funding, may not be used for official purposes, including building a Senate party site.

“I knew how we were paying for it was eventually going to be questioned,” McElhany told the Rocky Mountain News. “We decided we’d make a gift to the state out of the [political action committee funds] in the interest of getting out the truth to Colorado citizens.”

Taylor said the CORA request looking into the Penry campaign is centered on the Minority Office and seeks simply to determine whether or not the office is providing emails lists to any candidate or campaign. Neither the Minority or Majority office should be supporting partisan activities.

“It is our concern that they might be,” Taylor said.

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Surfing to the Web address brings notices not to open the site because it may “try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others or damage your system.”

The GOP site has been listed by browser monitors as a host to “malware” — software meant to do creeping harm to computers that come into contact with it. What’s more the site has reportedly been virus-ridden and dangerous for weeks. Most recently, the site RSS feed began showing malware warnings as well. At very least, the site ruins browsers, which unlucky visitors are forced to reinstall.

It’s unclear what tweak the webmaster may have made to transform the site into an internet pariah and under whose instructions. In fact it’s unclear whether the attacks the site launches originate with the site or whether the site itself has been a victim of attack and forgery.

It’s tempting to believe the Republican techies were just clumsy in their attempts to fish data from visitors; but it’s equally tempting to believe they cluelessly left the site exposed and were hacked.

FireFox explains:

What is an Attack Site? What is Malware?

Malware is software designed to harm your computer or steal your personal information without your knowledge. Attack Sites are Web sites that try to infect your computer with malware when you visit. These attacks can be very difficult to detect; even a site that looks safe may be secretly trying to attack you. Attackers will often hack a site to turn it into an Attack Site, and sometimes the Web site’s owner won’t even know that this has happened. You can learn more about Attack Sites and malware from stopbadware.org, a partnership among academic institutions, technology industry leaders, and volunteers committed to protecting Internet users from threats to their privacy and security caused by bad software.

It’s not the fist time the site has caused pains for the Colorado Senate GOP.

Two years ago, under pressure applied partly through Colorado Independent reporting, Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany revealed that the site came to life through a “handshake agreement” he made with Republican operative Brad Jones, the man behind conservative blog Face the State. The two sites were originally both registered to Jones.

Colorado Senate News was also forced to remove the state seal after it was made clear that it was a felony to use the seal to label anything but official state documents.

Colorado Ethics Watch also reported that McElhany broke the law in paying Jones $2,700 with contributions from a political action committee to create the site. Political contributions, mostly campaign funding, may not be used for official purposes, including building a senate party site.

“I knew how we were paying for it was eventually going to be questioned,” McElhany told the Rocky Mountain News at the time. “We decided we’d make a gift to the state out of the [political action committee funds] in the interest of getting out the truth to Colorado citizens.”

Senate Colorado News has been giving out more than the truth for years. Now they’re giving out data-mining viruses.

This is fun: For your own safety, don’t visit the site!

More from the governor’s office:

President Obama is trying to clean up bad decisions and failed policies left behind by President Bush, and Colorado’s GOP lawmakers are still trying to fight Bush’s old fights.

Memo to Republican lawmakers: “The election is over, and your guy lost. Time to move on.”

They’re trying to turn a hypothetical into a partisan football instead of focusing on the biggest issue facing this state: the economy.

Taylor filed a formal complaint with the DA’s office in April, accusing Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany, R-Colorado Springs, and the Legislature’s Senate Minority Office of breaking a law that prohibits public representatives from taking monetary gifts and using them toward official state business.

CEW claims that McElhany broke the law when he accepted money from a state political committee to pay for ColoradoSenateNews.com, the official Web site and communications hub of the Senate Minority Office.

The complaint was filed after the Rocky Mountain News reported (PDF) in April that McElhany admitted to taking a “gift” of $2,700 from a committee called the Senate Majority Fund in order to build the Web site.

“It’s almost been a year and it’s absurd,” Taylor said, because she sees the case as a clear violation of the law. “The statutes specifically prohibit taking gifts of money for official functions. [Sen. McElhany] even used the word ‘gift.’ “

Muddying the waters are campaign finance records filed by the Senate Majority Fund in April, after CEW’s call for an investigation, retracting the funds that were reported to have been paid for ColoradoSenateNews. Now it’s unclear how the site was financed. McElhany has not returned calls seeking information regarding the site’s funding.

Dick Reeve, the attorney at the DA’s office in charge of the case, has not taken action on the complaint and has not returned CEW’s phone calls, according to Tyler, who says the last time she talked to Reeve was in August.

Reeve has not returned a request for comment, and although Colorado Confidential was able to contact a representative with the DA’s office, they were not able to provide information on Reeve’s case by press time.

There is no statute of limitations on the case, because a formal complaint has already been filed. But the DA’s office has no time limits on pursuing the case.

Read Colorado Confidential’s coverage of the Colorado Senate News investigation here.

The organization, Colorado Ethics Watch (formerly Colorado Citizens for Ethics in Government), a nonprofit that monitors ethics throughout the state, is charging that Sen. McElhany violated the law by accepting money from a state political committee to pay for ColoradoSenateNews.com, the official Web site for the Senate Minority Office. On top of that, campaign finance reports are only adding to questions regarding how the office’s site was financed.

In April, Colorado Confidential reported on connections between ColoradoSenateNews and FaceTheState.com, a “free market news site” headed by Brad Jones, a former Republican consultant. When questions developed over how the the office’s Web site was funded, McElhany was reported to have stated in an Apr. 11 Rocky Mountain News article (PDF) that he used $2,700 in contributions from the Senate Majority Fund, a political committee, to pay Jones to create the Web page.

The only problem is that such an action is completely illegal, according to CEW’s director Chantell Taylor.

“The facts of this case are just so irrefutable that there should at least be some penalty, and if this doesn’t point to a violation then I certainly don’t know what would,” says Taylor, who claims that it’s unlawful under a state statutes for a public officials to use given money for official purposes, like building the minority office’s Web site.

Taylor also says she’s been in contact with Denver’s Deputy District Attorney Dick Reeve with little results, claiming that the DA’s office had said that there would be some kind of action on the case by September, which didn’t happen. Reeve did not return a request for comment.

“He’s just been putting us off all summer,” says Taylor. “It seems to me that they should be moving much more quickly or at least moving at all, and they haven’t been.”

Adding to the legal confusion are campaign finance records filed by the Senate Majority Fund in in April, after CEW’s call for an investigation, retracting the funds that were originally reported to have gone to Jones for work on ColoradoSenateNews. Now it’s currently unclear how the site was paid for, and who paid for it.

CEW also alleges that McElhany could have violated another law by failing to disclose the money from the Senate Majority Fund.

“He didn’t report it. He didn’t disclose it. So we think the violation is probably two fold, that it should’ve been disclosed and shouldn’t have been used for official purposes.” Taylor says.

Sen. McElhany has not returned a request for comment, and senate expenditures from April to the present reviewed by Colorado Confidential show no money going towards the Web page.

Although a letter dating back to 1999 from the SOS highlighted that “a facsimile of the seal may not be used by any private organization, business, or political organization” the State Seal somehow landed on the Republican State Senate Web site in 2001.

By 2003, the State Seal had remained on the political Republican Senate Caucus Web site Whoops! Another memo went out to the legislators from the Secretary of State Donetta Davidson to reiterate the State Seal rules. Down came the seal from the Web site.

The Republican Senate Caucus might have changed Web site addresses in the past year, but not their mode of operation. There was that pesky State Seal back on their new Web site, Colorado Senate News. This prompted a letter from the Colorado Democratic Party on March 30th, 2007 to Secretary of State Mike Coffman where CDP Chair Pat Waak noted:

It is clear that the State Seal may not be used for purely campaign or political purposes.  It is also clear that a facsimile of the State Seal may not be used by any private organization, business, or political organization.  The website Coloradosenatenews.com is a website put up by Republican members of the Colorado Senate and is listed as “an online service of the Senate Minority Office.”  This website is clearly not an official purpose or function of the Colorado General Assembly, nor is it paid for by taxpayer dollars; therefore, it is clear that this website and its contents fall into the “political” category, outside of the acceptable and proper legal uses of the State Seal.  Furthermore, it is our understanding that this very group was ordered to remove the State Seal from their website last year, and they have, once again, appeared to have violated state law and your office’s directives and placed it on the website again.

In response, on April 2nd Secretary Coffman sent ANOTHER letter to legislators on the rules and regulations concerning the State Seal. He specifically said, as had his predecessors, that the seal could not be used on any political materials or Web sites.

Down came the State Seal on ColoradoSenateNews.com, although other “complications” have developed.

One could argue that there is substantial proof that the Republican legislators have “willfully” disregarded the rules pertaining to the use of the State Seal over the years and that maybe criminal charges could help their memory in the future. Fortunately for them, no DA or judge would touch the miniscule case. In the meantime, perhaps the SOS office should hand out string to tie around their fingers instead of memos.

At issue was the fact that a Minority Office staff member had called CCEG, wanting to know information about the group’s funders-information that CCEG is not legally required to disclose.

Shortly after, ColoradoSenateNews posted an article attacking CCEG. The information included in the partisan news report appeared to have been obtained by the staff member, whose salary is paid by state money. Under current law it is illegal to use state time and resources to engage in partisan activities.

But even before ColoradoSenateNews had written its article, an individual representing FaceTheState.com visited CCEG offices and asked similar questions regarding the organization’s funding. Coincidence?

On March 29th, former Republican legislative candidate Aimee Rathburn entered CCEG offices and said she worked for Republican operative Brad Jones and was writing an article about ethics organizations for FaceTheState, according to a CCEG staff member.

“She asked for our [IRS tax forms], which we gave her because an organization like us, we’re required to be able to provide those,” says Jenn Berg, a Research Associate with CCEG.

“She sort of delved into the the world of funding and asked why we wouldn’t reveal our funders and apparently the answer that we aren’t legally required to didn’t suffice, so she started naming names and trying to call us out on the hypocrisy of wanting open government when we wouldn’t reveal our own sources, ignoring the fact that we’re not a government agency, ” Berg says.

The inquiry is estimated to have lasted approximately 15 minutes. In 2006 Rathburn ran against Democrat Jeanne Labuda for a local seat in HD-1 and lost with 44%. Brad Jones, owner of FaceTheState worked as a consultant on her campaign. Rathburn has also worked as a lobbyist for Colorado State Shooting Association in 2000.

On April 4th Colorado Confidential exposed other connections between FaceTheState and ColoradoSenateNews. Later in the day, ColoradoSenateNews changed its domain registration.

As of press time, FaceTheState does not appear to have posted any article regarding ethics groups.

Timeline

• Jan. 29th:
  Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany unveils new Web site, marking his “last press release ever.”
• March 29th:
  Aimee Rathburn asks CCEG about funding on behalf of FaceTheState.com
• March 30th:
  ColoradoSenateNews.com still has the lines “An online service of the Senate Minority Office” and “Hosted by Brad Jones LLC.” written at the bottom of the Web site.
• April 2nd:
  Both lines are removed from the site.
• April 4th:
  Colorado Confidential exposes ties between ColoradoSenateNews, Brad Jones, and FaceTheState. ColoradoSenateNews changes its domain registration the same day.
• April 11th:
  A staffer at the Senate Minority Office calls CCEG asking questions about funding. The line “An online service of the Senate Minority Office” manages to make its way back on to the site. Later, ColoradoSenateNews releases article on CCEG.
• April 16th:
  CCEG files complaints with Denver District Attorney and Governor Bill Ritter.

CCEG, a non-partisan, non-profit legal watchdog organization, argued that the office and its staff have engaged in a pattern of partisan activities which violate state law. From the press release:

At issue is a series of activities that appear to violate Colorado laws. The website, www.ColoradoSenateNews.com, has been touted by minority leadership as “the official communications arm of the Senate Minority Office,” and is maintained by Minority Office staff members whose salaries are paid by the state of Colorado. Despite its “official” status, the site was paid for at least in part by the Senate Majority Fund, a political committee with the primary purpose of advancing a partisan agenda.  State law makes it a misdemeanor for legislators to accept any gift of any money, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of defraying any expenses related to their official duties, such as communications.

Also at issue are partisan telephone calls made on Wednesday, April 11th by a staff member of the Minority Office to CCEG and its parent organization, the Washington, DC-based Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The information obtained from these calls was used by the Minority Office to publish a partisan article attacking CCEG and CREW via state-issued e-mail addresses and the Minority Office’s site. Engaging in political activities using state time and property amounts to official misconduct and is a misdemeanor subject to fines up to $1000.

“Members of the Senate Minority and their staffers have shown callous disregard for Colorado laws and have abused their public positions to advance a purely partisan agenda,” said Chantell Taylor, CCEG’s director. “Coloradans pay legislators to represent people, not parties.  This is not the first time Republican Senators have crossed the line, so we hope the Governor and District Attorney immediately investigate these egregious activities.”

A request for response has been sent to the Colorado Senate Minority Communciations Office via their contact/newstips webform.

A comparison of Colorado Senate News.com and Colorado House.org, the Web site maintained by the House Majority Communications Office, demonstrates stark differences between providing public information on legislative activities and lobbing partisan attacks on political opponents – and all seemingly conducted by taxpayer-funded state employees.

Colorado Confidential will have more on this developing story throughout the week.