Tag: Scott Shires

A pro-industry, anti-environmentalist non-profit first registered in Colorado and now operating out of the Washington, D.C. area is “clearly spending money to influence Montana elections,” an assistant attorney general in that state argued this week.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, according to the Denver Post, will be proposing a new set of rules that would waive or reduce a significant number of campaign finance fines for political committees that fail to file disclosure reports. As an elections law attorney for primarily conservative causes, Gessler represented groups that either flat-out failed to register with the secretary of state and later engaged in electioneering activity or failed to file disclosure reports – sometimes for years. Now he tells the Post he’ll roll out rules in the next few weeks that will make it easier to reduce or waive such fines.

Colorado State Senator Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, said she missed an opportunity to head off the controversy now surrounding newly elected Secretary of State Scott Gessler. Carroll had been weighing whether or not to introduce legislation that would have set strict disclosure laws for the secretary of state's office in particular and tightened state worker conflict-of-interest laws in general. She didn't introduce that bill but that doesn't mean a legislative response to the Gessler controversy is off the table, she said.

The Montana Commissioner of Political Practices late last week ruled that a Denver-based political nonprofit likely violated Montana campaign finance and disclosure laws and should be hit with a civil penalty action. Western Tradition Partnership (WTP), a 501(c)4 originally registered in Colorado in 2008 by Republican operative Scott Shires, has been active in state, county and city elections in both Montana and Colorado, drawing criticism for last-minute attack mailers like the one aimed at Colorado state Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass, earlier this month.

A pro-business lobbying group with Colorado ties Monday cheered a Montana judge’s decision to strike down that state's 98-year-old ban on corporate political expenditures, even as Montana prepares to rule on numerous campaign complaints against the group.

The Colorado Independent has learned that Scott Shires, a Republican operative who has registered dozens of political nonprofits and campaign committees over the years, still has not paid a fine levied against him by the state for improper electioneering during the 2008 Garfield County commissioners’ race.

State Senator Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass, has responded to attack mailers sent out by GOP dirty-trickster group Western Tradition Partnership that depict her as Donald...

Debra Bonogofsky, a moderate Republican small businesswoman from Billings, Mont., thought she was a “normal person” until she ran for the Montana State Legislature in June. Then she found out through 11th-hour attack ads, fliers and mailings that she was an anti-gun, pro-abortion, union-backing Barack Obama supporter.

GARFIELD COUNTY - Democrats drew up the blueprint on how to dominate a state in Colorado’s 2008 general election, but Republicans wrote the game plan for snatching a local election using outside oil and gas money – and they’re apparently sticking to it in 2010 Garfield County commissioners race.

Voters in Colorado care about clean elections and voted through a ballot initiative specifically to enact laws governing campaign finances in 2002. Lawbreakers have been caught and fined. But that's apparently where enforcement ends. The list of groups violating the law includes an increasing number that simply skirt the fines judges have levied against them. Secretary of State Bernie Buescher now seems determined to go after the deadbeats, but his office told the Colorado Independent that the law, as it stands now, simply lacks teeth.