Bob Woodward’s Deep Throat brought down a sitting president.
Richard Nixon.
Bob Beauprez’s Deep Throat could bring down a wannabe governor.
Bob Beauprez.
Trailing in most polls, Beauprez is already a gubernatorial long shot. If his attack ads against Bill Ritter become mired in sourcing instead of veracity, all bets are off.
The FBI has entered the criminal investigation to see how Beauprez’s campaign got information for an ad about a heroin dealer who supposedly cut a deal with then-Denver DA Ritter and went on to allegedly sexually assault a child. The feds are involved because the Colorado Bureau of Investigation found that someone looked up the perp’s name in the National Crime Information Center database.
Headlines in local newspapers Thursday were not about Democrat Ritter’s plea bargains with criminal “aliens” who avoided deportation and then went on to reoffend. Headlines were about possible crimes Republican Beauprez’s staff or supporters may have committed while acquiring this knowledge.
On Wednesday night, a local TV station asked viewers, “Why won’t Bob Beauprez reveal his source?”
Get it? The scandal is no longer what Ritter did. It’s what Beauprez did. It gets no worse for a guy needing a comeback.
Unless, of course, the candidate himself gets charged with a crime.
That almost certainly won’t happen. As ham-handed as Beauprez’s campaign has been – from picking a running mate who likened gay marriage to men marrying sheep to publicly claiming an inflated abortion rate among African-American women – the congressman cannot be so dumb that he didn’t insulate himself from his campaign’s dirty tricks.
Still, 2 1/2 weeks from Election Day, the reflected heat from a criminal probe has already burned Beauprez. After all, Republican Gov. Bill Owens called for this investigation.
Beauprez must hope for a quick resolution. He must hope no one gets charged with a crime. Even then, based on what the CBI already has revealed, Beauprez has some explaining to do.
Investigators know who got access to a federal criminal database to get information about Carlos Estrada Medina. Medina, a.k.a. Walter Noel Ramo, is the subject of Beauprez’s attack ad against Ritter. If the person who is the subject of the investigation, ICE agent Cory Voorhis, has any link to the Beauprez camp, the Republican’s campaign implodes. If he doesn’t, the coincidence alone is enough to blunt the attack ad’s effectiveness.
This thing is now lose-lose for Beauprez. What’s left is damage control. NCIC has plenty of legitimate uses. Helping political campaigns confirm dirt on opponents is not among them.
What this boils down to is intent.
Ritter appears to have plea-bargained with a slimeball, so the slimeball avoided deportation or prison. That apparently allowed the slimeball to go on with a life of crime that may have victimized a child. Even if that’s true, nobody in his right mind believes Ritter cut the plea deal so Medina could hurt a kid.
On the other hand, if Beauprez or his surrogates are linked to the NCIC search, their motive will look like anything but an attempt to protect children.
The other day, Beauprez compared himself to Woodward and Bernstein in his zeal to protect his confidential source. Surely, more folks view the Watergate reporters as heroes than as villains. But Beauprez also mentioned Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who wouldn’t give up her source in the White House outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Miller, you may recall, was jailed for a while for protecting her source during a criminal investigation. Miller eventually left her job after being outed herself for what seemed to be an unprofessional complicity with several of the powerful politicians she covered.
It’s still not time to stick a fork in the Republican candidate’s campaign for governor. But it’s not Bill Ritter spinning on a spit over a political fire. It’s Bob Beauprez. And it won’t take many more turns before he’s done.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
