The federal agent who accessed confidential information for Republican Bob Beauprez’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign is the only person charged with a crime – even though two other people accessed the same database during that time period, his attorneys said in a recent court filing.
The agent, Cory Voorhis, used a restricted database to obtain information that the Beauprez campaign used in an ad criticizing Democrat Bill Ritter and his record of plea-bargaining with illegal immigrants. After the ad ran in late September 2006, workers from the Denver district attorney’s office and the Harris County, Texas, district attorney’s office accessed the same system to look up information on the illegal immigrant portrayed in the TV ad.
“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 ad 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 committed a sex crime in California. He used different names in each case, making it difficult to connect them.
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 and charges that may connect to a fingerprint.
Voorhis ran 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 told him that illegal immigrants aren’t protected by the privacy act.
DA’s office dials in
A week after the ad first ran, a “senior, long-time” Denver deputy district attorney asked an employee to access information about the man in the ad, according to federal and state records cited by Voorhis’ attorneys.
The employee could not find the information in the Colorado database, so NCIC “had to have been accessed in order to get information,” 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 District Attorney Mitch Morrissey for “informational purposes,” she said.
Whether that information was given to Ritter, who was Morrissey’s predecessor, or his campaign, “I don’t know,” said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the DA’s office.
Kimbrough said the DA’s office accessed the information legally and in response to a large number of media and public calls surrounding the controversial ad.
She said that once the office found out the man who pleaded guilty to agricultural trespass in Colorado was the same who committed a sex crime in California, she may have told that to the Ritter campaign, but could not specifically recall.
“There is a possibility that I did, maybe not that day but right around that time,” she said, noting that she would’ve given that information to anyone who called and asked for it.
The campaign lawyer for Ritter called the CBI the same day the DA’s employee accessed NCIC and asked for an investigation into how Beauprez obtained it. The next morning, Ritter publicly demanded an investigation.
Ritter access defended
Ritter spokesman Evan Dreyer, who said he spoke to Kimbrough before speaking to The Denver Post, said the campaign never asked the DA’s office to do anything “inappropriate,” and that the DA’s office had done nothing wrong. Voorhis’ motion, he said, was the work of a “desperate criminal.”
Neither the senior attorney nor Morrissey was ever questioned by CBI or FBI officials, according to Voorhis’ attorney. Both the 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. Dreyer refused Wednesday to release the name of the staffer.
In Texas, an investigator with the Harris County district attorney’s 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.
State GOP chairman Dick Wadhams, who was not working for the state party at the time of the NCIC access, said Wednesday that he had no knowledge of the incident. Although the Texas investigator agreed to provide his file regarding the search, investigators never picked it up, Voorhis’ attorneys wrote.
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 immigration and customs agency.
Karen Crummy: 303-954-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com
