The Denver district attorney’s office is under increased scrutiny as federal and state investigators continue their probe into unauthorized accesses of a government crime database.
After the U.S. attorney’s office brought charges last month against a federal special agent for obtaining information from the National Crime Information Center, state and federal agents interviewed employees at the DA’s office to find out why they accessed the same information.
And the agents aren’t finished yet.
“You will see more interviews and more people contacted,” said FBI special agent Renee Vonder Haar, who said she could not release specific details because the FBI is involved in a “continuing investigation.”
The information obtained by immigration agent Cory Voorhis was eventually used by Bob Beauprez’s gubernatorial campaign in a series of ads questioning plea agreements Bill Ritter’s office made with illegal immigrants when he was Denver’s DA.
As a particularly critical ad was airing, someone at the Denver DA’s office accessed the restricted NCIC to look up the criminal history of the man featured in the Beauprez spot.
Denver DA communications director Lynn Kimbrough said she most likely notified the Ritter campaign of the information on NCIC they found, but Ritter’s spokesman Evan Dreyer said he does not recall whether the NCIC information was ever passed to the campaign.
“I don’t recall,” he said. “I don’t remember that we were told that. My understanding was that we couldn’t connect the dots.”
Dreyer said Stephanie Villafuerte, former chief deputy district attorney who had left the Denver DA to work for Ritter’s campaign, was the one who told Ritter that Beauprez must have found a way to access NCIC in order to run the ad.
Villafuerte, who declined comment through Dreyer, was part of a three-member team that researched campaign ads, Dreyer said.
Voorhis is accused in three federal misdemeanor charges of using the NCIC to track down the aliases of an illegal immigrant who had been charged with heroin possession during Ritter’s tenure and was allowed to plead guilty to the manufactured charge of agricultural trespassing. The DA’s office, which initially defended the plea deal with that man, now says the plea offer under Ritter was “inappropriate.”
Using NCIC, Voorhis found out that after receiving probation, the man, using a different name, committed a sex crime in California against a minor.
Beauprez used this case in an ad that started airing Oct. 10, 2006, criticizing Ritter’s plea-bargaining record.
That the DA’s office also accessed NCIC to confirm the same information was known to federal and state law enforcement officials more than a year ago but was not made public until Nov. 7, when the federal agent’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss, arguing Voorhis was the victim of selective prosecution.
The court papers referred to state and federal records, now under seal, which showed that at 3:46 p.m. on Oct. 12, 2006, the DA’s office used the database to search the name of the illegal immigrant. That same day, Ritter’s campaign lawyer called the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to demand an investigation into how Beauprez obtained the information being used in the ad. With few exceptions, it is a crime to access the NCIC for purposes outside of law enforcement.
CBI spokesman Lance Clem said he could not release the name of the CBI official Ritter’s lawyer spoke to or whether the call was made before or after the DA’s office had confirmed that the information in the Beauprez ad was available through the NCIC.
The DA’s office’s version of events has evolved in the past three weeks.
Kimbrough said the DA’s office was inundated with calls from the media and others when the Beauprez ad hit the airwaves. When Chuck Lepley, senior deputy district attorney, walked by her office, she asked him if he could help figure out whether the ad was true. Lepley asked an employee to run the man’s name through NCIC in order to find out whether the ad was true. Once confirmed, the information was printed out and given to DA Mitch Morrissey for “informational purposes.”
Initially, Kimbrough said she may or may not have told someone in the Ritter campaign about the identity of the illegal immigrant but could not specifically recall.
On Thursday, however, Kimbrough said there was a “high probability” she spoke to Ritter’s campaign, “probably” spokesman Dreyer, she said, that same afternoon.
“My recollection is that after the NCIC check, I would’ve returned all calls about that issue before I went home that day,” she said, asserting that several media outlets had requested the same information. She does not recall who made the requests.
When asked why she did not put out a news release, considering the high volume of calls she said the office was receiving, Kimbrough said she chose to call each person back. She said that the office has “occasionally” run NCIC checks for similar reasons but could not remember a specific instance.
Dreyer, who is now the governor’s spokesman, said he does not specifically remember talking to Kimbrough about this case.
He said the campaign had a “rapid response” team that researched campaign ads. The team included Villafuerte and attorney Trey Rogers, who is now Ritter’s chief legal counsel.
Karen Crummy: 303-954-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to an editing error, a headline indicated that representatives of the Denver district attorney’s office were not authorized to access the National Crime Information Center database. In fact, they are authorized.
