Did Stephanie Villafuerte tell the FBI the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Will U.S. senators on the Judiciary Committee believe she did?
Would you?
To be sure, President Barack Obama’s nominee to become Colorado’s next U.S. attorney (currently Gov. Bill Ritter’s deputy chief of staff) has not actually made any public statement about her role in a 2006 flap over a campaign ad attacking her boss for his treatment of the criminal Carlos Estrada-Medina. But Villafuerte has spoken to the FBI, and what she reportedly told them is hard to mesh with known facts.
She said that while working on Ritter’s gubernatorial campaign she never talked to anyone in the Denver district attorney’s office about the aforementioned illegal immigrant, who was busted in Colorado for heroin possession while Ritter was DA and who turned around, after a wrist-slap and no deportation, and committed sexual battery in California under a different name.
Villafuerte’s story strains belief for a host of reasons, most of which were laid out in a remarkable piece of reporting nine days ago by The Post’s Karen Crummy. Let me compress a few highlights here, and explain why this matters.
Remember, a federal immigration agent lost his job and was tried (and acquitted) over leaking information regarding Estrada-Medina to the campaign of Republican Bob Beauprez. Remember too that Ritter professed to be outraged — outraged — that anyone would exploit a federal crime database to further a political cause, and that his counterattack was a spectacular success.
Was Ritter’s campaign meanwhile wheedling the DA’s office for information regarding Estrada-Medina that could be obtained only through misuse of the same database? You’d hope not, but the expectation has been frayed by inconsistent, confusing and unlikely accounts offered by staffers in Ritter’s campaign and in the DA’s office (where Villafuerte once worked).
Although Villafuerte told the FBI she never discussed Estrada- Medina with DA staff, DA spokeswoman Lynn Kimbrough logged the subject of a message from Villafuerte as “Estrada Medina” on the day the ad appeared. Villafuerte also apparently told the FBI she spoke to Kimbrough perhaps “once or twice” during the campaign when phone records reveal Kimbrough called Villafuerte four times over one 48-hour period alone.
And so it goes. First Assistant DA Chuck Lepley apparently offered one reason to the FBI for multiple contacts with Villafuerte and another reason in a 2008 court hearing. Kimbrough at first acknowledged she may have told Ritter’s campaign that Estrada-Medina had indeed committed crimes under different names in different places, then told the FBI she hadn’t, then later said she probably had.
Would Villafuerte, the former chief deputy district attorney, be likely to have so many chats with former colleagues during this tumultuous period and not mention Estrada-Medina, even if she didn’t cross the line and ask for help? Yet she apparently told the FBI her conversations with Lepley were about such mundane topics as medical benefits! What about the alleged threat to Ritter?
It’s merely a coincidence, you see, that Lepley asked a subordinate to check the database for Estrada-Medina on the same day he spoke to Villafuerte three times.
Villafuerte is probably a first-rate prosecutor who’d be a fine pick for U.S. attorney were it not for her leading role in highly suspicious contacts between a political campaign and a friendly prosecutor’s office. But that role, and the fumbling attempts to justify it, make you wonder why on Earth she was put up for the job.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
