Stephanie Villafuerte’s decision Monday to pull herself out of the running for consideration as Colorado’s next U.S. attorney was the right call.
Ultimately, Villafuerte was unable to fully explain a spate of phone calls she made to the Denver District Attorney’s office during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign when a restricted federal database was accessed.
Did she ask former colleagues at the DA’s office for information from the National Crime Information Center, which would be improper if not illegal? She says she is sure she did not, yet she also says she can’t remember the conversations.
You cannot have it both ways.
Last week, U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked to put a hold on her nomination.
It was clear Villafuerte was in for a bruising confirmation battle. It’s hard to imagine how the questions about Villafuerte’s involvement — if there was any involvement— in the NCIC episode were ever going to be fully answered.
Her bowing out was an acknowledgment of the reality of her situation. But in her letter of withdrawal to President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, she calls the valid questions surrounding her actions in the 2006 gubernatorial campaign “political attacks.” Such a characterization fails to acknowledge the substantive nature of those questions.
Trying to get to the bottom of whether Villafuerte, who was working on the Ritter campaign, asked her former colleagues at the Denver DA’s office to access a restricted federal law enforcement database, or received information from it, is not a political attack. It is an effort to figure out the truth in a convoluted situation in which accusations of impropriety had the ring of plausibility.
Remember, if you will, the heated pitch of the governor’s race in the fall of 2006. Republican candidate Bob Beauprez had aired ads attacking Ritter’s plea bargain record.
One searing piece featured the criminal record of Walter Noel Ramo, a small-time drug dealer who pled out to agricultural trespass instead of a drug charge. Ramo, an illegal immigrant with multiple aliases, went to California and under the name of Carlos Estrada-Medina sexually assaulted a child.
Ultimately, we learned that Beauprez’s campaign got the information linking Ramo to Estrada-Medina from the NCIC, which is for law enforcement purposes only. Ritter’s campaign figured out that someone had accessed the NCIC to create the ad and went public about it.
Later, it came out that someone at the Denver District Attorney’s Office accessed Estrada-Medina’s records at the same time Ritter’s campaign was making a big deal about the source of Beauprez’s information.
Curiously, Villafuerte’s cellphone records show numerous calls to her former colleagues at the DA’s office at that time. And she can’t remember exactly what they talked about.
Further muddying the waters, First Assistant District Attorney Chuck Lepley says the calls were about serious threats to Ritter from a man who had stalked a prior mayor. Lepley later said he was so concerned, he talked to police officials, yet police have no records of the reports.
The oddities and dead ends leave the distinct impression that certain questions about the events never were going to be answered, though they ought to be. Villafuerte may not have done anything wrong, but from what she’s said publicly, she lacks the ability to prove it.
And that creates a cloud of suspicion under which the state’s chief federal prosecutor cannot operate.
