The Stephanie Villafuerte story ended in the only way it could end. It’s what happens in politics when the stakes are smaller than the headlines.
But Villafuerte’s decision to withdraw from consideration to be U.S. attorney still leaves us with many questions, including, of course, the really big one:
How could Bill Ritter not have seen it coming?
That’s not entirely fair to the governor, of course. We should also ask, how could Ken Salazar not have seen it coming? And, for that matter, what about Mark Udall?
In case anyone has forgotten, there are rules in politics. First, do yourself no harm. Second, if you have to do yourself harm, don’t do it during an election cycle.
And yet, as Ritter heads into a tough re-election campaign, the only way for the Villafuerte story to go away was for Villafuerte herself — or at least her nomination — to go away. And so she asked to have her nomination withdrawn, and just in time.
She left amid questions about her role in Ritter’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign and whether she had asked anyone at the Denver DA’s office to use a restricted criminal database. She claims she did not.
There’s irony here, of course, because the only reason Villafuerte was remotely involved in this controversy — if she was involved at all — was because the Bob Beauprez campaign had used that very same database in order to attack Ritter.
It’s not the only irony. Ritter had slammed Beauprez for using the National Crime Information Center database. He couldn’t really nominate someone for U.S. attorney who had done the same thing, could he?
It’s not clear what Villafuerte did or didn’t do. Her explanations, it’s fair to say, haven’t made any of it much clearer.
These kinds of nominations are matches just waiting to be struck. And Republican U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, who knows way too much about this kind of heat, was prepared to ask questions at a Senate confirmation hearing — one in which Villa fuerte would have been under oath.
Some people are guessing that Villafuerte dropped out because she was worried what the answers would reveal about her. It’s just as likely that she dropped out because her answers would have embarrassed someone else.
In her letter of withdrawal to the Obama administration, Villafuerte — who just happens to be Ritter’s deputy chief of staff — blamed “attack politics” for her departure. Presumably, she meant the work of Dick Wadhams, the state Republican chairman and attack-politics specialist.
But I don’t blame Wadhams, who can’t really help himself. He received a gift, directly from Ritter and friends — a holiday gift he never wanted to see returned.
You know the story. You’ve read the many stories. They began with Cory Voorhis, the former ICE agent who leaked the story of Walter Ramo/ Carlos Estrada-Medina to the flailing Beauprez campaign. Ramo was a small-time drug dealer and illegal immigrant who had pleaded to, yes, agricultural trespass.
Ramo went to California, using the name Estrada-Medina, and would be charged with sexually assaulting a child, a charge later dropped. Voorhis learned this apparently by trolling through the National Crime Information Center database, possibly on his lunch hour, while looking for just such a case.
The case was 3 years old by the time Voorhis found it. Still, Voorhis apparently was outraged. Or as Beauprez would colorfully explain later, Voorhis had had a bellyful. And so, with full belly, Voorhis leaked the story to the opposition campaign. As I may have mentioned at the time, it was Beauprez’s Alka-Seltzer defense.
If it seemed like a fairly crude political act, it wasn’t the only one. Beauprez was losing in the polls by 15 percentage points at the time. His only campaign strategy seemed to be to go after a DA Ritter for doing exactly the same kind of plea bargaining that all district attorneys do. Let’s just say the strategy wasn’t working.
In a final desperate act, the Beauprez campaign took Voohis’ information and turned it into its best imitation of a Willie Horton ad.
I don’t know if you remember the ad. It wasn’t as memorable as the one with Beauprez standing on the wrong side of the horse saying, “There’s that smell again.” But it was memorable enough.
It had facts wrong. It had other facts that were dripping with innuendo. It was ugly. And it backfired.
And things got even worse for Voorhis, who would be charged — although acquitted — for his actions. He would eventually be fired, but only because he deserved to be.
This, of course, made him a talk- radio martyr, which was all he could hope for in trying to get his job back — until Villafuerte’s nomination brought it all home again.
If you’ve been following the story, you know that one apparent explanation given for Villafuerte’s calls to the DA’s office was that Ritter was being threatened by a stalker.
Who knew that this story would still be stalking him more than three years later?
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
