June 05, 2020 07:14 PM UTC

Two Out Of Ninety-Seven Ain't Bad?

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Denver7’s Blair Miller reports, the wild and mostly meritless ride of a complaint before the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission against former Gov. John Hickenlooper ended late Friday, with two findings that Hickenlooper violated the state’s gift ban imposed under the 2006 ethics reform law known as Amendment 41:

The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission on Friday found that former Gov. John Hickenlooper violated the state’s gift ban in two of six instances that were alleged and continued on from ethics complaints made by a former Republican House speaker in October 2018.

The five-member commission found that Hickenlooper, currently one of two Democrats vying for the U.S. Senate nomination to face Sen. Cory Gardner in November, violated the gift ban in Amendment 41 when he flew on a private plane and went to private dinners on a trip to Connecticut for the commissioning of the USS Colorado and when he accepted transportation, meals and other things during a trip to the Bilderberg meeting in Italy…

But the commissioners found that Hickenlooper did not violate state law in the other four instances – regarding a plane ride back to Colorado with a friend after a meeting and getting his wife out of the hospital, a plane ride back from Texas for officiating Kimbal Musk’s wedding, a trip from Washington D.C. to Jackson Hole, Wyo. On his chief of staff’s plane, nor another plane ride on his chief of staff’s plane from Washington D.C. to Centennial in which they discussed the transition plans.

So ends what we expect will be the biggest fishing expedition of the 2020 U.S. Senate race in Colorado, with a complaint filed by Republican usual suspects that began with nearly 100 supposed allegations boiling down to two instances in which Hickenlooper should have reimbursed a benefactor for travel expenses according to the IEC. One of these benefactors happens to be Larry Mizel, a Republican megadonor and supporter of Hickenlooper’s presumed general election opponent Sen. Cory Gardner. Mizel flew Hickenlooper to the commissioning of the U.S.S. Colorado in Connecticut, certainly a justifiable trip for the governor of Colorado however it was paid for. As for the Bilderberg conference, talk radio will indulge itself with the conspiracy fodder, but it’s hard for us to see nefariousness in confusion over expenses that most of that conference’s attendees don’t have to justify to anyone.

The headline is of course not great for Hickenlooper, and it can be argued that yesterday’s reluctance to testify via a malfunctioning WebEx didn’t end up helping Hickenlooper optically. If we were Hickenlooper, now would be the time to thank the IEC for sorting all of this out, write a check to cover the expenses incurred, and move on. That would stand in favorable contrast to former Secretary of State Scott Gessler, who burned through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars unsuccessfully defending himself from the much more serious charge of misusing his office’s discretionary funds.

In the fall, when the referendum dominating the attention of voters is on the ethics of the Trump administration and of Republican enablers of Trump like Sen. Cory Gardner, these travel expenses aren’t going to close an eighteen-point deficit. If this is the worst Hick faces between now and November, it’s not going to be enough to stop the wave.