December 29, 2010 09:25 PM UTC

Top Stories of 2010 #7: The "Crooks and Criminals"

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• by: Colorado Pols

You can imagine our excitement in early September, when we received a hefty archive of research into the criminal and professional backgrounds of dozens of candidates for the Colorado legislature. With details on just about every significantly contested race, this really was a comprehensive treasure trove of information well beyond anything the public gets to see in media questionnaires, dumped into our lap by anonymous sources.

From a quick survey of the documents we were provided, it was objectively clear that Republican legislative candidates had a much larger problem on their hands. Both in terms of the number of candidates affected by serious criminal and professional misdeeds in their past, as well as the severity and propensity for violent crimes committed, for whatever reason the GOP’s legislative recruitment operation had rather spectacularly missed numerous race-ending scandals.

Then we waited–for some weeks, as the information was embargoed by our sources until the Denver newspaper published it. Although we can’t claim to have the best relations with the Denver paper right now, we certainly have enough respect for our own sources to honor the terms they offer us. We explained all of this in our post after the Denver newspaper published its story.

In the aftermath of the front-page disclosure by the Denver paper of these criminal records, several things happened. 527 groups–on both sides, but for obvious reasons mostly Democrats–fired up the printing presses as fast as they could. Meanwhile, Rep. Frank McNulty, the director of the GOP House campaign, lurched on the defensive, absurdly telling FOX31’s Eli Stokols:

“You’re seeing normal people stepping up and running for office,” McNulty said. [Pols emphasis] “You see folks who are ordinary people, who face the real challenges that families in Colorado face and that have the real problems that people in Colorado have.”

There was a lack of clarity on several details of this story as well, which seemed at first to help McNulty and some of his candidates get out from under the worst of the revelations. For example, HD-24 candidate Clint Webster was denying to some media outlets having actually fired shots at his wife in an alercation in the early 1990s. This and certain other ambiguities in the initial reporting led the Denver newspaper’s editorial board to take the unusual step of clarifying the matter for the newsroom in a weekend editorial–very clearly establishing the lopsided ratio of Republicans to Democrats affected, and better differentiating between the severity of Webster’s firing shots at his ex-wife and Dennis Apuan’s arrest for protesting against nuclear weapons.

Although it was tough for Democrats to get the word out on these downticket races in the compressed amount of time they had after this information was finally made public, there’s no question that it had an impact, through news reporting and secondary use by 527s, on the outcome of a few close races. And we predict that 2010 will mark the last year that legislative candidates from either party will ever escape a seven-dollar CBI background check.