August 12, 2012 10:08 PM UTC

Jared Wright: The Schadenfreude Continues

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby updates on the continuing saga of Jared Wright, the GOP’s hand-picked nominee to succeed disgraced Rep. Laura Bradford in HD-54.

The last reports about Wright, who faces only token third-party opposition in a heavily GOP-leaning district, and as a result is going to win the election short of a “dead girl/live boy” disclosure, concerned what was revealed as a chronic inability to start work at his day job as a Fruita police officer on time–complicated by alleged dishonesty about his frequent whereabouts (that is, his couch) after radioing “in service” at the start of his day. As a result of an investigation into this behavior, Wright was given the choice of resignation or being fired, and he chose the former early last month. That this case involved alleged dishonesty resulted in a “Brady letter” being sent to potential litigants in cases involving Wright.

Prior to this, Jared seems to have developed other problems, reports the Sentinel:

House candidate Jared Wright told the Colorado Republican Party about his 2011 bankruptcy, but gave a different reason for why he needed protection from his creditors.

The former Fruita police officer told the party he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection because of bad investments, GOP Chairman Ryan Call told The Daily Sentinel…

“Jared has never been dishonest or misleading with respect to the challenges his family has faced financially,” Call said. “The Obama economy and the struggling situations that a lot of folks have had because their homes or other businesses and investments get upside down gives Jared and other candidates … a unique insight that a lot our folks and residents in Mesa County and our state are facing.”

Wright’s petition for bankruptcy protection, however, specifically listed consumer debt as his reason for filing, and not business debts. [Pols emphasis]

The filing also lists no business, investment or job losses as reasons for not being able to pay his bills. Instead, it shows more than $74,000 in personal debts owed to credit card companies, debt collectors and lenders.

GOP chairman Ryan Call talks about about Wright’s “financial challenges” in a very sympathetic manner, very different from the way Republicans gleefully tore into Arapahoe County Treasurer Doug Milliken after his house went into foreclosure–just as one example.

For our part, we’d be more sympathetic to Wright on this matter, but the fact is he didn’t lose his public sector job before falling into bankruptcy. He in fact kept his job as a Fruita police officer until this summer, which makes him a fairly lucky public sector employee given the public sector job losses of the last few years. Wright only lost his this year, a year after his bankruptcy, under circumstances that cannot be blamed on the “Obama economy.”

These facts combine to make Call’s defense of Wright unusually and gallingly dishonest. Jared Wright had a dependable, taxpayer-funded income that he apparently couldn’t live within. He needed things like a new house, three cars, and a Luminox watch. This was a problem before, or at least in the same period as Wright developed a problem getting to work on time.

And if Wright had lost his public sector job before bankruptcy? Would Call be blaming Obama?

It takes a minute to explain, but people need to understand just how preposterous this is. Kudos to the Sentinel’s newsroom for their fine reporting. And one more we’ve got to acknowledge:

[Rep. Laura] Bradford said she was asked to step aside and now is questioning the party’s decision not to back her for re-election.

“It’s disappointing to me under the circumstances that I was encouraged not to continue my service,” Bradford said Friday. “I find it disappointing that the Republican Party’s choice (to replace her) isn’t of higher caliber.”

You really can’t blame her for saying something.