June 24, 2024 12:07 PM UTC

Dave Williams Lies About Spending Republican Party Funds on His Own Campaign

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dave Williams is nothing if not full of shit.

Last week Marshall Zelinger of 9News tracked Williams down at a Republican event to ask him a couple of questions, including a series of queries related to the Colorado Republican Party spending money on paid communications in order to help prop up Williams’s own Republican Primary campaign against Jeff Crank in CO-05. Here’s how that conversation went:

ZELINGER: How much has the Colorado GOP spent to help you beat another Republican, and how much has the Party spent to help the three other endorsed candidates win their contested primaries?

WILLIAMS: There has been no direct spending from the party for myself or any of the other [Congressional] candidates. [Pols emphasis]

In a story that later ran on 9News, Zelinger points out that we have already seen direct mail promoting Williams and opposing his Primary opponent that has come from the Colorado Republican Party, including this one that says at the top left, in bold letters, “PAID FOR BY THE COLORADO REPUBLICAN PARTY.”

Zelinger knew the correct answer to his question before asking Williams. We’re guessing that Williams also knew that Zelinger knew the correct answer. That still didn’t stop Williams from lying about it not once, but twice:

ZELINGER: So when the [campaign finance reports] come out, we’re going to see zero dollars spent to benefit Dave Williams’s CD-5 campaign, and zero dollars spent for any of the other endorsed candidates?

WILLIAMS: You’re not going to see anything like that. [Pols emphasis]

As it turns out, we DID see something like that. Something exactly like that:

As you can see from the Federal Elections Commission campaign finance report filed on June 21, the Colorado Republican party spent $19,445.29 on direct mail in support of…Dave Williams.

As Sandra Fish reports fruther for The Colorado Sun, this was not an insignificant amount considering the totality of the State GOP’s resources:

That represented the largest single expense of the nearly $90,000 the party spent last month, according to a Federal Election Commission filing late Thursday. The party raised about $56,000 in May and began June with about $550,000 in the bank…

…The Colorado GOP sent a mailer in late May promoting Williams and his endorsement from former President Donald Trump. The FEC report says the money spent by the party to support Williams’ congressional campaign was spent on May 28, the same day The Sun received a copy of the mailer. (The report does not say what the money was spent on, just that it was spent to support Williams.)

The party sent two more mailers in early June promoting Williams and attacking Crank. The Colorado GOP’s June spending won’t be revealed until late July. [Pols emphasis]

In other words, it will almost certainly turn out that the Colorado Republican Party spent roughly $20,000 to support Williams’s Congressional campaign on at least two other occasions. The total outlay for Williams’s own benefit will likely surpass $60,000 for a State Party that really doesn’t have a lot of money in general.

Williams declined to answer questions from The Sun, but his buddy and State GOP Treasurer Tom Bjorkland gave away the game with his response:

“The party isn’t out any money and our balance sheets and subsequent disclosure filings will show a net positive for Colorado Republicans,” Bjorklund said in a text message.

But Bjorklund declined to explain how that could be. He also refused to answer questions about whether Williams’ campaign plans to reimburse the party. Instead, he called The Sun “fake news.” [Pols emphasis]

When your response to a reporter is to call their outlet “fake news,” you’re pretty much just admitting that you have no good answer for a relevant question. Calling something “fake news” is the 2024 equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and humming, “Lalalalala.”

So what will be the end result of these shenanigans? The $60,000+ that the State GOP spent to help Williams is a pittance compared to the $2.5 million spent by Super PACs to help Crank. Williams will probably lose to Crank on Tuesday, after which he will probably cry out that the election was rigged, or stolen, or whatever.

But the spending by the State GOP to help Williams — an unprecedented breach of standards even in a standards-light Republican Party — will put more pressure on Republicans to oust Williams as State Party Chair after the dust settles from Tuesday’s election. If Republicans can’t even get rid of Williams after this and after all the damage he’s done in the last year, and in the last month specifically, then they truly have no business pretending to represent the interests of Colorado Republicans in general.