September 16, 2024 12:36 PM UTC

How Mayor Mike And A Slumlord Invented The "Takeover" Of Aurora

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• by: Colorado Pols

The New York Times’ Jonathan Wiseman reported this weekend in depth on the controversy over the fictional “takeover” of the city of Aurora, Colorado by migrant gangs, which despite being debunked at every step in the false story’s spread peaked last week with former President Donald Trump promising that the “largest deportation in the history of our country” would begin in Aurora. Trump made this promise despite a fresh statement from Republican elected officials in Aurora led by Mayor Mike Coffman seeking once again to tamp down the unfounded rumors damaging the city’s image. Coffman has taken heavy criticism for playing both sides of the issue depending on the inherent bias of the news outlet he was speaking with, while for City Councilor Danielle Jurinsky this statement represented a major walk-back from her previous hyperbole. For the New York Times’ audience, Coffman at first appears content to take his lumps:

Mike Coffman, the conservative Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo., said he was at home on Tuesday night watching the presidential debate and bracing for the worst.

And then there it was again, before tens of millions of viewers: former President Donald J. Trump, describing Mr. Coffman’s Aurora, a sprawling suburb just east of Denver, as a city under siege, terrorized by migrants.

“They’re taking over buildings,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re going in violently.”

Mr. Coffman was contrite on Thursday as he told that story. After all, he had helped create the tall tale now sullying his city’s reputation.

Coffman’s “contrition” in telling the story of Trump brazenly lying about the situation in his city, repeating baseless rumors that Coffman himself helped subsidize on the Fox News Channel, might evoke a measure of sympathy for Coffman, who it can be argued paid for Donald Trump’s rise to power with his own congressional career despite Coffman’s half-hearted attempts to distance himself from Trump in 2016 and 2018. But after everything Coffman has suffered in his own career because of Trump, Trump’s record after Coffman lost his seat in Congress including the January 6th, 2021 insurrection, and now Trump’s fact-free trashing of Mayor Mike’s town on national television, Coffman says he intends to vote for Trump this November:

Mr. Coffman has had to reverse his own rhetoric as he watches Mr. Trump, the presidential candidate he still said he would reluctantly vote for in November, continue to stoke fear in his community. Meantime, the mayor has started a crusade to try to undo the damage Mr. Trump is inflicting.

“I mean, I agree with him on a lot of policies as it pertains to immigration,” Mr. Coffman said in City Hall on Thursday. [Pols emphasis] “But I’m also the mayor of the City of Aurora, and my job is not only to make sure that the city is safe, but also to protect the image of the city. This narrative out there is exaggerated, and it’s our responsibility to correct it.”

Even after years of getting acquainted with Mike Coffman’s duplicity, it’s still something of a shock that Coffman says he will vote for Trump in the same breath as he acknowledges that Trump is lying about the state of the city Coffman is Mayor of. It’s even more shocking for Coffman to claim he agrees with Trump “on a lot of policies as it pertains to immigration,” when Trump’s immigration platform is inherently based on the lies Coffman says he wants to see debunked. It is the exact same cowardice in the face of Trump’s excesses that cost Coffman his seat in Congress in 2018.

Having nailed Coffman for his role in manufacturing the controversy in Aurora, the story turns to the property managers in charge of several apartment buildings alleged to have been “taken over” by Venezuelan gangs. And as it turns out, the entire story could be the spin from a “crisis communications” PR firm working for the landlords:

In July 2024, the landlord, CBZ Management, which says it is based in Colorado and Brooklyn, offered a new argument for why it couldn’t repair the buildings: Venezuelan gangs had taken over, and the property managers had been forced to flee.

Mr. Coffman and a Republican City Council member, Danielle Jurinsky, quickly repeated CBZ’s unverified claim in interviews.

“We have areas in our city, unfortunately, that have been taken, and we have to take back,” Mr. Coffman told a local talk radio host on July 31.

On Aug, 5, a public relations agent, Sara Lattman, hired by CBZ, pitched a “tip” to the local Fox television network affiliate in Denver.

“An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area,” she wrote on Fox 31’s tip line, according to an email obtained by The Times. “The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”

As readers who have been following this story know, the residents of the affected buildings have publicly protested the depiction of their apartment buildings as overrun by gangs, saying they fear only the rats, the cockroaches, and Mayor Mike Coffman. Residents had complained for years about lack of maintenance, and the city was in the process of enforcing code violations just as the drama over the supposed gang “takeover” of these buildings exploded.

As of today, it looks like it was all so a slumlord in Brooklyn could flake out on maintaining their Aurora apartment buildings. Mike Coffman’s two-facedness provided the opening for the “crisis communicators'” false information to spread at the city’s expense. And then Donald Trump took it to the next insane level for his own racist divisive purposes.

If he can really vote for Trump with a clear conscience after all this, Mike Coffman isn’t sorry enough.