One of the political groups formed to oppose U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Silt Republican who has galvanized friend and foe since she upset an incumbent in last year’s GOP primary, filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics last week alleging improprieties involving nearly $1 million in consulting fees paid to her husband by an energy company.
According to the complaint from former state Rep. Bri Buentello, D-Pueblo, a spokeswoman for the anti-Boebert committee Rural Colorado United, the $938,987 paid by a Texas-based natural gas company to Jayson Boebert in 2019 and 2020 far exceeds typical pay in the field. Buentello asked the ethics office to investigate whether there was a connection between her husband’s big payday and some bills Boebert introduced this year.
Lamenting what he termed “a constant string of left wing attacks from political hacks,” a Boebert spokesman dismissed the accusations as “a waste of everyone’s time.”
It’s hardly been a secret, said her press secretary, Jake Settle, that Boebert supports a policy embraced by most Republicans, of increasing oil and gas production and expanding fossil fuel pipelines.
An ethics expert told Colorado Politics that it’s a tough haul to establish the explicit quid pro quo required to prove a bribery charge, though a House rule that forbids improper influence might be implicated.
“Improper influence is accepting a financial benefit as a result of your official position,” said Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center and a former official with the Office of Congressional Ethics. He added that Boebert could also face repercussions if it turns out she intentionally failed to disclose her husband’s income and its source in previous filings.
It could be months before the ethics office rules whether the complaint merits a full-blown investigation — and months beyond that before issuing a ruling.
But if the string of ethics complaints lodged against Colorado officials over the last dozen years is any guide, Boebert’s opponents won’t wait until a decision has been rendered to make hay with the accusations.
It’s been a while since operatives in the state realized they could wield ethics complaints as potent political attacks.
In Boebert’s case, the outrage sharks are already circling the ethics complaint and news coverage that spawned it like so much bloody chum in the water, pumping out fundraising emails before the ink on the allegations were dry.
“It is clear that Boebert cannot be trusted with her position of authority,” warns a recently formed outfit called the Colorado Turnout Project in an email seeking donations to “fight to protect Colorado and the nation” from politicians like Boebert.
Notwithstanding the truism that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, the whiff of an ethical scandal hardly ever helps a candidate. Even when accusations fail to move many votes, political opponents can use their target’s tarnished reputation to stoke enthusiasm on their side.
Last year, Democratic Senate candidate John Hickenlooper flew into a perfect storm surrounding a slew of complaints filed with the state’s Independent Ethics Commission a couple years earlier for accepting forbidden travel accommodations when he was serving as governor.
While it didn’t cost Hickenlooper the nomination or, ultimately, the general election — he defeated Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner by a 9-point margin in a year that saw Democrats sweep the ballot in much of Colorado — the long-awaited ruling and the Hickenlooper defense team’s ham-handed handling of the situation fell just before the primary, helping slow the campaign’s momentum and turning what had looked like an easy win into a long-haul fight.
Colorado’s independent Ethics Commission, established by voters in 2006 with the passage of Amendment 41 by a wide margin, enforces a ban on gifts to state and local government employees and officials, with the exception of the judicial branch of government and those covered by stricter local ethics rules. Currently, the constitutional amendment bans gifts valued at more than $65 — the figure adjusts annually for inflation — and bans gifts entirely from professional lobbyists.
In the 14 years since Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission got its complaint system up and running in 2008, commissioners have rendered decisions on 356 complaints, from a low of four filed the first year to a high of 80 filed last year — perhaps not coincidentally, an election year.
The vast majority of the complaints have been dismissed as frivolous — alleging behavior that wouldn’t fall under the amendment, even if true — or outside the one-year statute of limitations, or both. In all, since 2008 the commission has taken 41 of the 356 complaints to the next stage, finding violations in only a handful.
In the early days, the left-leaning Colorado Ethics Watch filed most of the complaints, helping pioneer the weaponized ethics charge into a trusty arrow in state Democrats’ quivers. The organization shuttered four years ago, but soon a right-leaning version called the Public Trust Institute sprung up and has been going after Democrats with the same fervor Ethics Watch once brought to its attacks on Republicans.
It was the Public Trust Institute that filed a voluminous complaint against Hickenlooper in 2018, the last year he was governor, alleging he’s taken dozens of rides on private planes, as well as some other travel perks while on personal and official business.
After the commission tossed most of the allegations because the trips took place more than a year before the complaint had been filed, both sides battled it out in legal arguments for more than a year and a half before the ethics commission finally set a hearing date in June last year.
Since it was the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hearing would be virtual, with participants appearing remotely via teleconference.
Hickenlooper’s attorneys objected and advised the candidate to skip the proceeding, resulting in a contempt charge and loads of bad headlines just weeks before the primary election. When the rescheduled hearing took place, the commission found Hickenlooper had improperly accepted a private plane trip to Connecticut from a major campaign donor and took advantage of complimentary shuttle service from the airport at an international conference in Italy.
Hickenlooper paid the $2,750 fine and apologized for failing to navigate what even his critics acknowledged was a confusing set of rules — numerous flights were deemed OK, though the details weren’t much different from the one found to have been a violation — but his opponents went to town with campaign ad after campaign ad portraying the former brewpub owner and Denver mayor as one of history’s greatest monsters, at least from an ethical perspective.
Proving they could hurl charges, too, the Democrats went tit for tat after Gardner, filing an ethics complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee alleging the incumbent Republican had violated a Senate ban on accepting gifts over $50 by attending a dinner party in Florida sponsored by Krug Champagne.
The Gardner campaign pointed out that he’d reimbursed the company for the cost of the dinner, and the committee took no action, but the mere existence of a complaint was enough to spawn a series of negative digital ads that chipped away a bit at Gardner’s image as the Patagonia-wearing guy from Yuma.
When it comes to ethics-based attacks, the more spectacular the details, the better, and both Senate candidates’ complaints were chock full of them.
Hickenlooper, it turned out, didn’t just hop a friend’s private plane for an official trip to the christening of the submarine USS Colorado — that violation didn’t get much attention — but he also jetted off to an exotic locale in the Italian Alps and was chauffeured to the chalet in a black Maserati, all while sinister music played in the background.
And Gardner didn’t just eat dinner while rubbing shoulders with potential donors — he sipped $1,000-a-bottle Krug Clos du Mesnil 2004 as pianist Chloe Flowers and gold-lamé-clad violinist Ezinma serenaded tipsy revelers in a tropical jungle setting, inspired by some of the world’s finest champagne.
The complaint filed against Boebert might lack the lurid details — though you can already hear the narrator adopting an Austin Powers voice to say “nearly one mill-ll-ll-llion dollars” — but don’t be surprised if a widely circulated photo of the lawmaker in front of a drilling rig with her hard-hat-wearing husband starts showing up before long in their own attack ads.
This content was originally published here.
