Harris DA investigator surfaces in fed's probe of ICE leak

Case involves Colorado race for governor, access to records

By Susan Carroll, Houston Chronicle, November 8, 2007

An investigator for the Harris County District Attorney's Office allegedly accessed a confidential law enforcement database for a Texas private investigator on the Colorado Republican Party's payroll, according to records filed in federal court.

Much of the documentation outlining the alleged misuse of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, which includes FBI records of criminal histories, was sealed by a federal magistrate judge in Denver on Tuesday.

The alleged abuse surfaced in a criminal case involving Cory Voorhis, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Denver, who was charged in October in connection with leaking information to representatives for then-gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez.

Beauprez was in a contentious race last year with the former district attorney in Denver, Bill Ritter, a Democrat who won the election.

Voorhis was accused of using NCIC to research the criminal histories of immigrants who were offered plea deals by Ritter's office and leaking them to Beauprez, who then attacked Ritter's immigration record in political ads that aired in 2006.

In a motion to dismiss the charges filed on Tuesday, Voorhis' attorneys argued he was targeted for selective prosecution. The attorneys alleged that a Harris County District Attorney's Office investigator, who was not named in the motion, and a member of the Denver district attorney's office accessed some of the same records.

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said Thursday he didn't have any knowledge about the allegations. He said he would have his chief investigator look into the accusations.

Voorhis' attorneys cited Colorado Bureau of Investigations reports and e-mails from a private investigator in Texas in the motion to dismiss, but those documents were sealed.

A computer audit trail reportedly showed that on Oct. 4, 2006, an investigator with the Harris County Attorneys' Office made an inquiry through NCIC into the criminal history files relating to "Walter Noel Ramo," one of the people whose information was provided to the Beauprez campaign.

"Law enforcement agents subsequently determined that the (Harris County) investigator was affiliated with a private investigator who was under contract or otherwise employed by the Colorado Republican Party with respect to this matter," said the motion to dismiss.

"With no apparent need to access the databases for a law enforcement purpose, the Harris County Investigator's access should be inherently more suspect than Voorhis's," the attorneys argued. "However, Voorhis has been criminally charged and the Harris County Investigator apparently has not even been interviewed."

Voorhis faces three misdemeanor counts of exceeding his authorized computer access.

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