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Green: 'Smoking gun' should put focus back on Villafuerte

By Chuck Greene, Aurora Sentinal, November 4, 2009

To solve most crimes, you need a smoking gun. Once you’ve found that, the rest usually is easy.

But it’s not always so in politics.

In the long and complicated case of defamed federal agent Cory Voorhis, the smoking gun appears to have been located, but the case is far from over.

Voorhis, wrongly accused of misconduct and acquitted in a criminal trial, is still fighting for his economic survival and his good name, but he’s up against a political steamroller that involves the Denver district attorney’s office, the Colorado governor’s office, the federal agency he worked for, a couple of U.S. senators and the White House itself.

That’s a lot of firepower assembled against one guy.

The smoking gun is a single telephone message, discovered in the possession of an employee in the Denver DA’s office, which belies stories told by that employee and a woman now nominated to be the U.S. attorney in Colorado.

The phone message, written by DA employee Lynn Kimbrough, was a notation that Stephanie Villafuerte had called Kimbrough regarding Carlos Estrada-Medina, an illegal immigrant with a criminal record.

Previously the two women had said they never talked about Estrada-Medina during the period the phone message was taken.

At the time, Voorhis was an agent with the U..S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Denver, where he had investigated Estrada-Medina.

He was accused of improperly accessing a federal database in 2006 to get information about Estrada-Medina for political purposes, passing that information to the campaign of Bob Beauprez, who was running for governor against Bill Ritter.

Ritter was a former Denver DA, and Villafuerte was working as a top aide in his campaign. She had formerly worked in the DA’s office with Kimbrough, and the two had remained close during the Ritter campaign.

Beauprez had made Ritter’s record as DA in handling illegal immigrants an issue in the campaign. Voorhis was incensed that Ritter had offered plea bargains in criminal cases against illegal immigrants, and he was assisting Beauprez’s campaign in research.

A federal jury found Voorhis not guilty of improperly using the database, but his career was ruined in the process.

Kimbrough, who had worked for Democrat Ritter prior to his campaign against Republican Beauprez, and others in the DA’s office are suspected of accessing the same database to expose Voorhis.

Kimbrough, in the DA’s office, and Villafuerte, in Ritter’s campaign, have denied for nearly three years that they were involved in — or even discussed — the Estrada-Medina case at the time.

But then the telephone message was discovered by the FBI, indicating otherwise.

The case is important because Villafuerte, now President Barack Obama’s nominee as U.S. attorney, has denied discussing the Estrada-Medina case with Kimbrough. The Denver Post has reported that Villafuerte told the FBI she had “no conversations” with anyone at the DA’s office regarding Estrada-Medina.

It can be a federal offense to lie to an FBI agent, which puts Villafuerte in a precarious position as a nominee to the U.S. attorney’s job.

For several months, Villafuerte has refused to discuss any details of the case. Now she claims that, as a nominee of the White House, she is barred from commenting.

That’s the political equivalent of invoking the Fifth Amendment, which isn’t a good thing for a potential U.S. attorney to do.

When her nomination comes up for a hearing in the U.S. Senate, she needs to be questioned about the “smoking gun” phone message. So far, the two U.S. senators from Colorado, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, haven’t addressed that issue publicly.

They are Democrats, as is Villafuerte, but Republicans in the Senate have indicated they will pursue the smoking gun when Villafuerte’s nomination reaches them.

They certainly should.

And if Villafuerte claims amnesia regarding the phone message, she should be disqualified as serving in the U.S. attorney’s position. That’s not a job to be held by someone with a lame memory.

Chuck Green, veteran Colorado journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Denver Post, syndicates a statewide column.