Still plenty fishy in Voorhis prosecution
This Web only Speakout has not been edited.
By Mike Hazzard

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Here we go again. As everyone by now knows, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agent Cory Voorhis has been acquitted of illegally accessing immigration information and funneling it to the Bob Beauprez gubernatorial campaign in 2006. I couldn’t be happier. But what of those who knew or should have known that Agent Voorhis didn’t deserve to be put through hell like this, and who may have secretly enjoyed seeing him go through it?

A little background information: Since Bill Ritter, Congressman Beauprez’s opponent in the gubernatorial race and current Colorado Governor, had no record in Washington to analyze, the Beauprez campaign began analyzing Governor Ritter’s record as a prosecutor here in Colorado. Analyzing the record of one’s opponent in a political race, in this case for Colorado Governor, is seemingly as old as time itself. However, the Beauprez campaign was accused by Ritter and his campaign of illegally accessing a criminal database regarding Ritter’s plea bargaining of the case of an illegal alien accused of heroin trafficking. (All the more hypocritical, since it appears several allies of Ritter did exactly the same thing!) This man is believed to have then gone on to commit a sex crime in another state. Not surprisingly, instead of dealing with the issue of the plea bargain, or any wrong doing on the part of his own campaign, Governor Ritter and his campaign attempted to shift everyone’s focus to the question of how the Beauprez campaign got the information in the first place.

While there is much, much more detail I could go into, I understand fully why DAs plea-bargain. However, we’re not talking about a traffic ticket here, rather, heroin trafficking. Not that I really expect frank answers, but I’d like to ask Governor Ritter why he pleaded this case down. Was he overloaded? Did he not feel there was sufficient evidence? How many other such cases did he treat in a similar manner? Was he making some kind of political statement regarding illegal aliens? Was he nearly so concerned in this instance with doing what’s right or with destroying a political opponent? Did he not feel it was worth his effort because ICE wouldn’t deal with it to his liking? (Governor Ritter claimed in a debate on the Mike Rosen show, which can be heard in its entirety on Mike’s web site at www.850koa.com, that ICE wouldn’t deport illegal aliens he prosecuted so why bother?, or words to that effect. As far as the illegal immigration database and the flap surrounding it are concerned, a wonderful editorial, “The real scandal in latest ‘leakgate’,â€