Federal agent may have broken law by providing info

A federal immigration agent who may have broken the law to supply information in a TV attack ad against Bill Ritter "did the right thing," rival Bob Beauprez said Friday.

Beauprez, the GOP candidate for governor, appeared before dozens of reporters at his headquarters to defend his campaign, which is the subject of a criminal investigation involving the FBI.

A federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Cory Voorhis, is now the focus of the investigation, according to a source.

Voorhis, a registered Republican who lives in Morrison, is suspected of tapping into an FBI database to give the Beauprez campaign information that was used in an attack ad against Democrat Ritter.

Using that database for anything other than law enforcement purposes is illegal. The TV spot focused on an illegal immigrant arrested on suspicion of heroin dealing whom Ritter's office granted a plea-bargain to felony farm land trespass.

Beauprez, who represents the 7th congressional district, declined to say if Voorhis was the informant who aided his campaign, but he portrayed the source as a heroic whistle-blower who was angered by Ritter's record as Denver district attorney.

"By exposing the truth, he broke the law," said Beauprez. "A conscientious member of law enforcement exposed a reckless policy embraced by Bill Ritter and now Bill Ritter is demanding to know his name so he can destroy this person. Our source performed a great act of courage and public service by bringing this story to the public domain."

Ritter said he was outraged by Beauprez's comments, which he described as an invitation to law breaking.

"For a law enforcement officer to break the law and be congratulated by a congressman is something all Coloradans should be disgusted by," said Ritter. "That is a scary place for a person who wants to be governor to wind up. We should never get to a place in this country where the leadership believes the ends justify the means."

The Rocky Mountain News learned Friday that the focus of the investigation has now expanded beyond the most recent attack ad involving a plea bargain Ritter's office made with a suspected drug dealer and illegal immigrant named Carlos Estrada-Medina.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is now looking into the source of information the Beauprez campaign used for a series of similar attack ads that began running at the end of September.

The CBI has already interviewed staffers with the Ritter campaign. Evan Dreyer, a spokesman for Ritter, said they have provided the CBI with evidence they believe shows the federal database was illegally used to obtain information on five immigrants who received plea bargains from Ritter's office and were the subject of Beauprez's first attack ad.

"There is no way the congressman could have determined citizenship status of these defendants without accessing the confidential database," said Dreyer. "The congressman aided and abetted the commission of a crime."

Ritter's staff provided the CBI with a list of all 151 plea bargain cases the Beauprez campaign has criticized Ritter for. The CBI is trying to determine if the federal criminal database was illegally used to research those cases as well, said Dreyer.

Beauprez said his campaign had been approached by the informant this year. He said campaign manager John Marshall then began meeting with the source, who had extensive knowledge of cases involving immigrants.

Marshall said he never thought the data might be illegal.

"We had no reason to think he'd obtained this information in an unlawful way," said Marshall, adding that no one in the Beauprez campaign has yet been interviewed by CBI or FBI agents.

A Denver ICE official said it's expected that investigators will scour the FBI database to see if anyone else accessed it for the Beauprez campaign.

"They're going to start looking to see, 'OK, who else might be involved in this, and is Cory the only one?' That's just a logical step that they're going to take," said the ICE agent, who asked to remain anonymous because speaking out could cost him his job.

"If it looks like it's just him, then they're not going to go any further."

The fellow ICE agent defended Voorhis as "an absolutely great agent" who grew frustrated at what he saw as Ritter's office helping serious drug offenders avoid deportation by reducing their charges.

"Cory took an oath to protect the American people," said the agent. "I think it just got to the point with him when he heard Ritter was running for governor that he said: 'Enough is enough. Here is a guy (Ritter) who did not care about the public enough to work these cases and help us get convictions.'

"Then he went to a congressman (Beauprez) and told the congressman, 'Look, this is wrong,' " the agent said.

Ritter has held large leads over Beauprez in recent polls, and Beauprez has been hammering the former prosecutor for weeks over dozens of plea bargains his office negotiated with legal and illegal immigrants.

Beauprez has claimed those cases reveal a pattern of "recklessness" on the part of Ritter.

However, an investigation by the Rocky Mountain News this month revealed that Ritter's plea bargain record was similar to that of other district attorneys in Colorado. Several other DAs along the Front Range also accepted the 'agricultural trespass' plea that Ritter has been criticized for negotiating.