Gold Dome, Right To Arms

Dems know more about salary comment than they're saying

On Tuesday, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa clarified statements he made over the weekend, claiming the group of sheriffs who recently testified against a raft of gun control measures were facing push back in the form of paycheck extortion from Democrat leaders in the General Assembly.

The day before Maketa’s clarification was released, the Democrat Senate Communications Director, Doug Schepman, authored a communication (sent to one major media outlet that we’re certain of) in an apparent attempt to put the pressure back on Maketa. And Schepman’s press release raises a couple of very interesting questions about what Democrats knew about Maketa’s claims. We’ll get to those questions in just a moment, but for now, let’s cover the rest of the background.

In his clarification, Sheriff Maketa said,

…I received an email containing the following language from a member of County Sheriffs Of Colorado: “…I have been advised by a reliable source at the Capitol that the Dems are seriously not pleased with the CSOC positions on the gun bills, and given the potential for a real salary bill to be introduced as you shall see from a follow-up email from” (an unnamed sheriff), “support of SB197 would put us in a more favorable light for salary bill support from the Dems. I do not believe we would be sacrificing our principles or positions on the other gun bills by supporting SB197.”

So now, with more background on Maketa’s original claims published, let’s look at what Schepman said via email on Monday (produced in full at the end of this article).

“Senate leadership has now confirmed that the person who delivered a verbal message to a member of CSOC was not a Democratic legislator or staffer, but an individual stating their own opinion without referencing the salary bill.”

Interesting.

First question, how does the Senate leadership know that the conversation mentioned above contained no references…not one…to the salary bill unless someone from Senate leadership was there for the conversation? If no member of Senate leadership, or no Senate staffer was present, then Schepman is taking the word of someone he trusts, and this person needs to cover their rear now that Maketa’s claims have gone national. If the conversation didn’t mention the salary bill, how do they even know that was the conversation in question? How can a person identify a message they delivered, by noting the unique identifier of what was not said?

Second question, why doesn’t the Dem leadership “out” the rogue individual “who delivered a verbal message?” If outing the individual were harmful to Maketa and his claims, make no doubt, they would out that person, they would name names. Instead, they just call him or her “an individual.”

Could Dem leadership have sent an envoy to deliver a message, an envoy that would not have the burden of being an actual elected official or paid Capitol staffer, so as to deliver an implied threat, without getting their own hands dirty? Plausible deniability? After all, the Godfather doesn’t do his own dirty work.

Forgive us, but we’ve got a feeling like we’ve been here before.

In 2006, Bill Ritter’s gubernatorial campaign accused the campaign of Bob Beauprez of illegally accessing a criminal database to dig up dirt on a criminal Ritter had given a lenient plea bargain to while Ritter was DA. Only problem then became, how did Ritter gain enough knowledge to understand the database was used in the first place? The answer was a hypothetical that Ritter (or some other agent thereof) accessed the same database, thereby committing the same ethics violation.

In both cases, the Dem leadership and the Ritter campaign, may have protested too much.

Schepman Email Maketa by CompleteColorado

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