I realize primary politics isn’t beanbag, but in Colorado’s GOP Senate primary, Jane Norton appears to have crossed a line in an ad she’s running against Ken Buck.
After the Columbine school shootings, a new U.S. Attorney in Colorado named Ted Strickland wanted to crack down hard on gun sellers, and focused on an old ATF investigation of a pawn shop in Aurora. Unfortunately for him, at least 15 career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office, including Ken Buck, deemed the evidence of violations of firearms laws weak and unlikely to result in conviction. Every one had already seen the evidence and declined to prosecute, but Strickland brought in two new like-minded attorneys, and they began assembling a case.
Around this time, Ken Buck clearly did something he shouldn’t. Before the grand jury met or any indictments were issued, a lawyer for the pawn-shop owners called him up and Buck expressed his low opinion of the case against the owners. The defense attorney then sought to invoke Buck’s skeptical comments in court in his defense.
There are times when there is nothing ethically problematic about prosecutors and defense attorneys talking about potential cases, but this wasn’t one of them. Buck was given a letter of reprimand and instructed to attend ethics class. Buck has expressed regret over the decision. But that hardly makes him a bad prosecutor, or a bad guy. Strickland’s successor, then–U.S. Attorney John Suthers, wrote in the reprimand, “I have chosen not to impose any more serious consequences on the basis of my determination that your conduct was not intentional, my review of mitigating information you have presented and in consideration of your previous records as an (Assistant U.S. Attorney), as Senior Litigation Counsel and as Chief of the Criminal Division. This incident appears to be an aberration in your professional career.”
Oh, by the way, Ken Buck and the other career prosecutors appear to have been correct in their assessment that it was a weak case; the penalty imposed on the pawn-shop owners is almost comically minimal: “Two years after the original felony indictment, Greg Golyansky pleaded guilty to a paperwork misdemeanor and was sentenced to a day of probation. The charges against Leonid Golyansky and Dmitriy Baravik were dropped.”
A two-year battle to impose one day of probation: your tax dollars at work!
For this, a radio ad for Norton calls Buck “a government lawyer who doesn’t follow the rules” and declares he “left office under a cloud.” Come on. If this is his biggest mistake in years and years of work as a prosecutor, he’s exemplary.