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Beauprez cites 'credible' source

Alan Gathright, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 18, 2006 at midnight

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Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez revealed Tuesday that an "extremely credible informant who said 'I've had enough' " provided attack ad ammunition about Bill Ritter's plea bargains for immigrants charged with crimes as Denver district attorney.

Beauprez told veterans at events from Colorado Springs to Aurora Tuesday how the mystery source allowed his campaign to "unzip (Ritter's) little bag of secrets."

But he refused to reveal the "confidential informant" or where he got his information, which is the subject of an ongoing probe by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation into whether Beauprez's campaign illegally obtained negative information from an FBI database.

"Now that the CBI is involved, we're not going to investigate this in the media," Beauprez told reporters after an Aurora veterans gathering Tuesday afternoon.

His campaign has retained Mike Norton, a former U.S. attorney for Colorado and the husband of Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, to represent it while the CBI questions Beauprez campaign officials.

But on the stump, he told supporters, "We had an extremely credible informant, who said: 'I've had enough. Look here,' " recounting how the source provided the Beauprez campaign information about Ritter's DA office granting plea bargains to legal and illegal immigrants to allegedly allow them to avoid deportation.

"We verified . . . the information he gave us was accurate. What we did is unzip the little bag of secrets and Mr. Ritter doesn't like it that somebody has looked inside the bag," Beauprez said.

The CBI investigation followed a complaint by Ritter that the information in the attack ad could only have come from a law enforcement source with access to the highly restricted FBI database. It's a crime to tap into the database for anything other than law enforcement purposes.

Reporters asked why Beauprez wouldn't reveal the source of the information after vowing Friday to "demonstrate we got our information legally."

"Why didn't Judith Miller reveal her source? Why didn't Bernstein and Woodward reveal their source?" Beauprez replied.

He was invoking the former New York Times reporter who was jailed for refusing to name her source during a probe into a possible Bush administration leak of a CIA operative's identity, and the two Washington Post reporters who used a once-secret source known as "Deep Throat" to break the Watergate scandal.

Beauprez vehemently denied that his campaign illegally received information from an FBI database.

Yet, when pressed about whether anyone might have broken the law to get negative information against Ritter, Beauprez appeared to hedge, saying: "Well, certainly nothing that we had control over."

The furor erupted last week when Beauprez launched an ad saying that Ritter granted a 2001 plea bargain to an illegal immigrant arrested for heroin dealing. The ad claims the man, who eventually was granted probation, was later arrested for lewd conduct with a child in San Francisco.

Ritter has demanded that Beauprez explain how he knew the defendant identified in the ad as "Carlos Estrada Medina" was the same man named "Walter Noel Ramo" in the Denver court case and identified as "Eugene Alfredo Estrada-Acosta" in the San Francisco sex offense.