On July 29, 2021, the chief justice of Colorado’s Supreme Court quietly met in a Denver parking garage with the executive director of the state’s Commission on Judicial Discipline to discuss the latter’s press for information in its inquiry into misconduct allegations tied to an alleged contract-for-silence scheme at the Judicial Department.
During the rendezvous, Chief Justice Brian Boatright told the commission’s then-Executive Director William Campbell that he wanted the discipline panel “to have all the info (it was) seeking” in its investigation, but that Boatright “doesn’t want to give it easily.”
That rendezvous was detailed in a filing the commission made early Monday with a state legislative committee exploring changes to the state’s method of disciplining judges.
The reason, according to the filing, was so that Boatright would have “a credible way to decline providing it” to others digging into a judiciary scandal that’s rocked the state for three years.
The revelation is among several the discipline commission makes in the filing, an 11-page letter to the legislative committee supported by a pair of 12-page appendices that alleges a systemic process of coverup, obfuscation and, in some cases, outright falsehoods by the Judicial Department in its sustained effort to stall the commission’s investigative work.
The department late Monday in a statement said the letter "underscores the Department’s longstanding concern that a public back and forth characterizing previous discussions benefits no one, and in fact damages the Department and the Commission." It said any assertions that evidence is being withheld "is not true."
It called the letter "disheartening" and "omits many relevant statements, ignores important context, in some instances misstates discussions, misquotes language from the Department’s written communications, modifies quotes to imply something other than what was stated (in some cases not indicating the quote has been modified), and falsely attributes ill-intent to many members of Department leadership."
The commission's letter is an astonishing yet candid revelation of the backroom battles the commission says it has had with the Judicial Department in its efforts to obtain information dating back to February 2021, when it was revealed a memo at the center of an alleged quid-pro-quo contract to a former employee laid out several allegations of judicial misconduct that were either handled quietly or not at all.
The memo, by the department’s then-Human Resources Director Eric Brown, was allegedly the lynchpin of a multi-million-dollar contract to former Chief of Staff Mindy Masias, who was being fired for financial irregularities. Masias allegedly was prepared to file a sex-discrimination lawsuit for not landing the state court administrator’s job, the highest civilian post in the 4,000-employee department, and would disclose years of judicial misconduct that paled in comparison to her misdeeds, yet yielded little discipline compared to her firing.
Subsequent investigations by firms hired by the department rebutted those assertions and determined no quid pro quo contract existed, though misconduct and mismanagement was prevalent throughout the contract process.
At the core was an assertion by Christopher Ryan, then the state court administrator who approved the contract, that it was with the full agreement of then-Chief Justice Nathan “Ben” Coats and knowledge of his counsel, Andrew Rottman.
News of the contract-for-silence scheme broke in February 2021 and the discipline commission quickly launched into a fact-finding effort to determine whether any of the allegations of misconduct were true.
Monday’s letter from commission executive director Christopher Gregory lays out a methodical effort by the department to prevent or stall the commission’s work in investigating the scandal.
It lays out nearly a step-by-step process in which the department intentionally stalled the commission at every turn, from a delay in producing documents to arguing the commission had no right to access them in the first place.
“It chose to delay, mixed messages, and obfuscation” rather than share the information the commission requested of it, Gregory wrote on behalf of the 10-member panel.
“The bottom line is this: Members of the Colorado Supreme Court, directly and through its senior staff, made a series of decisions and took a series of actions throughout 2021 and 2022 that limited the ability of the commission ... to do its constitutionally mandated work,” Gregory wrote.
The letter outlines several instances where the commission sought records the Supreme Court freely shared with the two companies it hired to look into the scandal — RCT Ltd. and Investigations Law Group — but did not get themselves no matter how frequently they asked for them.
In all, the commission says it still has not received more than two-thirds of the documents it's requested, but that at least one of the two investigative companies received all of the 12,000 records it wanted within a matter of weeks.
Even after the legislature mandated cooperation in a bill passed earlier this year, the commission says it’s seen little more than delays and sidesteps.
“The events of 2021-2022 illustrate the many conflicts of interest that are deeply ingrained at several levels of Colorado’s current structure for judicial discipline,” Gregory wrote.
The department in its statement said it's provided all the documents the commission requested and is working on an additional request for 30,000 additional documents.
"Thus, it is entirely inaccurate for the Commission to state that the Department is 'withholding' documents when in fact the Department is working feverishly to comply with these requests in a timely manner," the department said in its statement.
The legislative committee on judicial discipline is an eight-member bipartisan committee formed by the General Assembly after it provided the discipline commission with independent funding, a result of problems it had in acquiring dollars to pay for a special investigator to look into the scandal.
The commission’s funding until then was controlled by the Supreme Court and came from registration dollars attorneys pay each year. In its letter to the legislative committee, the commission lays out how the court, and its financial controller, the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel (OARC), made it difficult for it to pay for its investigators.
Additionally, the OARC overstepped when it let the commission know it had no right to subpoena information during its investigative phases. It did that in cases that had nothing to do with the scandal, Gregory wrote.
Gregory said the department's counsel at the Attorney General's Office made it clear to the commission that “the department would seek to quash the Discipline Commission’s subpoena, and the Department's counsel expressed confidence that their client, the Colorado Supreme Court, would sustain their objection.”
OARC Jessica Yates said her staff "could not recall any in-depth discussion with the Commission about the extent of the Commission's subpoena powers during the investigative stage," according to an email she sent The Denver Gazette.
She emailed that OARC employees, while acting as special counsel for the Commission in its investigations on other matters, "indicated that they were always able to complete their investigations without subpoenas."
Gregory said the judicial department’s leadership — as described to the legislative committee in a June 11, 2022, letter from State Court Administrator Steve Vasconcellos — “has promoted a version of disputed facts, endorsed the credibility of some witnesses and denigrated the credibility of others while also subverting the system of judicial discipline charged by the Colorado Constitution with the task of impartially and independently investigating these same facts and witnesses.”
In some cases the narrative from the department was simply "false," Gregory wrote.
Gregory’s letter lays out in time-line fashion the department’s sustained effort at slowing the commission’s investigation, pushing forth a public narrative that plays loosely with the facts and bolsters its own image of cooperation and desire for truth. In some cases, the department simply offered falsehood, Gregory wrote.
Instead, he said, the department has recited a false narrative for its own benefit and changed its reasons for not cooperating whenever it was suitable.
In the end, the commission said the legislature needs to pass meaningful changes to how the state handles judicial discipline — some of which might require a change to the Colorado Constitution and require voter approval.
The legislative committee is scheduled to meet again on Wednesday in which ILG investigators are expected to testify, as well as Ryan.
