Dick Wadhams
Don’t bother seeking the “endorsement” of the corrupt regime running the Colorado Republican Party if you actually spent your life living and working in the district where you’re running for Congress.
Conversely, personally profiting off a company that imported millions of pounds of cheap Chinese goods into the United States guarantees an “endorsement” from the regime.
The Colorado Republican Party has violated more than 100 years of strict neutrality in primary elections by endorsing three carpetbaggers who recently moved into congressional districts to run for Congress. Not one has any current personal or professional ties to their new districts. Only their personal ambition led them to run in a new district.
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The moniker “carpetbagger” emerged during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War when corrupt northern speculators who carried carpet bags swept into the south to take advantage of a weak, post-war economy.
Here are today’s Colorado Republican carpetbaggers who have moved into congressional districts, where they have not lived, to run for Congress and who have been endorsed by the state Republican Party:
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert was facing almost certain defeat in the Third Congressional District in 2024 after she was reelected by just 564 votes in 2022 in a district that had a 9-point Republican performance advantage. Third CD voters clearly grew weary of her antics that included joining her equally behaviorally challenged ally, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, in screaming at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address in 2022.
Desperate to get out of an untenable political situation, Rep. Boebert announced she was abandoning the western slope-dominated 3rd CD and moving to the other side of the state to the heavily Republican Fourth Congressional District (4th CD). Since then, Boebert has spent most of her time running in the new district while continuing to draw her taxpayer-paid congressional salary of $174,000 per year.
But her bad behavior has continued unabated. Boebert and a date were escorted out of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts during a performance of “Beetlejuice” due to her inappropriate, lewd actions that were disrespectful to other theater patrons.
Stolen-election conspiracist Ron Hanks was a state representative who lived in Fremont County, which is in the Seventh Congressional District (7th CD) on the eastern slope. But when his ideological soulmate Boebert fled the 3rd CD, Hanks filled the void by moving to Grand Junction.
Previously, Hanks ran a losing race for Congress in California and unsuccessfully ran for senate in Colorado in 2022. Hanks believes the Chinese stole Colorado’s electoral votes from Donald Trump in 2020 when Trump lost by 14 points to Joe Biden.
Laughably, the state party said Hanks, who is essentially a clone of Boebert without the charm, was the party’s strongest candidate to win the 3rd District.
The state party endorsed Janak Joshi in the 8th Congressional District (8th CD) which is located in the northern Denver suburbs and Greeley in Weld County.
Joshi was a state representative from Colorado Springs from 2011 to 2017 before losing a primary for the state senate. He surrendered his medical license more than 10 years ago but in a recent ad portrays himself as a doctor. He moved to an apartment in the 8th CD only a few months ago.
But the breathtaking hypocrisy of Dave Williams in the 5th Congressional District (5th CD) makes carpetbaggers Boebert, Hanks and Joshi look like rank amateurs in brazen political opportunism.
Williams was narrowly elected chairman of the 400-member Colorado Republican State Central Committee in 2023 after getting the criminally indicted former Mesa County clerk, Tina Peters, to withdraw from the race and endorse him. He has refused to resign while running for the 5th Congressional District (5th CD), which is centered in El Paso County.
Williams, who declares himself an “America First” candidate, has unethically used state party funds to attack his primary opponent, Jeff Crank, as a tool of China.
But it is Williams who personally profited off the Chinese as an executive with MKW Global Sourcing which imported cheap Chinese goods into the United States.
Official records from the U.S. Customs Service show MKW imported 12 million pounds of plastic products from China in 1,000 separate imports between 2008 and 2020. Williams was the registered agent and vice president of logistics for the company.
Just last week, Williams violated the Trump presidential campaign demand that Republican candidates not try to raise money off Trump’s convictions in New York. Despite this, within minutes of the announcement of the convictions, Williams sent a fundraising email asking for donors to “Stand with Trump and Dave” with donations going to his congressional campaign, not the Trump campaign.
There are common threads that run through the candidacies of Boebert, Hanks, Joshi and Williams. They are obsessed with stolen-election conspiracies and still want to reverse the results of the 2020 election. They defend the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol and want those convicted to be pardoned. They want to steal the right of unaffiliated voters to participate in primary elections.
Carpetbaggers Boebert, Hanks and Joshi, and China-enabler Williams are continuing the downward spiral of the Colorado Republican Party into irrelevance.
Dick Wadhams is a former Colorado Republican state chairman who worked for U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong for nine years before managing campaigns for U.S. Sens. Hank Brown and Wayne Allard, and Gov. Bill Owens.