Republican Coffman attacks challenger Jason Crow’s record as a defense attorney
Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, who is hoping to hang onto one of the country’s most competitive congressional seats, is going on the offensive with a new ad attacking his opponent’s legal career.
Coffman, who represents Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, released a 30second television ad that starts with a narrator recounting Coffman’s military record. The Aurora Republican spent 21 years in the military, serving in the Army and the Marines. He also left office twice during his political career to serve in both Iraq wars. That’s all true.
But then the ad pivots to Democrat Jason Crow and claims he “has taken a different path.”
This is misleading because Crow is also a combat veteran. Crow is an Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and earned a Bronze Star for heroic service in a combat zone.
Crow left the Army in 2006. He went to law school at the University of Denver, graduated in 2009 and took a job at the Denver office of a national law firm called Holland & Hart. He made partner at the firm in January 2017.
It’s this work for Holland & Hart that Coffman’s ad condemns.
The narrator describes Crow as “a lawyer specializing in corruption,” pointing to three cases.
The first case is a man named Gerald Rising Jr. who ran a health insurance program that advertised itself as backup insurance for cata strophic events to school districts, nonprofits and small businesses. Rising pleaded guilty in 2012 to misleading people who bought his plan and leaving them with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills they thought were covered.
The second case centers around a Lakewood man who pleaded guilty to embezzling money from employee pensions he was in charge of administering.
Crow was part of a team of attorneys who represented the defendants in both of these cases, according to court records filed with Colorado’s U.S District Court. He was a junior associate when he worked on both of these cases, and his campaign says that means he didn’t get to pick the kind of work he did.
The third case involved a Department of Veterans Affairs contractor in Texas who pleaded guilty to defrauding the agency over a period of five years. Crow was one of five lawyers listed as representing the defendant, but the man changed law firms a month later.
The kinds of cases Crow handled changed as he moved up at Holland & Hart, according to the campaign.
Crow’s biography page on the Holland & Hart website advertises his recognition as rising star in whitecollar criminal defense by Colorado Super Lawyers from 2013 through 2017. But Crow also donated more than 1,000 hours of free legal service to Phoenix Multisport, a nonprofit that helps addicts and their families recover through physical activity.