The Post Editorial Attacks on governor deserve rebuke

This editorial board was fully prepared to slam Gov. John Hickenlooper for allowing himself to be wined and dined by private corporations footing his bill at a convention in Italy at the expense of transparency and public trust. But there is one small problem: That never happened.

Hickenlooper paid $6,770 to attend the Bilderberg Meetings in Turin, Italy, and also paid for his own air travel and hotel room, according to receipts submitted Wednesday to the Colorado Ethics Commission.

We were also ready to excoriate the governor for flying on Elon Musk’s private jet to visit a Tesla plant in Nevada, an inexcusable offense given the governor has been mulling mandates for low-emissions vehicles and electric-vehicle standards.

But Hickenlooper has never flown on Musk’s plane or visited a Tesla plant.

If former House Speaker Frank Mcnulty and state Sen. John Cooke aren’t embarrassed by the thorough debunking of the ethics complaints they filed against Gov. John Hickenlooper, they should be.

As far as we are concerned, both men staked their reputations on accusations that it turns out were easily refuted.

Perhaps they should have reached out to the governor’s office to discuss the rumors they based their complaints on before filing official documents. At best it represents lazy reporting or perhaps willful disregard of the truth. At its worst, they were politically motivated lies.

We do, however, have some very nuanced concerns with two flights Hickenlooper accepted on private airplanes that Mcnulty’s complaint highlighted.

Ironically the flight that raises the most concerns for our board is also the flight that is the most sympathetic. Hickenlooper accepted a seat on a plane owned by Kenneth Tuchman, founder and CEO of Teletech in January, so the governor could fly from a private terminal in the suburbs of New York to Denver to give the State of the State address.

Hickenlooper had a reason for wanting to catch a ride on a private plane; his wife was in New York recovering from surgery and he wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. Hospital records show the timeline matches.

On another flight, Hickenlooper was traveling on a plane owned by MDC Holdings Inc. the parent company of Richmond Homes which is headed up by Larry Mizel. Hickenlooper’s filing maintains that flight was a gift to the state because the governor flew to Connecticut for the naming ceremony of the USS Colorado.

Of the four flights Hickenlooper says he took on private planes in 2018, the flights with Tuchman and Mizel are the closest to the type of gifts that voters clearly wanted to prevent elected officials from accepting when they passed Amendment 41 in 2006.

However there are exceptions in the law, as there must be so elected officials can accept birthday gifts from friends and family; their children can be awarded a scholarship; or any number of mundane exchanges that could be banned under a rule without exclusions.

For example we agree that it was probably a gift from a friend on a special occasion when Hickenlooper flew on a private airplane provided to him by Kimbal Musk, the brother of Elon Musk, to officiate at Kimbal Musk’s wedding.

Some of these flights test the limits of Amendment 41, but Amendment 41 tests the limits of what we could reasonably expect of an elected official who has a life outside their official duties.