The Colorado GOP subpoenaed a top Republican in the state House last week for records from his 2020 campaign in the latest example of how fractured the party is becoming under the leadership of Chairman Dave Williams and as election season kicks into high gear.
The subpoena, issued by Colorado GOP attorney Randy Corporon and targeting former House Minority Leader Mike Lynch, R-Wellington, was served as part of the GOP’s drawn-out federal lawsuit seeking to block unaffiliated voters from casting ballots in Colorado’s partisan primaries.
The subpoena seeks from Lynch all documents and communications related to expenditures “for voter contact through advertisements, direct mail, digital communications, telephone communications or other means” in House District 49, including those with Kathryn Murdoch, Kent Thiry and Unite America.
In 2020, Lynch ran in the Republican primary in House District 49 against against Vicki Marble, then a state senator. The race was one of several GOP primary contests that year that became proxy battles between more mainstream groups, supporting candidates like Lynch, and more hard-line conservative groups that supported candidates like Marble.
(Marble, when she was in the legislature, was a conservative firebrand with a penchant for making offensive remarks.)
Unite America’s federal political action committee, through Colorado subsidiaries, spent in a handful of races to support more mainstream Republican candidates, but campaign finance records show the Lynch-Marble race wasn’t one of them. Lynch got help from other groups though, including Ready Colorado, a conservative education policy nonprofit.
At the time, Murdoch, a daughter-in-law of conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, served as vice president of Unite America, which advocates for what it considers a more functional government. Murdoch and Thiry, the wealthy former CEO of the Denver-based dialysis giant DaVita, are now co-chairs of Unite America’s board.
Thiry was also heavily involved in the 2016 ballot measure, Proposition 106, that let unaffiliated voters participate in partisan primaries.
The subpoena also seeks from Lynch “all documents and communications related to polling, research and/or analysis of the views and candidates being supported by unaffiliated voters and/or voters affiliated with the Republican Party” with respect to Lynch’s GOP primary that year.
Lynch, who is running for Congress in the 4th Congressional District Republican primary that includes U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, won 67% of the vote to Marble’s 23%.
The Colorado Sun asked Corporon and Chairman Williams why the party was subpoenaing Lynch and whether subpoenas had been issued to anyone other than Lynch.
“No comment,” Corporon, who is also a Republican National Committee committeeman, said in a text message.
Williams didn’t respond.
But when he served in the legislature with Lynch, the two men were in opposite factions of the House Republican caucus. And the thinking behind the Colorado GOP’s Proposition 106 lawsuit is that unaffiliated voters participating in primaries results in less conservative candidates being sent to general elections.
“I think this is a continuation of an active ploy to destroy the state party by attacking fellow Republicans,” Lynch told The Sun on Monday.
But Lynch, who said he will comply with whatever he must legally, said he’s not totally sure what Corporon and the Colorado GOP are seeking or aiming to prove.
“My best guess is that I was effective in unseating a sitting state senator that fell into their camp in ideology and they’re trying to make sure I don’t do that again to Boebert,” Lynch said, a nod to how Williams and the Colorado GOP have endorsed Boebert in the 4th District Republican primary.
Lynch was the top Republican in the Colorado House until late January, a week after revelations that he was arrested in 2022 on suspicion of drunken driving.
The endorsement has angered other Republican candidates in the 4th District, including state Rep. Richard Holtorf, who is now calling on Williams to resign.
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Between Williams’ endorsement of Boebert and his decision to remove a Colorado Sun reporter from the GOP’s statewide assembly earlier this month, there has been a growing chorus of high-profile Republicans in open revolt against party leadership. The party’s decision to subpoena Lynch is likely to add to that criticism.
A spokesperson for Unite America confirmed that the organization’s federal PAC, too, had received a subpoena in the lawsuit.
A representative for Thiry said he had not as of Monday, nor had a number of other mainstream Republican candidates who ran in contentious primaries in Colorado in 2020, including former state Reps. Colin Larson, Dan Woog and Tonya Van Beber.
In February, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Philip A. Brimmer denied a request from the Colorado GOP to issue a preliminary injunction in the Proposition 106 lawsuit. That means it may be years before the case is resolved.
In addition to Corporon, the Colorado GOP has also been represented in the lawsuit by John Eastman, a former University of Colorado visiting conservative scholar who tried to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
But last week, a judge presiding over the case found that Eastman is no longer an attorney in good standing in the U.S. District Court in Colorado because of a recommendation in California last month that he be disbarred.
The court’s rules state: “An attorney who is not in good standing shall not practice before the bar of this court or continue to be an attorney of record in any pending case.”
Williams said in an appearance last week on a conservative talk radio show that Eastman had already shifted his responsibilities in the case to Corporon.
Colorado Sun correspondent Sandra Fish contributed to this report.
The Thiry-O’Leary Foundation is a donor to The Colorado Sun. Donors have no influence over editorial operations of The Sun.