Official Documents Refute Naked Partisan Attack against Bob Schaffer

This week the Grand Junction Sentinel ran with a story that made it look like Bob Schaffer was engaged in wrongdoing when he traveled in his role as an energy executive to discuss a development deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government. Reporter Mike Saccone elaborates in a blog post here.

As more facts have come forward in this case, there appears to be no wrongdoing whatsoever by Bob Schaffer or his former employer, Aspect Energy. In particular, the Denver Post's Michael Riley - clearly no fan of Schaffer - did a little more digging. Here's what he says about evidence he found that contradicts the allegations of wrongdoing:

Yet the Oversight Committee documents present a very different picture. They include internal Hunt memos describing meetings with U.S. officials in which they talked about the potential leases with no mention of any warning that they were a bad idea. They also include an e-mail from a State Department official in Iraq to Hunt Oil vice president Jeanne Phillips, in which the U.S. official chats amicably about the Kurdish deal and flags a new opportunity the company might be interested in: "Anything I can do from here to give info or whatever, let me know," it reads.

Those documents match what Schaffer says about Aspect's own dealings as the company was arranging the Kurdish lease - that they received no discouragement from U.S. officials in their efforts. It is still unclear exactly what the State Department said to Aspect executives as they worked to line up the lease in 2006, if anything.

More light is shed in today's Rocky Mountain News:

But both Wadhams and Alex Cranberg, chairman of Aspect, disagree that the State Department had a clear policy against such contracts. Cranberg said his company received government approval to visit the region.

"We were not asked by the State Department not to do this deal," he said in an e-mail.

Unfortunately, Mike Saccone - perhaps trying to give legs to the story he broke - misinterprets what Cranberg's message means, trying to suggest that "Cranberg said there was no communication between Aspect Energy and the State Department." But that's not what Bob Schaffer's former boss said. According to Cranberg, government officials gave his company no reason to believe they shouldn't move forward.

If Saccone could make the case that Aspect Energy had no communication with State Department officials, then he might be able to give traction to the original argument. But if State Department officials told Aspect Energy there was no problem, then Schaffer did nothing wrong. And the charge against the U.S. Senate candidate looks like nothing more than a naked partisan political attack.

Interestingly, Mike Riley appears to have correctly pinned the blame on the State Department for what, at best, appears to be sending mixed messages (though he understates its significance):

Documents suggest that the situation was much less clear cut. They show that State Department officials in Iraq may even have encouraged some American oil companies in their efforts to secure those leases even as it was publicly describing them as problematic. To the extent that's true, Schaffer and Aspect may be much less culpable than Democratic critics suggest and it may be the State Department that is most to blame for playing the diplomatic game of saying one thing in public and another in private.

Yet two critics with Left-leaning records and attachments to Democrat candidates have attempted to come forward allegedly as unbiased experts to perpetuate the myth of wrongdoing.

Who are these two? Lawrence Korb performed the bidding of Congressional Democrats to attack the credibility of General David Petraeus back in 2007. Democrats and Korb since have been left with egg on their face, after Petraeus has led a successful military strategy in Iraq and quashed their defeatist agenda.

Rand Beers has been a senior foreign policy adviser to Democrat Presidential candidates John Kerry and Barack Obama. Beers recently went out of his way to attack John McCain for his honorable military service, in particular the suffering he went through as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam.

A couple of Democrat operatives are trying to keep the story alive for Mark Udall's sake - to score political points. But the problem here very much seems to be with officials in the U.S. State Department. Mike Saccone should do the decent thing and publish a follow-up story bringing the new, relevant information to light - and helping to expose the agendas of those behind the original attack.

Mark Udall's Priorities Out of Whack as Skyrocketing Energy Prices Hit Coloradans

Vince Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News, having seen the animated Left-wing attack ads on his newspaper's website, took a minute to investigate the claims behind the facile label attached to Republican candidate Bob Schaffer:

Has it really come to this: that working for an energy company is now a liability - an actual badge of shame - for a candidate for public office in Colorado?

It's hard to believe most voters are so unsophisticated - about economics and the price of gasoline, among other things. In fact, I don't believe they are. But some people do.

The left-wing activists over at ProgressNowAction recently took out an ad on the Rocky Web site trumpeting the claim that GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer is actually "Big Oil Bob," a fellow somehow complicit not only in escalating gas prices but also in war profiteering in Iraq. And these sleazy themes may well become a staple promoted by independent political groups as we approach Election Day.

After Schaffer left Congress in early 2003, he did indeed go to work for Denver-based Aspect Energy. But far from being a member in good standing of Big Oil (not that it would be damning anyway), Aspect Energy is a medium-sized independent. It's an aggressively entrepreneurial outfit whose current hydrocarbon production, moreover, is 80 percent in natural gas, according to its Web site.

At first, Schaffer worked mostly on Aspect's charitable efforts, which focus heavily on education. Eventually he shifted to the business side, where he ended up, he told me, as vice president for business development.

ProgressNowAction professes outrage (it's always hard to tell if a political hit squad's indignation is sincere) because Schaffer "voted for over $33 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil" in 2001, naturally neglecting to mention that the price of oil averaged $23 a barrel that year, as opposed to the stratospheric level of today.

Meanwhile, Mark Udall is a ranking member of the majority party running the "worst Congress ever," a Congress that sits idly by while gasoline and other energy prices skyrocket. No drilling in ANWR. No new oil refineries. No new nuclear energy plants.

Even a very carefully studied and limited drilling exploration of the Roan Plateau (a moderate bipartisan approach supported by Gov. Bill Ritter and Bob Schaffer) is not good enough for Udall.

So while the Big Blue Lie Machine uses "sleazy themes" to tar Bob Schaffer, it's Boulder liberal Rep. Mark Udall whose energy policies are actually harming the pocketbooks of average Coloradans. As Investor's Business Daily astutely points out:

Failing to allow drilling in ANWR. We have, as Bush noted, estimated capacity of a million barrels of oil a day from this source alone -- enough for 27 million gallons of gas and diesel. But Congress won't touch it, fearful of the clout of the environmental lobby. As a result, you pay at the pump so your representative can raise campaign cash.

That hits close to home. Coloradans "pay at the pump" so Mark Udall "can raise campaign cash." But then again, we already knew that Udall's - and ProgressNow's - priorities were out of whack.