Mark Williams decided to challenge Joe Neguse. Then “the knives came out.”

Was Joe Neguse privately chosen by Democratic Party insiders as heir apparent to Rep. Jared Polis’s seat representing Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District in Congress?

Neguse said it’s his opponents who’ve “created the perception that I’m somehow the anointed candidate.” His version is that he’s “tried my best to run a very clean campaign.”

Both candidates spoke to the issue at a Monday, June 4, candidate forum hosted by the group Together4Boulder at the downtown Boulder Public Library.

Neguse said that, yes, he has numerous prominent supporters, but “they’re supporting me because they know me, because they’ve worked with me, because they know my record.” He quickly ticked off current liberal Boulder City Council members Sam Weaver and Mary Young and former Colorado state legislator Ruth Wright as among his supporters.

Neguse noted that only 3 percent of his campaign donations have come from corporate PACs — including the law firm Holland & Hart where he was employed for six years — although he’s also received funding from “various lawyers” at Denver law firms.

He went on to decry the influence of money in politics and to call for public financing of elections.

After Neguse finished his hour-long Q&A session before the audience of about 60, it was his opponent Mark Williams’s turn for the second hour. And, only when asked, Williams addressed the “anointed heir” charges.

When Polis announced in June of 2016 that he wouldn’t seek reelection to his House seat, Neguse announced his candidacy “almost literally the following day,” Williams noted.

Shortly thereafter came a Daily Camera column — titled “Have Colorado Democrats Learned Nothing?” — in which former CU Regent Jim Martin opined that the process “smells rigged.”

After a presidential primary process in which many protested a pro-Hillary and anti-Sanders bias among party insiders, William said that he as chair of the Boulder County Dems had been “working my ass off for six months trying to prove to people that the Democrats could do business differently.”

Around that point, some people began suggesting that he run against Neguse. He started pondering. One thing that troubled him was why, “in the Year of Women,” there were no women seeking the CD-2 seat.

“I don’t know if this is the truth, but it probably wasn’t done in a cigar-smoke-filled room, but I would bet dollars to donuts that it was in a conference room in a law office in Denver and it was probably a bunch of old white guys. … And women were cut out of the deal at that point,” Williams said.

“There’s a lot of fine politicians who could have stepped up, and they didn’t. The word was put out to step down. And it’s the old-boy network that put this thing together.”

Williams took a leave of absence from running the BoCo Dems to explore entering the race.

At that point, he said, “The knives came out pretty quick.”

“It’s not your turn”

First, he said, he was accused of trying to steal party data. Then he received a variety of phone calls, all of which “eventually came down to … ‘you haven’t done your time,’ and ‘it’s not your turn.'” Williams said that, as a military veteran and more recently as a startup entrepreneur, he thinks in terms of merit, rather than in terms of “your turn.”

Subsequent callers, he said, praised his work with the local Dems and assured him that “we take care of our own.” They told him that, when posts become available in 2020 due to term limits on incumbents, “we’ll make sure we have something for you.

“I’m not making this up, people. This is almost verbatim.”

These kinds of insider fixes amount to “low-level corruption,” he charged: “This is why people don’t trust politics.” The near-automatic Democratic win in liberal CD-2, a result of gerrymandering, has led to “a certain level of intellectual laziness,” he opined.

Yet he persisted. He scouted for potential campaign managers, but found that, after initial meetings, “they disappeared.” A high-level Dem consultant “who knows everyone” told him that she’d asked around in Washington and found that “people are paying attention to your campaign” but that “the word on the street is that, if people get involved in your campaign, they’ll never work again in Colorado politics.”

Seeking endorsements, he was rejected by a progressive veterans’ organization (although he’d been an Air Force F-15 fighter pilot) and by the AFL-CIO (even though, as an American Airlines pilot, he’d been one of a handful of pilots who honored a flight-attendants’ picket line).

Problems with Denver attorneys

The Neguse backers who irk him include Norman Brownstein, a founder of the Denver law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, who’s such a prominent pro-corporate lobbyist nationally that he’s been called “the 101st Senator.” (Brownstein’s firm pulled in $29 million in lobbying income in 2017, mostly from corporations and industry groups.)

As for the individual Denver lawyers who’ve backed Neguse: “He’s taken money from lawyers who have litigated to prevent local control of fracking in Longmont, Ft. Collins and Lafayette.” These same lawyers receive hefty annual bonuses because their firms “took money from Anadarko [Petroleum Corp.] and Extraction [Oil & Gas].”

Another Neguse backer who is not Williams’s favorite is Ken Salazar, former U.S. Senator from Colorado and Interior Secretary, who Williams said had recently served as attorney for Anadarko after an Anadarko pipeline blew up under a house in Firestone, Colo., on April 17 of last year, killing two.

Williams described Neguse as “a fine young man,” and said his complaints are “not an indictment of Joe. It’s the system.” Both parties, he said, “have bitten from the apple” of corporate money. It’s time, he said, to get back to the Dems’ traditional roots: “Politics for the people, not the powerful or the privileged.”

Williams was concise: “It’s time to ban fracking.” He said the oil and gas industry, which he regards as “in its final battle,” needs to be met with a “united front” among the Boulder County cities.

Establishment muscle nationally

At the national level, left-leaning Dems have cried foul at how the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has lent heavy-handed support and funding to centrist Dems against more leftist, Bernie-ite opponents. One such instance was documented via secret recordings in Colorado’s nearby 6th Congressional District, which wraps in a crazy-quilt shape around Denver.

Neguse endorsers, per his campaign website, include quite the Who’s Who: former District Attorney Stan Garnett, Boulder Mayor Suzanne Jones, former State Senator Rollie Heath, former Boulder Mayor Will Toor, current Boulder City Council members (along with Weaver and Young) Aaron Brockett, Jill Grano and Bob Yates, former State Rep. Claire Levy and Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle.

The relatively short list of endorsers listed on Williams’s campaign website includes former State Senator Ron Tupa, former Boulder City Council members Steve Pomerance and Allyn Feinberg, and two current Council members, Lisa Morzel and Cindy Carlisle.

Host organization Together4Boulder was formed in 2017, uniting 30 Boulder neighborhood groups calling for “responsible growth” in Boulder. Its members endorsed and worked for five candidates in the 2017 City Council election, four of whom were elected.

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CORRECTION: Text was corrected to show Williams flew for American Airlines, not United.