Sep 19, 2008 6:42 am US/Mountain
Musgrave Attack Ad Hits Markey On Biz Dealings
(CBS4)
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About Reality Check: Raj Chohan focuses on matters of public policy and political persuasion. Online, he features his sources & an outline of his investigative steps on the pathway to his conclusions.
Republican Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave has released her first attack ad against Democratic challenger Betsy Markey. The 30 second spot raises questions about Markey's private business dealings while she served as a staffer for Sen. Ken Salazar between 2005 and 2007.
ad: what would you say if you knew Betsy Markey had run a small business, but what if you knew she actually got rich on non-competitive Halliburton style government contracts.
This claim is highly misleading. First, it implies that Markey's family-owned company, Syscom Systems-which sells data processing equipment, benefitted from the kind of alleged cronyism associated with Halliburton during the Iraq war. Yet, the Musgrave campaign offers nothing more than innuendo to support this contention.
In fact, there is no evidence that Betsy Markey used her position to enrich her family business.
Second, while the company earned just under $3 million during the three year period that Markey worked for Salazar, most of those contracts were won under the competitive bidding process. The company did earn more than $300,000 in no-bid contracts during that same three-year period. That was about 11 percent of the company's business. The Markey campaign says the no-bid contracts were for maintenance and renewal of existing contracts.
ad: and her contracts more than doubled after she took a key congressional job.
This claim is true if we compare the three years before Markey went to work for Salazar (2002-2004), to the three years after she started working for the senator (2005-2007).
During the later period of time the number of contracts more than doubled and revenues climbed 65 percent over the three years preceding Markey's Senate staff job.
ad: if Betsy Markey used her congressional job to double her company's government contracts, what will she do as your congresswoman?
Here's the spin. Betsy Markey didn't get rich from no-bid Halliburton style government contracts. No-bid contracts accounted for only a small portion of the company's business. Instead, Syscom seems to have succeeded by competing for and winning government contracts.
New Questions:
Shortly after the release of this ad, the Musgrave campaign raised some interesting new questions. Under federal law Markey would likely not have been permitted to own or manage a company that sought government contracts from entities that she would have been in contact with as a paid congressional staffer.
The Markey campaign has said repeatedly that she divested her ownership in Syscom to her husband when she went to work for Salazar in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. She even sought an opinion on the matter from the Senate Ethics Committee.
But according to her campaign, Markey didn't actually divest her interest in the company until she had already been working for Salazar for at least 9 months.
Also problematic, in her personal financial disclosure from May 2008, Markey lists Syscom as one of her assets. Her campaign said it was a reflection of her husband's ownership interest, and that she had nothing to do with the company. However, this detail is not made apparent in the disclosure.
I asked the Markey campaign for documents to verify that she actually divested her interest in Syscom in 2005. Her campaign was not immediately able to produce the transaction papers, but a staffer told me he was working on it. Stay tuned.
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