Lt. Governor Diane Denish has issued a flawed mea culpa for using federal stimulus dollars to fund her political operations. After initially calling our reporting (in her KNME-TV interview last Friday) a “patently false lie” and attacking our credibility by labeling us a right-wing group instead of addressing the facts as reported, she has now admitted that her office used funds from the 2003 Jobs Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act to perform work on the 2004 presidential campaign of John Kerry. She now admits that these public funds were also used to provide labor for a Christmas card project of her own political election committee.

Her Chief of Staff, Joshua Rosen, however, shifted the blame to the contract worker instead of having the Lt. Governor take responsibility. Said Rosen, “the state should not have been invoiced for these press statements relating to the election.”

The problem is not in what the contractor, Lauran Cowdrey, did. In the role of the Lt. Governor’s public information officer, she reported to the Lt. Governor herself, was in direct contact with Diane Denish on nearly a daily basis, according to her time sheets, and her invoices were submitted to Denish’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Sonja Carrasco-Trujillo. Carrasco-Trujillo is a lawyer and was later appointed a Santa Fe Municipal Judge. She then took a position as legal counsel for the Department of Public Safety. The worker was a fairly young woman who had no legal training. Her prior experience was as a producer at KOB-TV.

What Rosen calls improper invoices were approved and accepted by Denish’s office. Each bears a stamp and signature so stating. On invoices lacking the stamped certification of approval, Carrasco-Trujillo’s signature follows a hand-written note, “OK to pay.”

If the invoices, as Rosen says, never should have been submitted, then the invoices never should have been paid.

In his statement Rosen goes on to say, “The lieutenant governor expressly forbids campaign work from being done from the state office and she was unaware that these charges were misapplied.”

Here’s the problem. The time sheets don’t corroborate that claim. One of the instances of using stimulus funds on the Kerry campaign concerned a Leonardo di Caprio rally for the Kerry campaign at the UNM Student Building. Here’s a related entry on Cowdrey’s time sheet from November 2004, shortly before the Presidential election:

11/1 8 hours: Write Reiner remarks, write/send out election day release, write DiCaprio remarks, set up interviews, organize media clips and photographs, staff Lt. Gov. at evening event.

Actor/producer Rob Reiner was also campaigning for John Kerry. We’d like to clarify whether the Reiner referred to in this time entry is that Rob Reiner. We’d also ask who instructed Cowdrey to perform this work. The Lt. Governor’s office, however, has been refusing to answer any of our questions.

The next day Cowdrey’s time sheet reads:

11/2 10.5 hours: Staff Lt. Governor; set up and staff interviews, write and send press releases.

On the following day, according to the timesheets, Cowdrey was again in personal contact with Denish, meeting her at Denish’s house. The time sheets simply do not back up Rosen’s claim that that Denish was unaware of Cowdrey’s work. Denish saw the work Cowdrey was performing. Denish knew she was being paid for her work from the stimulus funds. Denish’s office has not claimed that Cowdrey provided volunteer services to the Lt. Governor’s office.

Denish’s political organization has refunded the state for paying Cowdrey to write the press release for the DiCaprio rally for the Kerry for President campaign. Nothing has been said about reimbursing the state for paying Cowdrey to write the Lt. Governor’s remarks for this event. If Cowdrey was being paid to write remarks for Leonardo DiCaprio and Rob Reiner, that raises entirely new questions about how the Lt. Governor was using public funds.

Our final report on the Lt. Governor’s use of federal stimulus funds will be released next week.