Homeland Security chief grilled over fired ICE agent

The case of a Denver Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent dismissed by the agency after a jury cleared him of accusations he improperly accessed a federal database has reached Congress, and it now could play a role in the questioning of President Obama's nominee for U.S. attorney in Colorado, Stephanie Villafuerte.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., raised the issue with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, the Denver Post reported.

"I am not personally familiar with this," Napolitano said. "But I will become personally familiar with it."

Sessions asked why the agent, Cory Voorhis, was fired while his supervisor still is employed, despite the agency's determination the supervisor wasn't telling the truth when he answered questions about Voorhis' case.

The Post reported the exchange is the first public indication Sessions, who as the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee will have input into Villafuerte's nomination, has been monitoring the progress of the Voorhis case.

WND previously reported Democratic Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter's defense of Villafuerte as questions grew over her alleged involvement in accessing a restricted federal crime database while she was working on Ritter's campaign.

Voorhis was charged criminally for accessing the same database and fired after he was cleared of the charges, but Villafuerte has faced no repercussions.

At issue are the federal database records for a suspect named Carlos Estrada-Medina, which became a campaign issue while Ritter was district attorney. Estrada-Medina was allowed to plead to minor charges of "agricultural trespass," even though he had been arrested on heroin-trafficking charges.

Instead of being deported or indicted on drug charges, he was released in Colorado and went to California, where he was accused of committing sexual assault on a minor.

Cory Voorhis

Voorhis was accused of providing information about the suspect to the campaign of Ritter's 2006 opponent, Bob Beauprez, and it was used in political ads.

There are claims Villafuerte, who was working on the Ritter campaign at the time while on leave from the Denver prosecuting attorney's office, called her colleagues in that office, who then ran the criminal's name through the National Crime Information Center computer.

In a column in WND, five-term Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., recounted the "persecution" of Voorhis for revealing that Ritter cut dozens, probably hundreds, of "sweetheart deals" for illegal immigrants as a prosecutor.

"Voorhis went public in September 2006 with the facts about the plea-bargaining practices of former Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter, who happened to also be a candidate for governor of Colorado," Tancredo wrote.

"During Ritter's tenure as Denver DA, 241 illegal aliens were given sweetheart deals for the explicit purpose of helping them minimize the risk of deportation. Some of them went on to commit other, more serious crimes, and when one of those cases was made public with Voorhis' help, he was targeted for criminal investigation at the behest of the Ritter for Governor campaign," Tancredo said.

The Denver Post reported Ritter contended, however, Villafuerte "did nothing wrong."

"As a person working for the campaign [she] did a host of things to try to independently verify this identity of Carlos Estrada-Medina and could not do it," Ritter said on a recent radio show. "She had people who were getting public records. We as a campaign employed individuals – interns – to go to the courthouse and get the records.

"We got nothing from the DA's office," he claimed.

But the newspaper reported law-enforcement officers know the Denver DA's office as well as a Texas investigator ran Estrada-Medina's name through the National Crime Information Center system about the same time Voorhis accessed the information.

The paper reported Villafuerte left a telephone message at the DA's office about Estrada-Medina just before the office accessed the database.

The newspaper reported in 2007 the spokeswoman for the Denver DA's office said there was a "high probability" she had spoken with someone at the Ritter campaign about the information from the NCIC on Estrada-Medina.

Voorhis reported he accessed the information – which, without an investigatory purpose, can be a criminal offense – with the approval of his supervisor.