Musgrave criticizes Markey for silence on attack ad

Updated 7/8 

U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Fort Morgan) shot back Tuesday at an environmental group's TV ad campaign directed against her, asking why CO-4 Democratic opponent Betsy Markey didn't condemn questionable claims made in the ads.

Though a Markey spokesperson declined to comment on the ads themselves, Markey said in a statement that Musgrave attacking her over negative advertising was "the height of irony and hypocrisy."

The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, a 501(c)4 environmental advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. , made a $200,000 TV ad buy three weeks ago. In the group’s ad, Musgrave is labeled as “one of the most corrupt members of Congress” and portrays her as being in the pocket of big energy companies. 

The ad ran on cable TV through July 2; broadcast air dates for the ad were not immediately available Tuesday evening.

Subsequent media analyses of the ad by CBS4 and 9News – as the Musgrave campaign pointed out – deemed many of the allegations made in the ad to be false or misleading.

A Defenders of Wildlife spokesperson, in an e-mail, called Musgrave's reaction to the ad "silly but expected" and said the media analyses were "culprits of at best misleading, and false, reporting." 

In a press release Tuesday, Musgrave said since Markey hasn't spoken out against the ads, the former Larimer County Democratic chair is practicing "the old politics as usual, politics of destruction by falsehood."

"My opponent's silence on these ads is both shameful and deafening," Musgrave said in the release. "Shameful because her silence amounts to an unspoken endorsement of the political character assassination and defamation now being conducted by her Defenders of Wildlife friends, whose endorsement she recently received. Deafening because her silence speaks louder than words as to her campaign's apparent strategy - to win this election at any cost, while permitting any lies.

"How can Ms. Markey call for bi-partisan cooperation on the major issues of our day, yet silently stand by and allow an extremist group that endorses her to falsely smear my character and distort the record?" Musgrave asked in the release.

Asked what Markey thought of the Defenders of Wildlife ad, Markey manager Anne Caprara declined to comment, saying any such comments "would essentially amount to us trying to influence an IE (independent expenditure), and I'm not going to wade into those murky legal waters."

In a statement, however, Markey said, "I find it the height of irony and hypocrisy for Marilyn Musgrave, who benefited to the tune of $1.7 million in intensely negative independent advertising spent against her Democratic opponent in 2006, to think that she has a single leg to stand on when it comes to this issue.

"As the clock ticks down to Election Day and even her own polling shows this race to be a dead heat, Marilyn Musgrave has pulled yet another trick from the tired old playbook: manufactured outrage and demands for denunciation," Markey continued in the statement. "Perhaps it's a coincidence that this new-found outrage comes in a year when she faces the political fight of her life and has been told by her own party not to expect the infusion of outside money that kept her afloat in past years, but I suspect not."

Even if the environmental group's ad buy has ended, Defenders President Rodger Schlickeisen said the organization was building an aggressive ground operation in the Fort Collins area that would be in place by the end of July.

Leading the effort is Ed Yoon, who in managed the Defender's successful campaign to oust U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo of California.