At 9:36 a.m. on August 28, Minerva Padron, an administrative assistant to Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, answered a call to the office's election number. On the other end of the line was an agitated male who said he wanted to talk to someone about letters that Gessler had sent to nearly 4,000 registered voters whom he suspected might not be American citizens, urging the suspected immigrants to offer proof that they were legal citizens — or otherwise remove themselves from the voter rolls.
Mark Manger
Scott Gessler is at home at the Colorado Secretary of State's office.
Mark Manger
Luis Toro, director of Colorado Ethics Watch.
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"I let him vent," Padron told the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. "He said Republicans should be shot in the head, and that way maybe they would learn."
Eventually the man hung up, but not before he told Padron that he knew where Gessler lived.
At the time, Gessler was nearly 2,000 miles away, at the Republican National Convention in Florida — where he had been for about a week, first at an election-law conference of the Republican National Lawyers Association, and then at the RNC. This wasn't the first threat his office had fielded while he was out of town, either. Four days earlier, an individual from outside Colorado had sent an e-mail saying that the wife and daughter of "Shithead Gessler" should be raped.
"You're stunned. You're worried as hell," Gessler recalls. "You're worried about how violent this might be."
Gary Zimmerman, his chief of staff, adds, "I was pretty much just aghast.... It's just horrific."
After the e-mail threat, Gessler's wife and four-year-old daughter had temporarily left their home in Cheesman Park; patrols monitored the home of his mother, Barbara.
After the phone-call threat, and at the urging of Zimmerman, Gessler flew home early from Tampa.
Law enforcement agencies started investigating the two threats. But the actions of that week would soon inspire an even more high-profile criminal investigation: into Gessler's own actions.
Two months later, Colorado Ethics Watch, an advocacy group that has closely scrutinized the Republican secretary, accused Gessler of illegally using public dollars to travel to Florida for partisan events outside of his official duties.
And on the eve of Election Day, in one of the most important swing states in the country, news broke that Gessler would be facing both criminal and ethics investigations — by the Denver District Attorney's Office and the state's Independent Ethics Commission, respectively — for his alleged misuse of funds, giving the secretary, who is no stranger to controversy, the worst headlines he'd ever received on his most important day on the job. He'd already spent a lot of time arguing that he was not suppressing voters; now he had to prove that he hadn't broken the law.
The election is over; the investigations are not. But as they push forward, Gessler says he's not worried. He knows he'll be exonerated, and he has David Lane, one of the town's ace attorneys, making sure that he is.
As the narrator says in the viral YouTube video that inspired Gessler's nickname — one that originated with opponents, but one he embraces — Honey Badger don't give a shit.
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When Scott Gessler arrived at Yale University in 1983, it was a bit of a culture shock. The institution was very liberal, he recalls, and so were most of the students.
"I didn't grow up in a family that was self-consciously political," he explains. "The thing that concerned [my parents] was earning a living.... I think in retrospect they were conservative, but it's not like we used those words."
Gessler, now 47, was born in Detroit and says he had a lower-middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago. He grew up with one younger sister and parents who divorced when he was seven years old. His father owned a construction company that built interiors for libraries, and his mother worked different jobs, most consistently as a hairdresser. In high school Gessler was a good student; he swam, founded a soccer club, was editor-in-chief of the newspaper, and was a member of the math and chess clubs.
After that, he was surprised by the Ivy League bubble he found in New Haven, Connecticut. "It was just a lot of people with far different values systems," he recalls.
He continued to play sports at Yale, where he studied political science and history, and became involved in a student group, the Political Union, and, specifically, its Party of the Right. Meanwhile, students around him were protesting apartheid in South Africa, talking about their love of the Soviet Union and hatred of Western capitalism, and blindly supporting environmentalism. "They are all preaching to the same hallelujah choir," says Gessler, who adds that he learned quite a lot about himself and how to defend his beliefs while at Yale. But he doesn't think that, as a whole, the Ivy League does much to help liberal thinkers grow.
His father had wanted him to be an engineer and hoped he might take over his construction business one day, but Gessler took a different path.
After Yale, Gessler went straight to law school at the University of Michigan. One summer, he worked at a law firm where he made more money than he does now as secretary of state — although he found the work quite boring. He spent another summer interning at the U.S. Army headquarters in Germany.
