By PAULA TRACY
and CATHERINE McLAUGHLIN, InDepthNH.org
WOLFEBORO – New Hampshire College Democrats are placing advertisements in 16 Colorado publications looking for students who they say may have been defrauded by the Corky Messner Foundation.
This comes after stories this week in the Washington Post and Denver Post about the Messner foundation and calls for a charity fraud investigation in Colorado.
Messner, a prominent Denver lawyer who is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire and is in a primary battle with Brigadier Gen. Don Bolduc, did not immediately return calls seeking comment. He has owned a home in New Hampshire for 13 years.
But Mike Biundo, a senior adviser for the Messner campaign, told the Denver newspaper: “The complaint is a political hoax with no legal basis or merit.”
The winner in the September Republican primary will face U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the incumbent in the November general election.
According to the Denver Post story, some residents of Colorado were petitioning the Attorney General and Secretary of State of Colorado to conduct a charity fraud investigation of the foundation.
At the same time, Messner’s foundation is in the news, the New Hampshire College Democrats are running their ads in the Boulder Camera and other community publications which state: “Were You Defrauded by the Messner Foundation? We are looking for victims of Colorado Corky Messner’s scam foundation for a potential class action.”
Hope Daley, spokesman for the New Hampshire College Democrats said: “Corky Messner exploited the time, energy and stories of low-income students and took hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors to prop up his scam scholarship foundation… We want to hear from the Colorado students who were hurt by Corky’s scheme—they deserve justice.”
The Denver Post reported that two former Colorado Supreme Court justices have asked state investigators to look into the matter.
“In a complaint filed Tuesday, the former justices joined several other Coloradans in alleging that Messner of Messner Reeves LLP broke the law when his charity raised $200,000 at a raffle in 2015 to fund scholarships for underprivileged high school students but didn’t provide scholarships that year,” the report said.
According to the complaint reported in the Denver Post: “The Messner Foundation and its president, Corky Messner, swindled both the underprivileged students in Colorado it was promising to help, as well as all of the people who purchased tickets for its 2015 raffle believing their money was going toward a good cause,” the five-page complaint to two state agencies alleges.