By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director

A judge Thursday upheld Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s denial of a conservative group’s request for records showing office-door badge swipes by her and her security team.

The Public Trust Institute filed a lawsuit in late September after Griswold withheld the records under a discretionary Colorado Open Records Act exemption for “specialized details of either security arrangements or investigations.” CORA allows such records to be kept from the public on grounds that disclosure would be “contrary to the public interest.”

“The record established before the court here today sufficiently demonstrates the specialized details of a security arrangement,” Denver District Court Judge Andrew McCallin said at the conclusion of a hearing. “Specific threats that have been to the secretary over time, which continue and are serious, convince the court that these details should be protected.”

McCallin said he “takes seriously” affidavits submitted to the court by Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Klein and Michael Ryan, the Colorado State Patrol major who oversees the secretary of state’s security detail.

“Release of unredacted badge entry and exit records presents a safety risk and undermines the work of the Security team,” Ryan wrote. “Such release could allow the public to: identify a pattern of life for the statutorily protected party; discern specialized details regarding security arrangements, including protective detail tactics and staffing levels; and identify movement habits at the building, all of which expose both the protectee and the protective detail to potential targeted or pre-planned attacks.”

A security risk still would exist, he added, “even if the Department of State were to aggregate, on a daily basis, the number of times badge access was granted to any of the individuals in the requested group … This information would give the recipient insight into the regular movement habits of the Secretary of State and enable them to predict the protectee’s location at future times.”

The judge declined to review the requested records in camera and consider redactions of dates and times to possibly allow the disclosure of some portions. He also rejected a request from Public Trust Institute attorney Suzanne Taheri (a former deputy secretary of state) for “a listing of days when Secretary Griswold was present in the office, or even the total number of days for each month that she was physically present in the office in lieu of raw badge scan records.”

The secretary of state’s office is not obligated under CORA to create such a list if one does not already exist, McCallin said.

Taheri, in the Public Trust Institute’s complaint, notes that Griswold is running for attorney general (as a Democrat) this fall.

“The number of days that an elected official is physically present in the office where she is the chief executive officer is information that is in the public interest to know, especially when that official is actively running for another position,” she wrote.

According to the complaint, the Public Trust Institute on September 3 requested “door card/badge access records into the Secretary of State’s Office” for Griswold or any member of her security detail from Oct. 24, 2025, through the end of that year. State records, she says in the lawsuit, show that the secretary of state’s office “made over $400,000 in payments to security contractors in 2025.”

“There is no reasonable basis for a public official who is actively running for office and actively making public appearances in uncontrolled outdoor environments to argue that revealing the dates she was physically present in the locked and secure office at any time in the preceding year is somehow a security threat,” the complaint contends.

Attorney Chris Beall, who was deputy secretary of state under Griswold from 2021 to 2025, represented Griswold in court Thursday.

In a brief filed late Wednesday, Beall wrote that the secretary of state “receives daily threats to do bodily harm to her, with a daily average of six threats per day, and even more when an election season is upon us, as is the case now.”

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