Mary Herrera
An e-mail from Secretary of State Mary Herrera to former employee James Flores appears to show that she asked Flores to help her re-election campaign by getting involved in the GOP and discouraging Republicans from running a candidate against her.
Herrera insists that things are not as they appear, and that the e-mail is really about trying to make Republicans feel welcome in her office.
But the e-mail exchange is very obviously about politics. And the discussion was held using Herrera’s government e-mail account and the government account of Flores, the former spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office who was fired last month.
The exchange adds to the body of evidence suggesting Herrera directed employees to help her re-election campaign.
The Jan. 21 e-mails obtained by NMPolitics.net, which you can read here, begin with Flores requesting a meeting with Herrera and two other employees to address an allegation that he made “certain comments regarding acquiring nominating signatures” at an awards banquet.
“The allegations made are untrue, as the issue of signatures was never talked about,” Flores wrote in the e-mail.
Herrera replied that she had no interest in meeting with Flores about the issue.
“I have seen your interest in supporting me,” she wrote. “I asked you a long time ago to get involved in the R party, you didn’t and now they are looking for someone to run against me.”
Flores’ e-mail is referring to the nominating signatures candidates have to submit when they file for re-election. To further add political context to the e-mail exchange, Herrera added in her response that the state treasurer told his exempt employees that in his second term he would only keep those employees who helped his re-election campaign.
Herrera is currently facing an allegation that she required exempt employees to gather nominating signatures for her re-election campaign. She denies that allegation.
Herrera says she was ‘trying to be open-minded with both parties’
Herrera acknowledged in an interview that the “nominating signatures” referred to in Flores’ e-mail are signatures candidates have to gather in order to run for office. But she insisted that her response wasn’t about politics. She said when she was elected she looked to Flores to help create a nonpartisan atmosphere in the office.
“I told him James, you should get involved in the Republican Party, and that way they’ll know that we’re trying to be open-minded with both parties,” Herrera said. “I said you should get involved. It was for our agency.”
She said her Jan. 21 e-mail should be interpreted this way:
“I told him James, you should have gotten involved with the Republicans. Now they’re not happy,” she said. “It was about the office.”
But Herrera didn’t deny that her e-mail referred to politics when it mentioned the state treasurer not keeping exempt employees who didn’t help his re-election bid.
She did say that the reference to the “Treasurer” in her e-mail was about the man she dates – Deputy State Treasurer Mark Valdes – not about State Treasurer James B. Lewis.
Flores says e-mail ‘speaks for itself’
Flores said the e-mail exchange “speaks for itself.”
“Mary, on many occasions, asked me to get involved in the Republican Party with the intention of speaking about her and getting her invited to R events,” Flores wrote in an e-mail. “She stated, and I paraphrase, that she could possibly fend off any opposition by doing this and insisted that I get involved. I never did because I felt it was not right, and extremely disingenuous.”
Flores said Herrera’s claim that she wanted to make Republicans feel comfortable in her office “is new to me.”
“We never had that conversation,” Flores said. “This entire issue was brought about for the sole purpose of gaining support from members of the Republican Party for her re-election bid.”
Republicans are running a candidate against Herrera – state Sen. Dianna Duran.
Herrera says she collected most of her nominating signatures
Flores and two other former employees have publicly accused Herrera of requiring them to help with her political campaign. One of them – former Elections Director A.J. Salazar – has said Herrera ordered exempt employees to obtain nominating signatures for her re-election campaign.
When he resigned in March, Salazar accused Herrera of violating the Governmental Conduct Act and election laws and of running a “crooked organization.”
Herrera said in a recent interview with NMPolitics.net that she didn’t order employees to collect nominating signatures. She said she set a goal of collecting 10,000 signatures for her re-election campaign, and she personally collected 7,000 of those. Most of the others were collected by friends and family members, not employees, she said.
Salazar, Flores and former Office Manager Manny Vildasol have taken their allegations against Herrera to the FBI. Salazar has also taken his allegations to the attorney general.
Herrera fired Flores and Vildasol after they went to the FBI, but she says they weren’t fired for whistleblowing.