The Four-Year War: American Muckrakers v. Lauren Boebert

With receipts.

Let me tell you how this started, because the version Lauren Boebert would like you to remember is not the one that happened.

It started with a website and one sentence. In May of 2022, we put up fireboebert.com, and the message on it was not complicated: we helped fire Madison Cawthorn, and now it was Boebert’s turn. [SOURCE: HuffPost, May 2022: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/madison-cawthorn-lauren-boebert-muckrakers-back-firing-campaign_n_62883dc4e4b05cfc268c57d2] The logo, fittingly, was a dumpster on fire. [SOURCE: Smoky Mountain News profile: https://smokymountainnews.com/archives/item/35461] I had just come off the Cawthorn campaign with my co-founder, Colonel Moe Davis, and I will be honest with you about what I thought at the time. I thought I had seen this movie before. I looked at Boebert and I saw Cawthorn’s twin sister. Same act. Same righteousness. Same certainty that the rules were written for other people. [SOURCE: Smoky Mountain News, same URL]

I want to be straight with you about the early days, because I have never pretended to be something I am not, and I am not going to start now.

In June of 2022, we reported on the networks of wealth and influence that quietly decide who rises in American politics. We named names. We reported, based on credible sources and supporting information, on introductions made in rooms most people never get to see inside. [SOURCE: D.B. Wheeler, “Remember Our June 2022 Reporting,” Feb 2026: https://www.americanmuckrakers.com/p/remember-our-june-2022-reporting] We believed then, and I believe now, that citizens have a right to understand those rooms and the people who arrange the introductions inside them.

Some of what we put out in those first weeks, we got wrong on the details. I have said that before and I will say it here. The press pointed out that, unlike Cawthorn, where there was video, some of our 2022 reporting could not be independently corroborated and had problems with dates. [SOURCE: CNN, June 2022, as summarized in Law&Crime: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/lauren-boebert-cannot-silence-speech-from-american-muckrakers-must-face-defamation-lawsuit-judge-rules/] When I was wrong on a date, I corrected it. That is the difference between us and the people we cover. We admit error, we fix it, and we do not retreat from the larger story.

Because here is what Boebert did next, and it is the part she never brings up.

She did not just deny what we reported. She tried to shut us up. She went and got a temporary restraining order against me in June of 2022. [SOURCE: Colorado Public Radio, July 2022: https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/22/lauren-boebert-no-defamation-suit-against-american-muckrakers/] And then a funny thing happened at the hearing to extend it. My attorney showed up. Nobody showed up for her. The judge vacated the order and dismissed the case. [SOURCE: CPR, same URL] Her threat collapsed the first time it touched a courtroom.

We did not stop. We filed a complaint against her with the House Office of Congressional Ethics. [SOURCE: CPR, same URL] We kept the pressure where it belonged, on the record and in the institutions that are supposed to hold these people accountable.

She won her primary that summer with sixty-six percent. [SOURCE: CPR, same URL] I will give her that. But then came November, and the district that was supposed to be a safe Republican seat nearly threw her out. She beat Adam Frisch by five hundred and forty-six votes. [SOURCE: Yahoo/WesternSlopeNow: https://news.yahoo.com/lauren-boebert-facing-defamation-lawsuit-231749545.html] Five hundred and forty-six. Remember that number, because a woman who wins by five hundred and forty-six votes is a woman who is paying attention to people like us.

Then she handed us September of 2023, and honestly, she did most of the work herself.

You know the story. Most people don’t know we broke the story and were first to report it.

The Buell Theatre in Denver, a city-owned house, a touring production of Beetlejuice. According to the city’s own incident report, she and her date were warned at intermission after three separate complaints, vaping, singing, causing a disturbance, and when a fourth complaint came in during the second act, security walked them out. [SOURCE: Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/13/lauren-boebert-beetlejuice-musical-ejected/; NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/lauren-boebert-was-escorted-beetlejuice-show-denver-allegedly-causing-rcna104793] The usher wrote in his report that when he told them they would be trespassing, they told him to go get the police, and that in the lobby one of them said, and I am quoting the report, “Do you know who I am.” [SOURCE: Scripps News incident report via AOL: https://www.aol.com/footage-shows-rep-lauren-boebert-221918920.html]

And what did she say? She said she was guilty of “laughing and singing too loud.” Her campaign denied the vaping. [SOURCE: NPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199188010/lauren-boebert-theater-beetlejuice-denver] Then the surveillance video came out, and the video showed the vape pen and the smoke and the flash photos, before the show had even started. [SOURCE: Scripps via AOL, same URL] That is the whole woman, right there in ninety seconds of theater security footage. Tell the easy lie, and assume the tape will never surface. The tape always surfaces.

Her own party noticed. Republican county commissioners started lining up behind her primary challenger, and more than one of them said the Buell Theatre was the last straw. [SOURCE: Yahoo/WesternSlopeNow: https://news.yahoo.com/lauren-boebert-facing-defamation-lawsuit-231749545.html]

So in December of 2023 she did the most Boebert thing imaginable. She ran. Not from politics, from her own district. She announced she was abandoning the Western Slope seat she actually lived in and moving hundreds of miles across the state to run in a safer, open district. [SOURCE: Roll Call: https://rollcall.com/2023/12/28/boebert-still-faces-fight-after-district-switch/; Colorado Sun: https://coloradosun.com/2023/12/29/the-unaffiliated-20231229/] She called it a fresh start. I called it what it was. When the going got tough, she abandoned the people who elected her.

Now. The part she really does not want repeated.

While all of this was happening, we had taken her to federal court. Not the other way around. In 2023, American Muckrakers and I sued Lauren Boebert in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, because she had made false statements about us, and because she had threatened our donors, the people whose contributions make this work possible, with lawsuits for the crime of supporting independent reporting. [SOURCE: Colorado Newsline: https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/06/26/boebert-defamation-settlement-lawsuit-colorado/; complaint, D. Colo. 1:23-cv-01463: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67489406/american-muckrakers-pac-inc-v-boebert/]

On June 9, 2024, a federal magistrate judge, the Honorable Kathryn A. Starnella, issued her written opinion. And she found that Lauren Boebert defamed me. Five separate times. [SOURCE: Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/colorado-lauren-boebert-lawsuit-american-muckrackers-1918210] She agreed that our donors never should have been threatened, and she let our claim over those threats move forward. [SOURCE: Reason/Volokh: https://reason.com/volokh/2024/08/12/empty-threats-to-sue-donors-of-entity-that-allegedly-defamed-you-could-be-tortious/] The same opinion held that public advocacy websites like ours are public forums, a ruling other courts have since cited. [SOURCE: Doe v. Alwan briefing citing the opinion: https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2025/01/Doe-v.-Alwan-MTD-file-stamped.pdf]

Sit with that for a second. The woman who got a restraining order to silence me, the woman who threatened the people who fund us, the woman who called us liars on television and on X, walked into federal court and walked out with a judge’s signature on a document that says she is the one who defamed somebody.

We settled later that month. The terms are confidential, and I am going to keep them that way. The case was dismissed with prejudice on July 8, 2024. [SOURCE: Colorado Newsline: https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/06/26/boebert-defamation-settlement-lawsuit-colorado/; docket order: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67489406/american-muckrakers-pac-inc-v-boebert/]

Vindication has a price. I paid it. Years of my life, my income, and my peace. [SOURCE: D.B. Wheeler, Feb 2026: https://www.americanmuckrakers.com/p/remember-our-june-2022-reporting] I would pay it again tomorrow.

So when people ask me why American Muckrakers is so entwined with Lauren Boebert, why we keep coming back to her, this is the answer. We did not pick a fight with a random congresswoman. We told the truth about a powerful person, she tried to make us pay for it, and a federal court told her she was the one in the wrong. That is not a grudge. That is the job. The job is to put the truth on the record and make it stick, no matter how much money or how many lawyers stand on the other side.

She is up for reelection in 2026. She raised about seven hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars last year. [SOURCE: FEC committee C00728238: https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00728238/] She is not going anywhere.

Neither are we. Over the coming days, we’ll have more to say and will be doing everything we can to beat Boebert at her own game.

Join us, help fund our informational campaign against this menace: www.voteroi.com/support We need your help today.

DBW

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About the Author

David B. Wheeler is President and Co-Founder of American Muckrakers, a public-interest accountability organization best known for exposing political hypocrisy, corruption, and misconduct. He has spent decades building organizations, working internationally, challenging powerful people, and occasionally making them wish they had chosen a quieter line of work. He believes in public records, hard evidence, civic courage, and the useful art of firing fools.

Disclaimer

The views expressed here are those of the author. This publication is for commentary, accountability, and public-interest reporting purposes. Nothing here should be taken as legal advice. Readers should evaluate the facts, review source materials when available, and reach their own conclusions.