According to our news partner, "The Gazette", a group of Colorado Republicans voted Saturday to remove Dave Williams as chairman of the state party at a meeting denounced by Williams and his allies as "fraudulent" and "illegal."
Republicans cheered when results were announced at a church in Brighton, where Williams' opponents gathered in defiance of state GOP warnings that its proceedings lacked authority and would be ignored.
About 88% of the 182.16 central committee members in attendance voted to oust Williams, easily clearing the 60% required under state party bylaws to remove an officer. (Some members hold fractional votes.)
Williams did not attend the meeting.
Republicans also voted to fire Williams' lieutenants, Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman and Anna Ferguson, the state party secretary.
The vote came 48 days before mail ballots are scheduled to start going out to Colorado voters for the general election, when Republicans hope to make up ground after suffering historic losses at the ballot box in recent years.
Todd Watkins, the El Paso County GOP's vice chair, told Colorado Politics that he issued a formal call for a meeting of the state party's central committee after Williams and other state GOP officers failed to comply with a petition he submitted in June demanding that the party schedule a meeting within 30 days to consider removing Williams.
Williams and his supporters have contended that the petition didn't meet requirements, and last month the state party's executive committee declared it "null and void."
A motion passed by central committee members at Saturday's meeting, however, overruled the executive committee's decision, paving the way for the later vote to unseat Williams.
A majority of Colorado's Republican congressional nominees earlier this week called for Williams to resign or be removed. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, the lone Republican incumbent seeking reelection to the House this year, issued a separate demand last month asking Williams to support GOP candidates or face removal by the party's state central committee.
Saturday's meeting was the latest in a series of disputed central committee meetings called by feuding factions of the state party, including sparsely attended huddle under a bridge in the southwest corner of the state called last month by Williams' backers, who told Republicans not to attend.
Williams and his lieutenants maintain that an upcoming state central committee meeting they've called for Aug. 31 in Castle Rock is the only legitimate meeting on the books. This week, they urged Republicans to skip Saturday's meeting and insisted that any business conducted at the meeting wouldn't be recognized.
In late July, Watkins and other organizers of the move to replace Williams cancelled a meeting they'd called at the church in Brighton where Saturday's vote took place after a district court judge issued a temporary restraining order sought by Williams and the Colorado Republican Party.
Instead, the Williams critics who called the derailed meeting announced they would instead hold a "rally" at the same location, where county party officers and candidates took turns at the microphone to air complaints about state party leadership.
Arapahoe County District Court Judge Thomas W. Henderson reversed his restraining order days later, ruling that he had issued the initial order based on inaccurate information submitted by Williams the courts didn't have jurisdiction over the internal party dispute.
The meeting in Brighton took place days after Henderson rebuffed a request by Williams and the state party to issue another injunction while the case was under appeal, arguing in part that replacing GOP leadership in the middle of an election would sow chaos and handicap the party's efforts to elect Republicans.
Williams appealed the district court judge's earlier ruling this week and asked for an emergency injunction from the Colorado Court of Appeals, but by Saturday morning, the appeals court hadn't responded to the motion, effectively allowing the meeting to proceed.
Critics charge that Williams, a former state lawmaker from Colorado Springs, used party resources to support his' unsuccessful congressional campaign in the El Paso County-based 5th Congressional District.
Making his second run for the seat held by retiring U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, Williams lost the GOP primary to conservative operative and former radio host Jeff Crank by a wide margin, despite having won an endorsement from former President Donald Trump.
Crank was among the congressional candidates who urged Williams to resign in a series of letters.
Some Republicans have been calling on Williams to step aside since January, when he launched his congressional campaign and the state party abandoned its longstanding policy of remaining neutral in contested primaries.
The organized effort to fire Williams, however, caught fire in June when the state GOP attacked the LGBTQ community and Pride Month, including a directive to "Burn all the #Pride flags," in emails and social media posts.
Through it all, Williams and his supporters have responded that his combative approach to politics is what Republicans wanted when the central committee elected him to chair the party in March 2023.
Dave Williams tells News5 in response, "A fringe element of our State Party, who has now proven that they do not care about electing Trump this November, held a fraudulent meeting today with 77 people in actual attendance (who also brought with them 104 questionable proxies).
And they even had to amend their already broken rules while illegally re-interpreting our bylaws to improperly attempt to remove all of your duly elected officers without even a majority of our members present.
They clearly don't have 3/5th of the entire body to remove anyone but that won't stop them from harming the Party further while wasting time with nearly 70 days to go in the election."
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