In home stretch, sheriff race gets nasty
On its face, the website looks innocent enough.
Logos and photos decorate the professional background. Visitors can scroll down to see a candidate smiling warmly back while a narrative details a cavalcade of accolades and accomplishments. Down below, a link gives readers an opportunity to chat with the candidate via the perfectly innocuous email bob@norrisforsheriff.com.
But there's a problem.
“That’s not my email,” Bob Norris said. “That’s not my email, that’s not my website, that’s not my campaign. I don’t know who that is.”
The website and its email counterpart — generated from www.norrisforsheriff.com — is one of at least two sites pretending to represent the frontrunner in what has become one of the more contentious sheriff races in local memory. The second website — www.whoisnorris.com — has been taken down, but its satirical cousin remains up.
“I come from California,” norrisforsheriff.com said, “and there is no place better to cheat the vote than California. We have thousands of illegal voters (aka immigrants) voting all the time! So I know a thing or two about illegal voting and I can assure you that I pulled this race off with my LASO wits.”
LASO stands for Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office. The real Norris said that, yes, he is a retired member of the LASO, meaning, yes, he did come to Idaho from California. But the site — as well as his opponents — have levied accusations of corruption that vary from voter fraud to involvement in organized crime.
To be clear, Norris has never been charged with any such crimes, but he said that fact hasn’t kept the accusations from flying.
“When we started this, I expected all the candidates were going to put our experience forward, and then we’d let the voters make the decisions," he said Friday. "Wow, was I wrong.”
That polar opposite was on display Wednesday night, when Libertarian candidate Justin Nagel used his closing comments in the Coeur d’Alene Press 2020 Town Hall Forum to launch into a list of people he claimed are afraid to provide relevant information about locally famous crimes.
“We have a culture in law enforcement — period — of not fully addressing problems, when one of the people involved is a friend of the cops,” Nagel said after the forum. “We certify every single police officer to live within the law. Then we train them. So when they do something illegal inside the police department, it’s common practice to accept it as legal. It’s more of a greater-good mentality. Norris is 100 percent on board with a guardian mentality.”
One of Norris’s last remaining opponents, independent Mike Bauer, said the vitriol in this election can leave damage that can’t be undone.
“This process has turned us into enemies,” Bauer said. “That’s wrong. That’s wrong. It’s not teaching younger deputies any sense of moral decency.”
Bauer’s words come on the heels of not just his own political ads criticizing Norris, but an Oct. 4 full-page advertisement in the Press paid for by the Kootenai County Deputy Sheriff’s Association. In it, the ad condemns Bauer as a “$100 million liability,” suggests that Bauer — also a former employee at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office — was corrupt, and that he is not capable of making sound decisions.
“In the forum Clint (Schroeder, publisher of The Press) conducted, I listened to Bob Norris criticize using the term ‘corruption’ to apply to people without any evidence,” Bauer said. “Then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Why did the DSA do that to me?’ The whole process in that department is too political.”
While the Deputy Sheriff’s Association stamped their name at the bottom of the the full-page ad, per campaign finance laws, Norris found an anonymous mailer in his mailbox with only two names on it: his and his wife’s. That mailer, addressed to his wife and processed through the post office, features a hand covering the mouth of an endangered child on one side and the image of Norris beneath a litany of allegations on the other.
“Sex Traffickers are Flooding Kootenai County from California,” its headline reads before alleging links between Norris and a murderous sex-trafficking ring within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office.
“Robert ‘Bob’ Norris is currently running for Sheriff in Kootenai County,” the postcard reads. “Until 2015 he was a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. Shortly before his ‘retirement,’ several high ranking officials with the LASO were indicted by Federal Prosecutors for various crimes ranging from murder of people in their custody to sex trafficking of minors …
“Kootenai County citizens have an opportunity,” the postcard continues, “to reject sex trafficking, corruption, and down-right evil by refusing to vote for Robert ‘Bob’ Norris.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Norris said after completely denying the postcard’s allegations. “I went down to get the mail, and there was this thing accusing me of sex slavery and sex trafficking. It’s obviously 100 percent false, but still, I couldn’t believe it.”
Bruce Mattare, Norris’s campaign manager, said he was in near-equal shock.
“I can tell you, just having grown up and lived in Washington, D.C., this is really more like national political tactics than something at the local level," he said. "You would think there’d be an underground bunker of two or three hundred people beneath the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office working away, with the (attention) that’s been put in.”
The footer of each page at www.norrisforsheriff.com stresses the website is purely satirical, going so far as to mention Norris’s real website — www.norris2020.com.
"This site is satire," it reads. "It is meant to poke fun at the Sheriff’s race and provide comedic relief. This is not a news site and you should not take anything we have reported here as fact. It’s all in good fun."
