A multi-million dollar Judicial Department contract awarded to a high-ranking employee facing firing was not the result of her threatened tell-all sex-discrimination lawsuit but rather a desire to simply keep her employed, according to an eight-month investigation into the deal released Wednesday.

The $2.5 million judicial training contract awarded to Mindy Masias in early 2019 was the brainchild of three people – Masias, who was the department’s chief of staff, State Court Administrator Christopher Ryan, and Eric Brown, its human resources director – and it had already been discussed for months before the lawsuit threat ever materialized, the 70-page report says.

The investigation by RCT Ltd did find problems, however — in the political structure of the office and a secretive climate that allowed it to foster —  and made more than a dozen recommendations for change.

“The internal culture of the SCAO was characterized by toxic relationships, factionalism, and a lack of accountability for key leaders,” RCT found. “Several department leaders made critical errors in judgment or engaged in outright misconduct.”

And although then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan “Ben” Coats was on-board with Masias getting the training contract despite her being fired over financial irregularities, Coats did not agree to the deal in an effort to silence any lawsuit, the report by RCT Ltd concluded.

Ultimately, RCT said Ryan was wrong to think problems in the State Court Administrator’s Office would be solved by giving Masias the contract.

“He misjudged that a contract with Masias would solve the problem, and he chose the worst of the tactics common in that culture to get the Contract approved,” the report says. “He lied to Coats about Masias’s history of reimbursement misconduct. He lied to Coats about the justification for a sole-source contract. … He hid Masias’s surreptitious recording of Rice from Coats … He intimidated [SCAO Chief Legal Counsel, Terri] Morrison so she would not interfere with his plans. Ryan thus gradually built an increasingly fragile edifice of deceits that eventually imploded.”

In the end, “the contract was ill-advised, did not serve the interests of Coloradans, and should never have been approved,” RCT wrote.

RCT is led by former Colorado U.S. Attorney Robert Troyer.

Ryan on Wednesday said he was “not shocked” by RCT’s findings and was “just appalled.”

“I wholeheartedly dispute the characterizations and statements form the judicial department justices and staff and stand by my previous statements,” Ryan told The Denver Gazette. “As has been demonstrated repeatedly by the actions of the Supreme Court and the Judicial Branch as a whole … they will take whatever action is necessary to control the narrative and protect the black robes.”

A two-page memo that Brown authored, which contained a laundry list of judicial misdeeds that Masias was allegedly prepared to air in a lawsuit had little impact on whether she obtained the contract, RCT said. The company did not look into whether the allegations of misconduct were true.

“Contrary to allegations made and repeated in news media coverage, Troyer and his investigators concluded that the contract was not a ‘payoff’ to silence Masias from filing a discrimination lawsuit or revealing supposed evidence of judicial misconduct,” Chief Justice Brian Boatright said in a press release issued with the report.

“There is no way to sugarcoat the uncomfortable findings of RCT’s investigation,” Boatright said in the release.

RCT also determined the entire Supreme Court held some fault because it paid little attention to the administrative matters that bogged the chief justice.

“The other justices focused exclusively on resolving the cases on the court’s docket and were detached from administrative matters pursuant to the court’s long-standing practice,” RCT wrote. “They did not know the SCAO culture, serve on its internal committees, or fully understand its functions.”

Moreover, Coats “was not trained as an administrator” and was “isolated” about the department’s operations.

That allowed Ryan to operate with minimal oversight, resulting in him “concealing critical information from Coats and, in some cases, providing him with false information.”

Ultimately a number of problems — a faulty contracting system, lax purchasing rules, no accountability for senior leaders, a culture of fear, and an unfair and untransparent method of handling complaints against judges among them — led to the entire scenario.

Faced with losing a long-time employee with valuable experience, officials in the department’s financial section refused to sign off on a state audit if Masias was allowed to keep her job, the report found. Ryan and Brown determined she could be given the judicial training contract if she were to resign, RCT investigators say.

“Coats had already tentatively agreed with the proposal to contract with Masias at least three months before Brown presented the alleged ‘dirt’ in his talking-points list,” the RCT report says. “Therefore, we conclude that the ‘dirt’ did not motivate Coats’s thinking at that time.”

An internal audit in August 2018 had found several problems with Masias’s expenses dating back several years and Ryan barred her from any travel or out-of-pocket reimbursements, as well as signing any department contracts. Ryan told state auditors that Masias “likely violated Colorado law.”

But Ryan’s warning went no further, RCT said.

“Ryan did not tell Coats or Rottman any of this,” the report found. “Nor did he inform either of them there was a written audit report documenting these irregularities.”

Coats and his counsel, Andrew Rottman, agreed the contract was a workable idea, but only if additional investigation into Masias’ conduct revealed no other problems, the report concluded.

The entire deal unraveled in July 2019 when Coats learned Masias months earlier had secretly recorded a conversation between herself and the former Chief Justice Nancy Rice discussing how Masias was too feminine looking for the chief administrator’s position she wanted but didn’t get.

“Coats was misled, and his judgment failed him on other fronts, but he did not approve the contract to silence Masias,” the report says.

The memo and contract are at the center of at least six investigations and legislative hearings into whether Colorado’s system of judicial discipline requires extensive reform.

The long-awaited RCT report is a dire contrast to accusations that Coats agreed to the deal as a way of stopping Masias from suing and airing the department’s dirty laundry.

Allegations that Coats was read portions of a memo that enumerated various degrees of misconduct by judges and other high-level officials in the Judicial Department, and his reaction to those details – that he waved his hands and asked how to prevent the disclosures – were not accurate, the report concludes.

RCT investigators said they never interviewed the three key players – Ryan, Brown and Masias. That’s likely because the trio faced criminal investigation by the Denver district attorney at the time RCT was doing its inquiry.

RCT investigators were forced to rely on the other two people at the memo meeting: Coats and Rottman.

RCT made 14 recommendations for change with how the department does business including better training for the chief justice and to have an ethics officer.

“We are already evaluating how best to implement these recommendations to ensure an organizational culture of professionalism, accountability and transparency worthy of the thousands of hard-working and dedicated people of our branch …,” Boatright said in the statement.

He added that the department has “new channels” for employees to file complaints and report misconduct and imposed “increased rigor” to sole-source contracts.

The DA’s criminal inquiry was closed, prosecutors said, because they received a heavily redacted copy of an audit that months earlier had already found evidence of what appeared to be fraud. Additionally, prosecutors said the lag in getting the report left them with insufficient time to investigate and potentially bring charges before the statute of limitations had expired.

Much of the delay in referring the matter to the Denver district attorney — auditors are required by law to make a referral to law enforcement immediately upon discovering anything that could be a crime — was because state government lawyers with the Attorney General’s office and the Judicial Department bickered over what the word “immediately” actually meant.

Ryan said the slowdowns were evidence the department was trying to control how the investigations were conducted.

“It appears that Judicial used the self-imposed delays in the contracting and procurement process, along with the redaction and slow down in the release of the auditor’s findings to develop the narrative it provided to (RCT),” Ryan said, noting it restricted “the availability of information to the investigating entities, including the district attorney.”

He added: “While I have great respect for Mr. Troyer, I elected not to participate in his investigation because even with a fair dealer, you don’t stand a change in a rigged game.”

The report comes seven months after the Colorado Judicial Department hired RCT Ltd to delve into the circumstances of the contract.

RCT’s $75,000 deal was inked in November 2021, eight months after state Supreme Court Chief Justice Brian Boatright publicly promised a transparent and immediate inquiry into allegations of a quid-pro-quo arrangement to silence a threatened tell-all sex-discrimination lawsuit by a department official.

The department also hired Investigations Law Group for $350,000 to look into allegations the department has long fostered a culture of sexual harassment and discrimination.

The two investigations are among a half dozen that were launched following the disclosure in February 2021 that a company Masias had formed was given a no-bid judicial training contract two years earlier. The contract’s base value was slightly more than $2.5 million and could have reached $2.75 million or more over five years with the department’s permission.

In a related development, the Legislature last week began the first of several public hearings into whether the state’s method of investigating and disciplining judges needs reform. That came because the state’s Commission on Judicial Discipline ran into repeated roadblocks in its inquiry into the scandal.

Although Masias faced firing, discussions had been ongoing on how to award her the training contract. When Coats expressed concern over how much Brown seemed to be representing Masias’s interests, he asked Ryan to intercede and let Brown know he needed to back away, the report says.

“Brown prioritized Masias’s interests over those of the Department itself,” RCT found. “He was considered untrustworthy and even dishonest when it came to matters involving Masias.”

That’s when the memo materialized with the threat of a lawsuit if Masias was actually fired. In it were dozens of instances where the misconduct of judges and other department officials through the years went unpunished or unreported.

One of the memo’s allegations was the quiet settlement of a harassment complaint – “per the chief justice,” the memo said – against an appellate court judge so as not to affect his potential, and eventual, Supreme Court appointment.

Another was a Supreme Court justice’s demand that Masias ignore and destroy an anonymous letter alleging sexism and harassment within the court.

The memo, purportedly authored by Brown, also contained several allegations of how women in the department had been generally mistreated and harassed.

The memo quoted Rice from the recording Masias had, telling Masias she was “a small woman” who didn’t “look the part” of the state court administrator, a job for which Masias had unsuccessfully applied.

Rice also told Masias that she needed to “dress less like a woman and more like an attorney on 17th Street.”

RCT said Coats was never told about the surreptitious recording — and other Judicial Department officials also kept it under wraps for months. It came to light because a newspaper reporter asked for a copy.

“Coats and Rottman were stunned and furious that so many senior personnel had withheld this critical information from them for so long,” RCT wrote.

Even Morrison, the department’s chief legal counsel, hid the recording from the attorney general’s office when asked about it.

“Morrison initially ignored the request and, when pressed, she asserted that (Masias’s) resignation agreement’s confidentiality provision barred her from sharing it,” RCT wrote. “That was false.”

Although newspaper stories uncovered the Masias contract in July 2019, the existence of the memo, its contents and Ryan’s assertion that it was the reason for the contract wasn’t revealed until February 2021. Ryan and Brown resigned in the wake of the revelation and the court canceled the deal.

RCT said it was Ryan and Brown who said the contract was necessary to avoid the lawsuit.

“Brown and Ryan told Morrison that in order to avoid a lawsuit and prevent the public revelation of this ‘dirt,’ the department needed to secure a leadership training contract for Masias,” RCT found. “Morrison also told Ryan that for several reasons Masias’s threat was empty and she did not have a valid gender-discrimination claim. Ryan appeared to ignore Morrison’s advice.”

When Ryan and Brown met with Coats and Rottman, the latter were unclear why they were there.

“Brown simply launched into a description of long-past incidents of alleged misconduct within the department of which Masias was aware,” the RCT report says. “Brown did not present these as issues that needed attention, just as information Masias possessed.”

As Brown kept reading, Coats and Rottman grew weary, RCT wrote.

“Rottman and Coats were unsure what Brown’s point was in describing these incidents, and they grew impatient. After several minutes, Brown stopped and asked Coats if he should continue,” RCT wrote. “Coats turned to Ryan and asked, ‘Do I need to hear more of this?’ Ryan simply looked sheepish, shrugged, and may have said something akin to, ‘Up to you, Chief,’ whereupon Coats told Brown to stop.”

More importantly, Coats wasn’t about to give in to any threats, RCT wrote.

“After Ryan and Brown left the meeting, Coats told Rottman that if they were going to explore a contract with Masias they were not going to consider any of the information that Brown had detailed,” the report notes. “Masias, Brown, and Ryan, each for his or her own reasons, clearly and brazenly pursued approval of the contract. They pulled all the levers they thought would further that goal. It is equally clear, though, that the ‘dirt’ lever did not affect Coats as they thought it would.”

Additionally, RCT found that Coats expected criticism for a contract to a former employee, which he was willing to accept “for the good of the department,” RCT wrote. “This is another indication that when he approved the contract, Coats was not motivated by fear of criticism or damage to the department’s reputation.”

The seven Supreme Court justices have publicly denied there was a quid-pro-quo deal and that the idea Coats and Rottman “would ever authorize the use of state resources to silence a blackmailer is simply false.”

The justices at the time also said Masias “was not promised any contract prior to her resignation.”

Masias and Brown were close associates for several years, frequently giving lectures together at conferences for the National Center for State Courts.

Masias had been the department’s human resources director and Brown her assistant director until she was promoted to chief of staff, a position that was created for her when she did not land the state court administrator’s post. Brown was promoted to Masias’ former job.

The relationship between the two was often the fodder for department gossip, so much so that the chief of building security, Jane Hood, was asked by her superiors to keep track of their movements in the judiciary’s new office building downtown.

The building has an elaborate electronic monitoring system that allowed Hood to watch the pair on video surveillance as well as monitor the use of their personal security cards.

RCT called the “brazenness” of the personal relationship between Masias and Brown “enormously corrosive.”

“This relationship destroyed staff confidence in their leaders’ reliability and fairness, and it undermined any trust that they would be protected if they spoke up about misconduct,” RCT wrote.

Hood was let go from her job after Masias and Brown learned of her tracking activities. Hood was given a severance package that included a year’s salary, an agreement that later came under scrutiny by state auditors.

The judicial leadership-training contract was already something the department was planning on putting out for public bids. Two companies that previously handled the job were specialized in corporate leadership training but not in a court setting, so the department was seeking a change.

RCT said Ryan made the initial suggestion that if “Masias chose to resign they might be able to bring her back” through a training contract.

Coats agreed – as did the other six Supreme Court justices.

“Coats indicated that if Ryan investigated and found no other misconduct by Masias, and she resigned, the department would consider contracting with her to perform leadership training,” the report says. “Coats explained this approach to the other justices, and none objected.”

Coats insisted that the contract process be “above board” and “by the book,” RCT said. Ryan has said it was he who insisted it be put for public bid.

Several weeks earlier and while technically still employed with the department, Masias had reserved with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office the name of the company she eventually formed for the contract: The Leadership Practice.

More than 400 companies were eligible to bid on the five-year deal. A handful downloaded bid documents. None made an offer, not even Masias.

The RCT report found that Brown largely authored the bid solicitation and that qualifications for the contract were so narrowly written that no company could have landed the deal except for Masias.

Rather than being fired, Masias resigned her position in March 2019 with back pay and additional benefits. The next day, Brown wrote a formal recommendation for Masias’ newly formed company to be awarded the contract.

The contract was kept hidden because many department employees who could report it feared Masias and Brown, RCT wrote.

“Masias and Brown were perceived to have unilateral discretion to receive, investigate, and resolve complaints against judges and justices,” RCT found. “This perpetuated the belief that the judges and justices were themselves shielded from accountability, and that Masias and Brown had leverage over them, which strengthened the perception that it would be dangerous to come forward about the contract.”