Kenneth Buck

Kenneth Robert Buck (born February 16, 1959) is an American lawyer and politician who has represented Colorado's 4th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives since 2015.

Buck was born in Ossining, New York, in 1959.

He and his two brothers were encouraged by their parents, Ruth (Larsen) and James Buck, both New York lawyers, to attend Ivy League colleges.

Buck earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics from Princeton University in 1981 and completed a 75-page long senior thesis titled "Saudi Arabia: Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place".

Buck later said that the Princeton degree was "more important to [my father] than me".

At Princeton, Buck played four years of football on the Princeton Tigers football team, including one year as a defensive back/punter/kicker and three years as a punter, earning All-Ivy League honors as a punter his senior year.

After college, he worked in Wyoming at the state legislative services office and received a Juris Doctor from the University of Wyoming College of Law in 1985.

He was also an instructor at the University of Denver Law School and for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy in Colorado.

In 1986, Buck was hired by Congressman Dick Cheney to work on the Iran–Contra investigation.

Following that assignment, he worked as a prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington D.C.

In 1990, Buck joined the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Colorado, where he became Chief of the Criminal Division.

Buck was formally reprimanded and required to take ethics classes in 2001 for a meeting he had with defense attorneys about a felony case he thought should not be pursued.

Only one of the three men initially indicted on felony charges was convicted, for a misdemeanor offense.

Buck said he is "not proud" of the incident that effectively ended his career with the Justice Department, but that he felt it was unethical to prosecute such a "weak" case.

Buck was elected the District Attorney for Weld County, Colorado, in 2004.

When he suspected that Social Security numbers were being stolen by undocumented immigrants, he raided a tax service in Greeley, Colorado, and seized more than 5,000 tax files.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Buck's office for violating the privacy of the service's clients and after an appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court, costing the county approximately $150,000, the raid was deemed unconstitutional.

Buck has said that his time enforcing laws for the Justice Department and Weld County stoked his desire to become a lawmaker himself.

According to a following article in the Independent, "Buck's refusal to prosecute 2005 rape case reverberates in U.S. Senate race," the reporter provides a transcript of another tape of a conversation between the woman and Buck, in which "Buck appears to all but blame her for the rape and tells her that her case would never fly with a Weld County jury."

The article, about a case Buck refused to prosecute in 2006, included a complete transcript of a tape between the victim and her attacker, including the following dialogue:

Victim: "You do realize that … it's rape."

Suspect: "Yeah, I do."

Victim: "Like in a number of different ways, because I didn't want to do it and because I was intoxicated and because I was afraid."

Suspect: "Yes I do. I know."

The tape, which Greeley police had the victim record during its investigation, was available before Buck made his decision not to prosecute the woman's admitted rapist.

"A jury could very well conclude that this is a case of buyer's remorse," Buck told the Greeley Tribune in 2006.

Formerly the District Attorney for Weld County, Colorado, Buck ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2010, narrowly losing to Democrat Michael Bennet.

In Congress, Buck has emerged as one of the foremost proponents of antitrust enforcement in the Republican Party.

A member of the House Freedom Caucus and a staunch fiscal conservative, Buck was one of only four Republican votes opposing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's April 2023 debt ceiling/deficit reduction bill, explaining in a subsequent Washington Times op-ed that "[i]f this plan with modest spending reductions is the best the GOP can provide, Americans could be forgiven for wondering what the point of a Republican majority in the House is."

Buck announced in November 2023 that he would not seek a sixth House term, stating that his party's "insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans' confidence in the rule of law."

On March 12, 2024, Buck announced he would resign from Congress at the end of the following week, effective Friday, March 22.

Buck's resignation requires Gov. Jared Polis to set a special election for Buck's replacement.

One of the three men donated $700 to Buck's 2010 Senate campaign.

During the 2010 Senate race, The Colorado Independent ran an article titled "Suspect in 2005 Buck rape case said he knew it was rape".

"That comment made me feel horrible," the victim told the Colorado Independent in 2010.

"The offender admitted he did it, but Ken Buck said I was to blame. Had he [Buck] not attacked me, I might have let it go. But he put the blame on me, and I was furious. I still am furious", she said.

According to the Independent, "A man entered the alleged victim's apartment and had sex with her while she was drunk, she says. As she passed in and out of consciousness, she says she told him 'no' and tried to push him away. If he had been a stranger, the case may have played out differently, but he was a former lover, and she had invited him over."

In the meeting that she recorded, Buck said, "It appears to me … that you invited him over to have sex with him," and that he thought she might have wanted to file rape charges to retaliate against the man for some bad feeling left over from when they had been lovers more than a year earlier.

According to the Independent, "Buck also comes off on this tape as being at least as concerned with the woman's sexual history and alcohol consumption as he is with other facts of the case."

From March 30, 2019, to March 27, 2021, Buck served as chair of the Colorado Republican Party, having replaced Jeff Hays.