One of the more bizarre stories in Colorado politics is how Jena Griswold got a $40k fellowship to “Salsa Dance Around the World.” But there are zero photos or documentation of any of this. Jena received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (Watson is the founder of IBM and original IBM AI Engine namesake) after graduating from Whitman College. This prestigious, highly competitive post-graduate fellowship funds independent, year-long international projects for recent college graduates. It is not a traditional academic “salsa dancing fellowship” but a self-designed travel and research grant. From the record, She used the fellowship to travel to multiple countries, immersing herself in salsa dance, its cultural roots, marketing, and social contexts. She took salsa lessons, frequented salsa clubs, and studied how the dance is practiced and commercialized globally. The countries she visited for this project included: • Brazil • Japan • Germany • Panama • Spain • Puerto Rico Again, no photos, documentation or thesis available. This very strange story has never added up. Why would you go to Japan to study salsa dancing? Why would such a prestigious fellowship fund this? Griswold goes from “salsa around the world” → Penn Law → Obama campaign → Colorado Secretary of State → AG candidate, it’s easy to wonder if the fellowship was less about dance and more about networking or grooming. Plenty of elite fellowships (Fulbright, Rhodes, etc.) do have intelligence ties for talent spotting. And nobody has ever seen her salsa dance, mor wants to. #copolitics