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Top Comments: Defamation Lawsuit Reveals New Trump Crimes [1]
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Date: 2023-06-18
We have lived in California for almost two years now, but I’m still on the lookout for interesting news from Northwestern Pennsylvania, where we lived for 20 years. Recently, a story dropped that has attracted national attention. Dan Laughlin, a Pennsylvania State Senator who represents a portion of Erie County, is suing a local newspaper for defamation, and discovery has unearthed some interesting facts.
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Here’s a little background on Dan Laughlin. He was first elected to the PA Senate in 2016—a bad year for Democrats in Pennsylvania generally, and in Erie in particular. In his campaign that year, his sole promise was to permit hunting on Sundays during deer season, and it appeared he hadn’t thought much beyond achieving that goal. Members of the Erie County Democratic Party assured me that Laughlin was not the sharpest tool in the shed. However, deer hunting is big in Pennsylvania, and Laughlin’s opponent, incumbent Sean Wiley, was strangely keeping a low profile. Laughlin won in 2016 and was reelected in 2020.
In July of 2022, when the Congressional Commission on the January 6, 2021, attack on the U. S. Capitol, was conducting its public hearings, Jim Wertz, the chair of the Erie County Democratic Party wrote an column for Erie’s free Newspaper, the Erie Reader, in which he claimed that Laughlin and Mike Kelly, who, as the congressman elected from PA-16, (mis)represents the region, requested general pardons in the waning days of the Trump administration, for their actions in attempting to overturn the result of the presidential election. Kelly’s actions have been widely reported (his office acted as a conduit in the attempt to deliver Wisconsin’s fake electoral votes to Mike Pence on Jan. 6, among many other actions), but I didn’t know that Laughlin was culpable. If you recall, there was a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who sought to reverse the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Pennsylvania senate, led by Doug Mastriano (majority leader in the PA senate, and 2022 GOP nominee for governor), filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court.
The Republican senators’ brief reads, in part, "Certain select Pennsylvania State Senators bring this brief as Amici Curiae in support of their authority as a legislative body under the U.S. Constitution...The General Assembly, as the legislature of Pennsylvania, is given authority to prescribe the 'Times, Places, and Manner of holding elections' under Article I, § 4, cl. 1 of the U.S. Constitution." ... Basically, what these senators argue is that the General Assembly has all the power. Like the Kelly brief, these senators assert that neither the courts nor the Pennsylvania Secretary of State – whose job it is to administer elections in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – have the authority to administer or to ensure the integrity of Pennsylvania's elections.
Then,
In the fourth January 6 hearing on June 21, the committee introduced an email from Alabama congressman Mo Brooks to Trump's executive assistant at the White House, Molly Michael, requesting a "general pardon" for "Every Republican who signed the Amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit against the other states deriving from their violation of Article I, Section 4 (and, perhaps, other) provision of the United States Constitution" and "Every Congressman and Senator who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania." The email is dated January 11, 2021, just five days after the January 6 insurrection.
Laughlin filed a defamation lawsuit against the Erie Reader. I think I understand why. Laughlin himself never asked for a pardon, nor would Mo Brooks have had him specifically in mind when he requested a blanket pardon for members of state legislatures who provided support to the insurrection. Further, it seems doubtful to me that the DoJ would pursue a state legislator for simply signing on to a amicus brief. (Mike Kelly is another story. I have no doubt that if the DoJ goes after members of Congress who supported the insurrection, Kelly will be among the first indicted.)
In the process of discovery for this lawsuit, new information of how Pennsylvania state legislators were pressured to overturn the election result in favor of Trump. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the newly revealed e-mails:
[P]reviously unreported communications obtained by The Inquirer show that, two days after Bobb’s email, Trump himself called Mastriano — this time peddling lies about Dominion voting machines. “POTUS just called me,” Mastriano wrote in a Dec. 14, 2020, email with the subject line “Document from POTUS.” “He asked that I share the attached with you.” Mastriano was happy to oblige. He sent the email to an unidentified group of recipients, with findings from a debunked “study” of voting machines in Michigan, including a false claim that there was a “68% error rate in votes cast.”
The e-mails also provided a view of internal squabbles within the PA state GOP regarding their response to these attempts to reverse the election. It’s a very ugly picture, one that Jack Smith might find interesting.
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