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About a year ago, The Erie Reader, a free alternative newspaper in northwestern Pennsylvania, published this opinion piece from Jim Wertz, the chair of the local Democratic Party. The point of the column was unsubtle: Wertz slammed two local Republican lawmakers — U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly and state Sen. Dan Laughlin — over their efforts to contest the 2020 election results.
The GOP officials were not pleased, but the Erie Reader and the author of the piece didn’t much care, and they ignored the Republicans’ calls for a retraction and an apology. The state senator then filed a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper and Wertz.
On the surface, this might not seem especially notable. In fact, disputes like these are not uncommon. What makes this story interesting, however, is some of what we’ve learned as a result of the case.
A month after Donald Trump’s defeat, the outgoing president and his political operation focused on a handful of key battleground states, with the hopes of overturning the will of the voters. Among the targets, of course, was Pennsylvania.
At the time, right-wing state Sen. Doug Mastriano wasn’t convinced such efforts were legal, so Team Trump gave him the hard sell. Christina Bobb — at the time, on air-personality at a conservative media outlet, before she formally joined Trump’s legal team — emailed the outgoing president’s advisers, urging them to have Rudy Giuliani pressure Mastriano.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported this morning on previously unknown details about what happened next.
[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.”
There was no 68% error rate, but Trump sent his Pennsylvania ally false and conspiratorial information — after calling Mastriano directly — as part of the broader anti-election scheme.
The same scheme included another Trump/Mastriano phone call in which, according to the state senator, the then-president wanted GOP state lawmakers to send a letter to congressional GOP leaders, claiming in-state voting “irregularities” that could be used as part of an election challenge.
These details came to light thanks to the discovery process from a Republican defamation case.
What’s more, it’s not just the former president who looks worse as a result of the revelations. From the Inquirer’s article:
In addition to a couple of Mastriano emails referencing his conversations with Trump, other emails point to disagreements within the GOP about challenging the results of the election. For instance, Laughlin privately scoffed at a lawsuit filed by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, one of Trump’s top supporters, seeking to disenfranchise about 2.6 million voters by throwing out every mail-in ballot in Pennsylvania.
“We’re not saying a word on this crap,” Laughlin wrote from his cellphone on Dec. 8, 2020. “Mike Kelly is hurting our party right now.”