‘POTUS just called me’: Pa. GOP emails shed new light on 2020 election upheaval

In mid-December 2020, even Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano apparently had some doubts about the latest plan hatched by Donald Trump’s inner circle to select fake Electoral College electors in an attempt to reverse the results of the presidential election.

The right-wing senator had heard from other Republicans that the scheme might be “illegal,” in the words of lawyer Christina Bobb, then a One America News anchor who later joined Trump’s legal team.

“Mastriano needs a call from the mayor. This needs to be done. Talk to him about legalities of what they are doing,” Bobb wrote on Dec. 12, 2020, to Trump advisers, referring to Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. That email and others from Trump’s team were reported last summer by the New York Times.

But previously 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.”

“A Cover-up is Happening regarding the voting machines in Michigan,” reads one of the talking points Mastriano forwarded.

That same day, Mastriano posted on Facebook a link to a conservative news site with a headline about how Dominion software was “intentionally designed to influence election results.”

“Uh oh,” Mastriano wrote.

Those claims, of course, were not true. In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation case stemming from false claims it had aired about the company’s voting machines.

That Trump had been in contact with Mastriano and other Pennsylvania legislative leaders in December 2020 has previously been reported in the media, and documented by the House Jan. 6 committee that investigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But the new emails reveal additional details about Trump’s pressure campaign in Pennsylvania and provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how it was received in Harrisburg. Election-related conspiracy theories and bad legal advice percolated quickly through the legislature.

Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and Miami, remains the focus of criminal investigations in Washington, D.C., and Georgia for his efforts to cling to power after losing the election.

Emails among Pennsylvania state representatives and senators are generally not considered public record under the state’s Right-to-Know law. These communications recently surfaced as a result of a defamation lawsuit that State Sen. Dan Laughlin filed last year against the Erie Reader and one of its contributing editors over an opinion piece.

By suing the weekly newspaper, Laughlin, an Erie County Republican, opened the door to legal discovery — and depositions — that unearthed otherwise confidential communications.

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 iPhone on Dec. 8, 2020. “Mike Kelly is hurting our party right now.”

Kelly’s legal challenge was unanimously rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court later unanimously declined to hear the case on appeal.

Laughlin’s email made for an awkward moment last month in Pittsburgh, when Kelly was deposed by a lawyer representing the Erie Reader, according to a deposition transcript reviewed by The Inquirer.

“Do you know what he means when he says ‘this crap’?” the lawyer asked Kelly, who responded: “No, I don’t … Nobody’s ever said this to me in person. I don’t know. I’ve never seen this e-mail before right now.”

Kelly, who said he has a cordial relationship with Laughlin and has campaigned with him, raised doubts about whether Laughlin had actually written the emails.

“I know what’s written here, but I don’t know that this is — he’s never said this to me directly,” Kelly said, according to the transcript.

House Republicans in Harrisburg — including those who in December 2020 signed a letter asking Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to reject the state’s electors — were noticeably silent about Trump this week. They did not want to discuss his arraignment in Miami on federal charges, which included concealing classified documents, obstruction, making false statements, and related counts.

The state Senate does not return to session until next week. Laughlin and Mastriano did not respond to requests for comment.

» READ MORE: Pa. Republicans don’t want to talk about Trump. It was business as usual in Harrisburg as he was arraigned on federal charges in Florida.

In a Facebook post last month, Laughlin bristled at having to sit through a deposition of his son in the defamation case he brought. “This is about as low as you can go,” he wrote.

Laughlin has argued that while he did sign a friend-of-the-court brief in a Texas lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 election, he did not support claims of election fraud or attempts to overturn the results. The newly disclosed emails show that he signed the brief against the advice of a political adviser, who told him: “It is a court filing. Don’t put your name on it.”

Paula Knudsen Burke, the attorney representing the Erie Reader and Erie County Democratic Party chairman Jim Wertz, the contributing editor who wrote the column, declined to comment on Laughlin’s lawsuit. (Burke, of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has represented The Inquirer in public records matters.)

The new emails also include a sampling of the backlash Laughlin received from constituents for supporting the Texas lawsuit.

“You should be ashamed,” one man wrote. “Think about what you did. You are clearly a sad Trump suck up as well as an idiot.”

As for Mastriano, the emails include his recap of another Trump phone conversation, on Dec. 30, 2020. After the call, Mastriano told his colleagues that Trump had asked them to send a letter to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) that “highlights the litany of voting irregularities” in the November election.

Mastriano, who was asking other lawmakers to sign the letter, sent the email to an executive secretary who forwarded it to all Republican senators and their chiefs of staff. He included a draft of the letter, which included baseless claims of “extensive potential fraud.” It sought to delay the certification of the election on Jan. 6, 2021.

Last year, Mastriano secured the Republican nomination for governor, relying on a statewide following he’d built through election denialism and opposition to coronavirus mandates. But the retired Army colonel followed it up with a quixotic general election campaign that at one point had him campaigning with a right-wing evangelist who believed COVID-19 vaccines were used for “surveillance under the skin.”

Trump flew to Pennsylvania twice and stumped for Mastriano, but it didn’t help. He lost in a landslide to Democrat Josh Shapiro.

Votebeat Pennsylvania reporter Carter Walker and staff writer Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this article.