Two Wyoming lawmakers say they may take court action if a political action committee does not correct false and misleading mailers the group sent to voters last month.
The Wyoming Freedom political action committee (PAC) last month sent mailers to residents in Riverton and Lander, among other communities, falsely claiming that Republican state Reps. Ember Oakley of Riverton and Lloyd Larsen of Lander had voted to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot.
Two Rock Springs legislators have also launched a defamation lawsuit over the fliers.
Oakley and Larsen sent a cease and desist letter to the PAC on Tuesday, telling it to correct its action and stop disseminating such statements.
“Please be advised that if you refuse to cease making these false statements, continue to send out these mailers and continue to allow your members and surrogates to make these false statements, we will unfortunately be left with no choice but to take all action allowed by law to ensure that your organization ceases in making its malicious and patently false statements that have damaged Mr. Larsen’s and Ms. Oakley’s reputations,” says the letter, signed by attorney Jeff Stanbury on behalf of Oakley and Larsen.
“One of the things I’m trying to get across is how dangerous it is when you’re saying that I hold the opposite values and stances of those that I do, and that I vote for,” Oakley told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday. “Because then the people who would want me to represent them … are tricked into thinking I don’t.”
On the other hand, the false or misleading claims can trick people who wouldn’t want her as their representative into voting for her, she said.
The Wyoming Freedom PAC is the campaign arm of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. Its Chair Kari Drost did not immediately respond Friday to a Cowboy State Daily voicemail request for comment.
Larsen and Oakley’s respective opponents also did not respond to Thursday requests for comment; however, the fliers do not name any affiliation with the incumbents’ opponents.
One of the fliers’ claims is false. The others may be misleading.
What About Trump?
The claim that certain House members voted to keep Trump off the ballot is false. The Wyoming Legislature this year did not contemplate any bill or budget provision featuring wording about keeping Trump off the ballot.
Several House representatives, including Larsen and Oakley, voted to keep a budget footnote that would have made the Wyoming secretary of state get legislative approval before waging out-of-state lawsuits with public money, unless Wyoming or the secretary were already named in those lawsuits.
The footnote, which did not pass the entire Legislature, surfaced after Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray filed an amicus brief in a Colorado lawsuit to fight plaintiffs trying to keep Trump off the Colorado ballot.
But the footnote itself had commonsense policy reasons that have nothing to do with Trump, Stanbury’s letter says. It lists the need to keep state elected officials from squaring off in competing lawsuits on Wyoming’s behalf or wasting taxpayers’ money.
“The amendment in no way would’ve restricted the state of Wyoming from attempting to keep President Trump on the ballot,” wrote Stanbury. “It simply affirmed the vesting of (the litigation) power in the governor.”
The letter asserts that the PAC knew the lawmakers’ votes to keep the footnote weren’t attacks on Trump by citing arguments that were in play at the time about the need for Wyoming to speak “with one voice.”
Breaking Down These Other Claims
The mailers claim Larsen and Oakley voted “no” to capping property tax increases at 4%.
Larsen and Oakley co-sponsored a bill that was originally designed to cap property tax increases at 5%. They voted to keep that figure at 5% rather than 4% early in the bill’s process, said Larsen.
The bill cleared the state House of Representatives with the 5% cap in place, but when the Senate slashed it to 3%, the House, including Oakley and Larsen, voted in favor of a compromise at 4%.
“I was always for (capping property tax increases),” Oakley told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday interview. “I was always a cosponsor. I consider it one of my bills.”
Illegal Aliens And Driver’s Licenses
The mailers say Oakley and Larsen voted to stop illegal aliens from using specially-issued, out-of-state driver’s licenses as identification.
Rather, the pair voted to keep that bill in the Corporations Committee as assigned by the House Speaker when some representatives opened a vote to move it to another committee, Larsen said.
“There never was a vote on the bill (itself),” he said.
Larson pointed to the high number of bills in the short budget session, a concept Stanbury’s letter echoes, saying the lawmakers voted against letting the bill “leapfrog other legislation vital to the state of Wyoming.”
The bill’s sponsor, Cheyenne Republican Sen. Anthony Bouchard, disagreed, saying a procedural vote that could inhibit a bill’s passage is a vote against its intention as well.
“Any vote (against moving) it out of committee, those are … actions to kill legislation,” Bouchard told Cowboy State Daily. “They should be called out for it, because they’re voting like Democrats instead of Republicans.”
Bouchard said there should be more mailers listing people’s votes, but he declined to opine publicly about the other claims in the mailers.
Foreign Land Ownership
The mailers claim Oakley and Larsen voted “NO — to STOP Chinese Communists from owning land in Wyoming.”
Both Oakley and Larsen voted in favor of Senate File 77, which allows state law enforcement to investigate purchases in critical infrastructure zones, and requires county clerks to report the purchase of land on or near critical infrastructure zones to federal and state law enforcement agencies.
The fliers’ qualm, however, is with the two delegates’ votes to keep a different bill addressing land infrastructural security in the House Appropriations Committee, where it died.
Had it passed, Senate File 102 would have barred citizens of foreign governments adversarial to the United States from buying Wyoming land near critical infrastructures.
It would have given a “prohibited foreign party” four months to sell his land once notified by the Wyoming office of Homeland Security that he’d violated the law. And if the landowner failed to sell off the land, the bill would have required the Wyoming attorney general to push for its seizure in court, then would have let the state auction it off.
Larsen said he worried this would violate the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bars the government from taking things for public use without reimbursing the owner of those things. He also worried the bill could frighten Turkish investors from continuing to invest in Wyoming’s trona industry, and could make Wyoming look unstable to other potential investors, he said.
“That bill, in its effort to address something we all have a concern about, wasn’t structured really well,” said Larsen. He said the Appropriations Committee has arranged a working group to come back with a “bill that works.”
Sen. Cheri Steinmetz, R-Lingle, said her bill was modeled after an Arkansas bill that is now being implemented, and she does not believe the takings clause would apply when dealing with a foreign adversary or enemy, like China: “a foreign country that wants to destroy us.”
“That is not the purpose of our constitution,” she continued. She said she also ran a bill concurrently that would have allowed the citizens of Wyoming to vote on a constitutional amendment to prohibit the nation’s enemies from owning property in Wyoming, and that bill also was killed by the house appropriations committee.
“I am still shocked that such important bills did not make it through the Legislature,” she said. “I believe the citizens of Wyoming want us to take action on this critical issue of national security.”
Protecting critical infrastructure from Chinese buy-ups “is not optional,” she said.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
