A Wyoming state senator has retracted a statement he made last week, accusing the national Freedom Caucus network of hinging campaign donations to its local members based on their voting records.
Sen. Ed Cooper, R-Ten Sleep, told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday that he has retracted the statement, which the Greybull Standard quoted in a Jan. 29 story about a county commission meeting.
Cooper’s original statement was:
“The state’s Freedom Caucus (FC) in D.C. has pledged $30,000 to each house race in Wyoming. The … members are judged on how they vote on each of their agendas and the email that they get every day. The more you are in line with the voting the better your campaign donation is. I’ll just leave it there. No matter what they think, that is what they are told to do.”
“I sent a letter to the editor of the Basin paper over the weekend, stating that I spoke incorrectly on that because I can’t substantiate it,” said Cooper in a Thursday interview.
Though he believes he spoke “incorrectly” because he wasn’t able to verify the information, Cooper did not go so far as to call the claim incorrect.
“It’s one of those deals that I made a mistake there, and I’ll own my mistake,” he added.
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which is a chapter of the State Freedom Caucus Network, has around 25 confirmed members in the state House of Representatives, though its full membership is unknown.
Proponents of the Republican-membership coalition say it’s the voice of the true political right in Wyoming.
Detractors of it say it produces sloppy legislation and promotes groupthink.
It has pushed for socially-conservative legislation like keeping biological males out of girls’ school sports, and has pushed for fiscal maneuvers like cutting property taxes.
‘Fair Enough, But …’
Andy Roth, president of the State Freedom Caucus Network, told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday that he’d “like to hear where Cooper heard that.”
“It’s completely false and he’s either lying or spreading a rumor that he heard somewhere else and treating it as a fact when it’s not,” said Roth.
Upon learning of Cooper's retraction, Roth added, “Fair enough, but it was sloppy on his part to spread the idea in the first place.”
The Messages
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus in 2023 delivered daily text messages and other communications telling legislators its stance on bills in that session, Cowboy State Daily reported prior.
A lawmaker who was a member at the time but has since left the caucus, Rep. Daniel Singh, R-Cheyenne, said at the time that the messages originated from the national State Freedom Caucus Network.
Yet Singh upon leaving the caucus said it never told him how to vote, but urged him to pray about issues and learn about them.
Roth in his Thursday interview compared the messages to stance indicators from other policy-oriented groups.
“Gun groups support and oppose legislation and let the lawmakers know about it,” said Roth. “Life groups do the same. Local county associations do the same.”
Roth said the network dispatches recommendations reflecting “how we feel about various bills.”
“For them to say that we’re doing something nefarious or — the D.C. overlords or whatever they call us — we’re no different from those other groups that do the same thing," he said.
Roth said the national network has given money in the past to the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’ campaign arm, but not to individual Wyoming Freedom Caucus candidates.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
