President Donald Trump’s popularity in Wyoming could be on trial in a high-profile political lawsuit this year.
State Reps. Cody Wylie and JT Larson, both Republicans from Rock Springs, sued the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’ campaign arm for defamation in 2024 after the political action committee had mailers distributed claiming the pair had voted against keeping Trump on the ballot.
The PAC also sent out a text-message blast claiming Larson had “voted with the radical left” to remove Trump from the ballot.
No vote about Trump’s ballot eligibility had surfaced in the Wyoming Legislature.
Rather, Wylie and Larson voted in favor of keeping a budget amendment that sought to bar the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office from spending Wyoming taxpayer dollars on out-of-state lawsuits where Wyoming wasn’t a party.
Secretary of State Chuck Gray had, earlier that winter, filed amicus briefs backing Trump’s position in a case in which Colorado-based Republicans challenged whether Trump was qualified to be on the Colorado ballot.
When some of the Wyoming House of Representatives’ budget-planning members announced the proposed budget provision to block Gray’s spending of Wyoming public dollars on such efforts, they said it was over constitutional and Wyoming-first policy concerns.
Wylie and Larson voted to keep the amendment.
But it didn’t survive the full budget process.
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately sided with Trump, after receiving 76 amicus briefs in that case, including one from Gray.
The PAC, which is called WY Freedom PAC, earlier this month asked the Sweetwater County District Court to dismiss Wylie and Larson’s defamation case against it by judging it early in their favor.
The PAC said the lawmakers’ evidence falls short of the bar to prove defamation. It claimed the lawmakers’ witnesses to the scorn they allegedly endured were “recruited;” and the lawmakers struggle to show they suffered real harm.
Wylie and Larson filed a counter-motion March 23 through their attorney Clark Stith, urging the court to keep the case alive and send it to a jury.
The motion says Wylie has spent $12,936.50 trying to restore his reputation and Larson has spent $14,696.03.
Trump’s popularity is a gamechanger in Wyoming, this motion asserts.
“Trump is exceedingly popular among Republicans in Wyoming House District 17, Wyoming House District 39, and Wyoming generally,” wrote Stith in the motion. Trump is so popular, he added, that “that whether one supports Trump has become a proxy for whether a person is a true Republican.”
That popularity spiked after a person tried in July 2024 to assassinate Trump. And it manifested itself when now-U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman defeated incumbent Rep. Liz Cheney for the GOP nomination in the congressional House seat in the 2022 primary election, wrote Stith.
Hageman easily defeated Cheney statewide 66% to 29% and by an even larger margin in Sweetwater County of 69% to 22%, the motion says.
“The defining feature of that 2022 Republican primary campaign was Hageman’s support for Trump, contrasted with Cheney’s opposition to Trump,” Stith added.
If a Wyoming Republican legislator had voted to remove Trump from the ballot or voted against keeping Trump on the ballot the Republicans of Wylie and Larson’s districts would view him negatively, “generally,” wrote Stith. And that person would be held up to public hatred, contempt, ridicule or scorn, or face shunning or avoidance, and would suffer an injury to their reputations that would diminish their status among others, asserted Stith, echoing a legal definition of defamation.
Evidence
The WY Freedom PAC’s attorneys Mark Jackowski of Wilson, Wyoming, and Stephen Klein of Washington, D.C., pointed in their motion for an early and favorable judgment to the evidence of the case; especially exchanges between WY Freedom PAC executive director Kari Drost, then-caucus chair Rep. John Bear, R-Gillette, and others.
Jackowski and Klein’s motion says these communications show that Bear and Drost believed the publications they were forming: that a vote to bar Gray from using public money on out-of-state lawsuits amounts to a vote to keep Trump off the ballot.
That was a nod to the legal tenet that public figures have a harder time suing others for defamation, since public figures have to show that the people who defamed them either knew they were lying or acted with a reckless disregard for the truth.
For example, Bear defended the act in a text-message exchange with then-podcaster Joey Correnti, saying the text-message blast was “not a twist. The insiders were pushed until they admitted on the floor that the footnote was drafted because (the appropriators who formed the footnote) didn't like Chuck's behavior.”
The WY Freedom PAC submitted that text exchange to the court as evidence backing its position.
Stith drew the opposite conclusion from the evidence.
He pointed to a message in which Bear had asked the Freedom Caucus’ Wyoming director Jessie Rubino to make a spreadsheet of “every RINO who voted against our budget amendment to reinstate Chucks’ ability to bring suit” and that that needed to be labeled “voted against keeping Trump on the ballot” or something similar.
Stith asserted, “Mr. Bear acknowledged in the first sentence that the vote at issue was not a vote to keep Trump on the ballot, but rather a vote about Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray’s ‘ability to bring suit.’”
Stith also drew from a deposition in which he’d questioned Bear about an early edit Bear made while planning the publications.
Bear had asked a person, “Can we change the ‘voted to keep Trump off the ballot’ to the line we used in the mailer? ‘Stood with the radical left to remove Trump from the ballot.’”
Stith asked Bear during the latter’s deposition, “Would you agree with me the phrase you’re suggesting, ‘stood with the radical left to remove Trump from the ballot’ is more figurative than the phrase voted to remove from the ballot?”
“Yes I think that’s a — characterization that’s accurate,” Bear had answered, according to a portion of Stith’s motion that cites that deposition transcript.
“And are you making this suggested change because you’re concerned that the phrase ‘Voted to keep Trump off the ballot’ is just not true?” asked Stith, reportedly.
“Yeah,” answered Bear.
Bear told Cowboy State Daily that Stith's rendering of his deposition transcript is inaccurate, and he still maintains that the vote pertained to Trump's ballot status.
"I still will attest that both of those guys voted, and that amendment was to keep Trump off the ballot in other states," Bear said Monday. "If you can’t sue to keep him on the ballot, that's keeping him off the ballot. And eventually that leads to our votes not counting."
Bear disagreed with Cowboy State Daily and other media outlets reporting - for nearly two years - that the mailers contained false claims.
"I would never have put it on the mailer if it was false," he added.
Stith cites portions of the depositions of two Rock Springs residents, one in Wylie’s district and one in Larson’s, who each said they thought less of their representative after the attack ads reached them.
Wylie and Larson both won the GOP bid in the primary election; a point the WY Freedom PAC had emphasized in its own motion.
Lawmaker, Lawyer, Judge
Stith was closely acquainted with the case even before he filed it: as a House representative he was on the House Appropriations Committee that brought the controversial budget amendment in 2024.
He lost his reelection bid that year but continued waging this and later another high-profile political case, which are both ongoing.
He’s also set to become a judge in the court that has most recently overseen this case.
But on March 24, Stith’s predecessor and current Sweetwater County District Court Judge Richard Lavery transferred the case to Uinta County District Court Judge James Kaste.
Stith, meanwhile, told Cowboy State Daily that he may have found an attorney to take over Wylie and Larson’s case when he takes the bench, but it’s “not official yet” so he wouldn’t name that person Monday.
Now it falls to Kaste, to decide whether this case should end early or go to trial.
This story has been updated to include a post-publication comment by Rep. John Bear.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
