Yeah this doesn’t look suspicious at all:
Republican Senate candidate Sean Parnell has asked a judge to seal records in his ongoing custody case and to ban his wife and her attorney from talking publicly about past protection-from-abuse orders against him — matters that have stirred political attacks and media scrutiny.
A judge in the case, filed in Butler County, heard arguments on the requests Tuesday morning. Mr. Parnell, asking for a seal on the case for a second time, argued that he was trying to protect his three children from media prying and being exposed to harmful information about their parents’ dispute.
“I signed up to run for office,” he said during the hearing. “My kids did not.”
An attorney for his wife, Laurie Parnell, said the candidate is trying to protect himself and his political ambitions. She noted that in 2019 he sought permission to use the children’s photos on social media, filing a motion that cited a brand strategist’s advice to do so “in order to harness the potential of his customer base, secure new followers,” and improve sales of his books. Mr. Parnell’s campaign website also prominently features photos of him with his children.
“He is once again using the children as an excuse to try to protect his true character and actions from being shown to the public,” his wife’s attorney wrote in a filing.
She added that Mr. Parnell’s campaign has released some court documents to reporters to rebut political attacks about the protective orders. Ms. Parnell opposes the seal and gag order.
The Bulwark noticed a pattern with pro-Trump Marine candidates like Parnell. They sat down with Parnell’s former congressional opponent and potential U.S. Senate opponent, Rep. Conor Lamb (D. PA-17) to address this:
Avery different model of a Marine veteran can be found next door in Pennsylvania, running for the seat being vacated by Sen. Pat Toomey. (Toomey is yet another of the departing Republicans who supported the second Trump impeachment.)
On the Republican side, the leading candidate to replace Toomey is Sean Parnell, a retired Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan and is a darling of Fox News. Parnell hasn’t met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. He has never held elective office: Parnell tried to unseat a first-term incumbent in the House of Representatives in 2020, but lost.
One of the leading candidates on the Democratic side—polling a solid second behind the state’s lieutenant governor—is the guy who beat Parnell last year: Rep. Conor Lamb, a Marine who served as Pittsburgh’s assistant U.S. attorney. At a time when most of the Marines running for Congress are far-right extremists, Lamb is a moderate. You might even say he’s a ghost of the long-dead “Blue Dog” caucus.
I talked to Lamb about his service and how it shaped his time as a member of Congress—and why he wants to be a senator.
To start, I asked why so many Marines on the right, like Miller, Mandel, and Vance, are campaigning like nutjobs, while people like Lamb show that it’s possible to run normal campaigns.
First, I think that just as a general point, the Marine Corps, because it’s known for being so tough, so rigorous, so hard to join successfully, and they seek out the toughest mission and everything, it attracts a lot of extreme personalities. So, if you’re getting a cross section of America, you’ll end up with people with extreme views politically on both sides…
One thing that was to my great shame and anger was how prominent the Marines were on January 6th. Marines were in that crowd wearing the Marine logo while they were attacking the Capitol.
One former Marine I talked to pointed to the “leadership traits” of the Marines: Bearing, Courage, Decisiveness, Dependability, Endurance, Enthusiasm, Initiative, Integrity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Loyalty, Tact, and Unselfishness.
There are also the Marines’ three core values: honor, courage, and commitment. But when you go through the fourteen traits, you wonder how people like Conor Lamb, J.D. Vance, Max Miller, and Josh Mandel served in the same branch of the military. Integrity? Tact? Knowledge? One only need look at Vance’s, Miller’s, and Mandel’s Twitter accounts to know that they fail on a daily basis to exhibit those traits.
Lamb tells me:
The idea is basically the role that the Marines play in the national defense, they use the word “expeditionary.” It’s a very small force. The whole point of it is supposed to be that in an emergency situation and at the start of a conflict, the Marines have everything you need to get there first, fastest, bring the maximum amount of violence on the enemy with the minimal amount of people, while the Army is still packing up their tanks, and the Air Force is still figuring out their bombing, and all that kind of stuff. But the Marines are fast and hard. That means they’re lean and small.
So, the Marine Corps . . . they’re small, they’re selective, very intense mission set. As a result of being people that have to act fast in unforgiving climates, like the water, or invading into a desert situation, whatever, they operate in smaller units.
Why am I saying all this? The point is that they then have to train you to be able to operate on smaller teams, in very, very uncertain environments. The Army has units that they’ll train to fight mountain warfare, and units that they’ll train to fight big, open warfare with tanks or whatever. The Marine Corps, they train you for all of it, and none of it. They teach you to be super flexible and adaptable.
So when it comes to leadership training, everything is about being open-minded and not doctrinaire. Really, really valuing the work of every single person that you serve with, because there’s not that many of you. If you’re given a mission, there might only be 25 of you. You need every single one of those people, and you need them to come back. So, when you’re teaching someone to be a leader that translates as a maximum sense of responsibility, but also a lot of humility. Because I think when people are operating in small groups, if somebody who’s in charge thinks they’re a king or is super power-hungry or whatever, it just doesn’t work.
While it remains to be seen who will emerge from the Democratic Primary, Vanity Fair had a good piece out profiling Lamb and what might make him appealing as a candidate:
Potter County, Pennsylvania, is hostile territory for Democrats. It’s rural, more than 97% white, and Donald Trump cashed in nearly 80% of the vote in 2020. If you need further proof, it can be found on the walls of the Democratic Party headquarters, where a banner reads “Vote Democratic, No One Has to Know.”
It’s a curious place for any Democrat to launch a Senate campaign, but that’s exactly where Conor Lamb, who currently represents a district in the Pittsburgh suburbs, chose to go last month, just days after announcing his bid for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey. Lamb isn’t going to win too many votes in Potter County. He described an enthusiastic crowd at the event, but even in his telling, it numbered only 40 or 50, which to be fair likely represents a healthy share of active Democrats in the area. But his trip there was more than an exercise in voter recruitment. It signals a clear strategic belief for the 2022 midterms: that if Democrats want to prevail in a 50-50 state like Pennsylvania, they’ll have to do more than run up big leads in cities and suburbs, which have recently trended blue. They’ll also have to “lose better,” as one Democratic Party leader put it to me, in places like Potter County.
A key part of Lamb’s appeal, and the overall case moderates are making to primary voters, is that he’ll be able to deflect Republicans’ culture-war attacks—the idea that he’s a handmaiden to AOC and Nancy Pelosi and that he wants to defund the police, popularize critical race theory, and enforce COVID mask mandates. Lamb’s been there before. Sean Parnell, his 2020 congressional opponent who’s now running for the same Senate seat, has attacked Lamb for his relationship with the Bernie Sanders wing. One popular, slightly crazed ad showed Parnell walking a factory floor, holding a stuffed lamb and insulting framed photos of Sanders, Pelosi, and the “socialism squad.”
Parnell’s charges didn’t take root because Lamb has crafted an image that is moderate, bipartisan, and pro-working class. He’s noted that 80% of his House votes have been on bipartisan measures, and his efforts on veterans’ health care have formed the core of his congressional work. He quickly shifted our conversation to what he called the “economic part of our democracy,” i.e. workers’ rights to organize and earn a living wage. When I asked him about the hasty U.S. retreat from Afghanistan and mentioned the C-130 aircraft that had flown out more than 600 Afghan refugees, he jumped in to correct me, proudly noting that it was a C-17 aircraft—the type of plane flown by the air reserve base in his district. And, if we’re being comprehensive about it, it doesn’t hurt that Lamb looks the way many in Pennsylvania think a middle-of-the-road politician should: clean-cut, square-jawed, and white.
By the way, here’s what else Pennsylvania Republicans have been up to:
Days after Pennsylvania Republicans subpoenaed Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration for millions of voters’ personal information, including the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, the head of the Senate GOP acknowledged the request was “intrusive.”
But, Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward said, the subpoena simply demanded the same records the administration had already disclosed to third parties. Not only that, but those outside groups could have compromised the voter rolls, she suggested last month: “We don’t know what information they could add to the system. We don’t know what information they could take from the system.”
It was a striking claim. Trump supporters have been pushing similar claims for months, and the Republican senator leading the party’s new election review has said lawmakers will be “digging into” the issue.
But there’s no evidence to support it. A top Pennsylvania elections official said in sworn testimony earlier this year that outside groups had no such access. House Republicans investigating the matter accepted his explanation.
Rep. Seth Grove (R., York), House Republicans’ point person on elections, said he’s concluded there’s nothing to it: “Just because you read it on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true.”
The statements from Ward and other Republicans — which run contrary to all available evidence — show why experts fear the Pennsylvania Senate’s investigation of the 2020 election won’t improve voter confidence, as its proponents argue, but rather sow doubt and spread more misinformation.
Elections experts and nonpartisan pro-democracy groups have condemned Pennsylvania’s review, which began 10 months after Donald Trump was defeated, as part of a national movement to discredit Joe Biden’s victory. Since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the “stop the steal” movement has focused on efforts by GOP-led legislatures in swing states to conduct what they call “forensic audits” of the election.
“These kinds of audits are not audits … they are partisan efforts to try to delegitimize a past election,” said David Becker, head of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Ward’s office stood by her claims and said the investigation may soon provide proof.
Ward spokesperson Erica Wright said the administration’s “unwillingness to be forthright” and years of “mounting public questioning” of the electoral system “have led us to this point.”
“There is so much more that is being investigated,” she added, “and we look forward to sharing as able.”
Democracy and Health are on the ballot this year (Pennsylvania Supreme Court Elections) and next year and we need to get ready to keep Pennsylvania Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with these Pennsylvania Democrats campaigns and organizations: