by Maggie Mullen, WyoFile
The political action committee affiliated with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus asked a Sweetwater County judge on Friday to dismiss a defamation case filed against the PAC this summer.
Rock Springs Reps. J.T. Larson and Cody Wylie filed the complaint in July after the PAC sent text messages and mailers to voters equating a vote on a 2024 budget amendment to the two lawmakers voting to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot.
Larson and Wylie allege that the PAC knew its statements were false — the Legislature has never held a vote to remove Trump from the ballot — and therefore made them with actual malice, a legal standard in defamation cases. Earlier this month, the two legislators filed an amended complaint to account for additional mailers sent after their initial lawsuit and to try to strengthen their legal argument. Both Larson and Wylie won their reelection bids against Freedom Caucus-backed opponents in the primary, but the suit alleges the statements caused harm to their reputations and one of their private businesses.
But the lawsuit fails to state a claim and the allegations do not constitute defamation, according to the PAC’s motion to dismiss filed on Friday. Instead, the motion argues, Larson and Wylie are “seeking to punish and censor criticism of their records as legislators and to profit from their public service.”
The lawsuit “neglects to include important context for the speech at issue,” the PAC’s motion argues, adding that statements made to voters “were made in the course of political campaigning, where imaginative expressions and hyperbole are at their zenith.”
The PAC is represented by Teton County’s Mark Jackowski and Washington D.C.-based attorney Stephen Klein — the latter of whom has litigated other high-profile cases related to Wyoming elections, including one recently heard in federal court, according to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.
In their amended complaint, Larson and Wylie contend the PAC’s statements were especially damaging in a conservative state like Wyoming, where “support for Trump is so strong … that whether one supports Trump has become a proxy for whether a person is a true Republican.”
The PAC argues otherwise.
“At their worst, a reasonable person would take WY Freedom PAC’s statements as a prompt to investigate the legislative records of the plaintiffs, and there is nothing bad about that — to the contrary, it’s the very stuff of American democracy.”
How we got here
During the 2024 budget session, lawmakers clashed over which elected officials should have the authority to represent the state’s interest in litigation. That debate came after Secretary of State Chuck Gray joined Ohio and Missouri’s Republican secretaries of state in filing an amicus brief that advocated for overturning a Colorado court’s decision to remove Trump from that state’s ballot because of his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
The Joint Appropriations Committee responded by adding a footnote to the budget limiting the secretary of state’s ability to sue on Wyoming’s behalf.
Some lawmakers, including Rep. Clark Stith (R-Rock Springs), who is now counsel for Larson and Wylie in the case, argued on the House floor that the footnote was about separation of powers. More specifically, the footnote ensured the state’s chief executive — the governor — remained the one office with the authority to speak on behalf of Wyoming in a courtroom, Stith and others maintained.
Defending the mailers
While Larson and Wylie stand by this and argue in the amended complaint that voting on such a footnote “was not a vote to remove Trump’s name from the ballot,” the PAC says otherwise.
“The plaintiffs are welcome to this opinion, but it is hardly one with which disagreement makes for material falsity,” the motion states.
“It is far from false to claim that these votes were, in effect, votes to keep Trump off the ballot. If falsity could even be proven — and it cannot — in this context the claim will fall far short of the threshold of actual malice, for the PAC is entitled to its position in a political disagreement.”
Even if the statements at issue were false, the PAC argues, and “were made to ‘registered Republicans’ and ‘for the purpose of influencing the outcome of the primary election,’ a claim that one voted in favor of excluding Trump from the presidential ballot is not capable of a defamatory meaning.”
While the motion asks the court to dismiss the case, the PAC makes an alternative suggestion that the court resolve the case without a full trial. The plaintiffs, who previously requested a jury trial, now have the opportunity to respond.
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
