Republicans rip Dem senator over family’s tie to attorney involved in Pennsylvania election law change
Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s family link to an attorney involved in key Pennsylvania election law changes is drawing scrutiny from Republican campaign operatives looking to knock off the incumbent in the critical swing state.
An attorney at the same Harrisburg firm as Casey’s brother-in-law Patrick Brier worked as chief counsel to Pennsylvania’s Department of State in 2020 — and was tapped to draft election procedures in red-leaning Luzerne County for 2024.
Myers, Brier and Kelly counsel Timothy Gates was tasked with hashing out election procedures after several Luzerne voting locations ran out of paper during the 2022 midterms.
The fiasco kept polls open two hours past the regular closing time, prevented some would-be voters from casting ballots and led to a bipartisan investigation by a US House committee last year, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
Gates told The Post that Myers, Brier and Kelly do not discuss the legal services it provides to clients and that Brier, whose practice areas include health care, energy and voting rights, was not involved in representing Luzerne County.
Former President Donald Trump won Luzerne County in 2016 and 2020 by double-digit margins.
Ahead of the 2020 election, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar unilaterally made changes to election law in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — and was later hit with lawsuits by Trump’s campaign and others.
Those changes included accepting ballots without verifying voter signatures and pushing the deadline for mail-in ballots without postmarks to three days after Election Day.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court upheld the state’s election law changes at the time, though some have since been overturned on appeal.
“Bob Casey’s close personal relationship with the law firm that has been instrumental in rewriting the rules of Pennsylvania’s elections raises serious questions,” National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Philip Letsou told The Post.
“To ensure Pennsylvanians can remain confident in the integrity of their elections, Casey must call for any of his family members involved in litigation related to the 2024 elections to immediately recuse themselves,” he added.
A spokeswoman for Casey’s campaign declined to comment.
Casey is currently leading Republican Dave McCormick in the RealClearPolitics polling average by 4.8 percentage points, with the latest survey from the New York Times showing him with just a 2-point cushion.
On Wednesday, Casey made a rare public appearance beside President Biden ahead of a campaign event in Philadelphia.
Trump is ahead of Biden in the Keystone State by 2.3 percentage points in the RCP average.
Brier’s legal work has intersected with Casey’s public service before.
The senator visited his hometown of Scranton last year to tout $200,000 in grant funding for the nonprofit Maternal Family Health Services, for which Brier began lobbying at the state-level in December 2021, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit outlet Broad and Liberty reported.
In 2022, Brier also lobbied at the state-level for a Medicaid-managed health care company months before the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was going to release a scathing report on the organization’s efforts to boost profits by denying treatment and benefits, according to the same outlet.
Casey had pushed for the audit in a 2019 letter to HHS’ inspector general following investigative reports on the scandal by the Dallas Morning News.
More than two decades ago, Brier helped Luzerne County settle a case involving “$2.03 million in Medicare overcharges to the federal government and unspecified Medicaid undercharges to the state government” at Valley Crest nursing home, the Wilkes Barre Times-Leader reported.
A county official in 2002 remarked to the outlet that Brier should not have gotten involved “because he’s too connected” — and suggested the hiring of his firm shielded the county’s Democratic commissioners from state scrutiny.
At the time, Casey was making an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and boasted during the primary campaign of having “uncovered a crisis in our state’s nursing homes” during his stint as the state’s auditor general beginning in 1997.
But despite probing at least 25 nursing homes, Casey uncovered no billing issues in Luzerne County’s Valley Crest, which had been included in his statewide audit.
Casey told the Wilkes Barre Times-Leader that he disclosed Brier’s legal work as an “affiliation [that] could reasonably be perceived to constitute a conflict of interest” on his state “code of conduct” statements between 1996 and 2000.
He also said that he and his brother-in-law had not talked “about Valley Crest or about state work.”
