Hey, you remember when this happened, right?
Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has appointed Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who worked to overturn the 2020 election, as a senior legal adviser, his campaign announced on Monday.
Ms. Ellis campaigned vigorously during the primary for Mr. Mastriano, who played a key role in efforts in Pennsylvania to subvert the state’s 2020 results in favor of former President Donald J. Trump.
That was June 13, 2022.
Well, things have just gotten a little more complicated in the Mastriano campaign.
As part of an ongoing investigation into Donald Trump’s potential criminal interference in the 2020 presidential election, several of the former president’s closest advisers — including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — are being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Georgia’s Fulton County, according to court filings obtained by The Washington Post.
The subpoenas, which were approved July 5 by the judge presiding over the grand jury, summon senior members of Trump’s legal team, including Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Cleta Mitchell, all of whom are believed to have knowledge of Trump’s attempts to tamper with the election process in battleground states such as Georgia, according to the documents. The conservative pundit Jacki Pick Deason was also subpoenaed. [Emphasis added.]
You can read the subpoena here. It starts on page 21.
She'll now have to testify under oath about Trump's attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia. Does she throw Trump under the bus? Does she commit perjury? Does she cooperate? None of the above? All of the above?
Who knows?
What's certain is that her connections to Mastriano just got very complicated.
Then there's this from the AP:
Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, has made a campaign staple out of the allegation that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s policy of readmitting COVID-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes caused thousands of deaths — a baseless claim for which no investigator or researcher has provided any evidence. [Emphasis added.]Some facts:
The virus was largely introduced by asymptomatic workers in areas where the virus was heavily transmitted, researchers say.
“Our research has been pretty definitive that the most important factor in determining whether there’s an outbreak in the building is community prevalence, by far,” said Vincent Mor, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University. “Nothing else comes close.”
But this has been known for some time as seen by this Opinion piece from two years ago by professors Mor, Konetska and Grabowski:
When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its early summary of federal data on the novel coronavirus in nursing homes, the agency tried to convince the public that there was some light in the thicket of dark numbers. Yes, CMS acknowledged, the numbers of cases and deaths were grim. But, the agency suggested, an early analysis of the data showed that better nursing homes were less likely to be touched by the pandemic.
This is not true. All three of our research teams independently analyzed what determines whether a nursing home will see a coronavirus outbreak. And all of us found that what matters most is the community where the nursing home is located. No care facility, no matter how excellent, can keep covid-19 away if it’s widespread in the areas where staff members live and work. To protect our most vulnerable citizens, we have to protect everyone.
Notably:
Location matters because the coronavirus that causes covid-19 often spreads without causing symptoms. Visitors have not been allowed in most facilities since March, but staff members still go to work. If a covid-19 outbreak is underway in the community where staff members live, the pandemic will soon be in the nursing home where they work.
And finally:
It is also not true, as some Republican lawmakers suggested at a recent House briefing, that policies such as New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s since-rescinded mandate that nursing homes accept recovering covid-19 patients are largely to blame for coronavirus deaths in these facilities. Several states, including Massachusetts, never required nursing homes to admit covid-19 patients upon their release from the hospital and still experienced significant outbreaks in these facilities.So the next time PA State Senator (and now GOP candidate for PA Gov) makes any such statement, we can tell him to his face that it's a lie.
