Phelan Rips Deep Fake Photo with Pelosi
and Ties Covey to Abbott Donor and Beto
Capitol Inside
April 27, 2024
Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan took a shot at Governor Greg Abbott's all-time largest contributor on Friday night when he branded primary runoff foe David Covey as a lying coward in response to a campaign mailer that shows the incumbent Republican hugging former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Phelan stopped short of identifying individual Covey donors by name in a post on X. But the Texas speaker portrayed the challenger as a pawn for TikTok in a reference to Jeff Yass - a Pennsylvania resident who's the leading investor in the controversial social media company that's under fire in Congress.
The Texas speaker contended that use of deep fake photos was the latest example of his opponent's penchant for prevarication to mask his own inexperience, ineptitude and cowardice as a candidate in House District 21.
"Why is Covey lying all the time? Because he is trying to cover up the fact that his own campaign is funded by TikTok billionaires and Beto O'Rourke donors," Phelan wrote last night in the social media post. "In fact, Covey is planning to hide behind his liberal-funded attack machine the entire campaign. That's why Covey refuses to face me in a one-on-one debate, man-to-man. David Covey truly is both a liar and a coward."
The remark on O'Rourke - the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate and governor in 2018 and 2022 - appeared to be a product of reports on right-winger Tim Dunn contributing a half-million dollars to a super PAC that helped elect the former El Paso city council member to the U.S. House in 2012. The Campaign for Primary Accountability spent $240,000 - almost half of the money it received from Dunn - in opposition to Silvestre Reyes as the incumbent who O'Rourke ousted in the primary election that year.
Phelan accused the "Covey propaganda machine" of stooping to a "new low" with the manufactured pictures in the mailer that the speaker said depicted him as Pelosi's closest friend. But Phelan declined to call out Yass by name nonetheless in an analysis that could have offended Governor Greg Abbott as a consequence of an unprecedented dependence on cash from the TikTok financier.
Yass gave the distinct impression that he was trying to buy off the governor of the second largest state when he donated more than $6 million to Abbott in the past six months. Yass has bankrolled the Club for Growth political committee with donations of more than $60 million in recent years. The Club for Growth Action has poured more than $4 million into efforts aimed at ousting Phelan and several GOP colleagues who voted against a school choice bill last fall.
Abbott has remained officially neutral on the HD 21 race after viewing Phelan as an ally until now. But Abbott took sides on TikTok two years ago when he used an executive order to ban the app on state computers, phones and other devices amid fears that it was being used by the Chinese communists to spy on unsuspecting Americans. The governor even produced an extensive statewide plan designed to protect Texans from TikTok.
But Abbott has been silent on TikTok in the wake of Yass' historic largess with the exception a brief tweet to endorse a congressional plan that would restrict the use of the app in the U.S. with divestment mandates for investors. Abbott's top new donor could lose billions of dollars if the measure became law.
Abbott signed a bill last year that outlaw deep fake photography and videos that are used in pornography. But the plan that cleared the Legislature in Senate Bill 1361 would not apply to the mailer at piqued Phelan's wrath in light of the fact that the Texas speaker and Pelosi are wearing clothes with none of their private parts exposed.
more to come ...
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