Ralph McGrew: Claudia Tenney Is Not For Election Integrity

To the Editor,

Claudia Tenney is running for Congress in the new 24th district, a wide section of northwestern New York. Voters here are not familiar with her, because she has been the Representative for the old 22nd district, centered on Utica, near her home. She has chosen to run in the new 24th district because she would have little chance of winning an election where she lives. As her constituent for four years, I have seen her actions and can warn you.

Tenney claims to be a champion of election integrity, which she calls a “primary focus of her second term in Congress.” She actually holds elections in contempt. The January 6 insurrection was organized to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election. Tenney’s first statement about it agreed with Donald Trump’s, claiming that the rioters were not Trump supporters. Soon after, she criticized the property damage, but not the fighting, the injuries, the deaths, or the plot to make Trump President again.

When Claudia Tenney was running for Congress in August 2018, Donald Trump headlined a fundraiser for her in Utica. Ukrainian-born Lev Parnas was there and arranged for his partner Igor Fruman to give $2435.84 in two illegal payments to her campaign. She kept the money through that election until October 2019, when Parnas’s and Fruman’s indictment listed her among twenty-five candidates who received contributions. Then (she says) she gave the money to charity. Russian tycoon Andrey Muraviev supplied the money to facilitate licensing for a marijuana business. Fruman pled guilty and was sentenced in January to a year in prison. Parnas was convicted on all counts and was sentenced on June 29 to twenty months in prison.

Muraviev, Parnas, and Fruman are not stupid. How did they choose the twenty-five recipients? No doubt they picked the Republican candidates they could influence the most—those who were the most corrupt.

-Ralph McGrew

Binghamton NY 607 761 2967

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