Op-Ed – Luthmann Responds to Brian Laline
Brian Laline’s Trump-Deranged NY-11 Redistricting Broadside Misses the Mark
NOTE: The Staten Island Advance’s chief propagandist didn’t write an editorial. Brian Laline wrote a confession. Fifty years hiding in a newsroom will do that to a man. He sees fire everywhere except where it’s actually burning. This NY-11 redistricting scam didn’t start with Trump. It started with Marc Elias, the same Democrat arsonist who lit the Steele Dossier and walked away whistling. Laline calls it “fairness.” I call it lawfare, racial gerrymandering, and a Trojan Horse aimed at Staten Island’s throat. The Voting Rights Act excuse is garbage. The venue stinks. The judge is a Hochul hack. And if this case collapses, it won’t be because Nicole Malliotakis lost the argument. It’ll be because her lawyers forgot how to fight. This piece, Luthmann Responds to Brian Laline, won’t run in the Staten Island Advance.
By Richard Luthmann
(STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK) – I’ve just read Staten Island Advance editor Brian Laline’s latest “editorial” on the NY-11 redistricting lawsuit, and it’s a doozy. Laline parrots Democrat talking points so faithfully you’d think he was on their payroll. (In fact, he’s acted like DA Michael McMahon’s personal press flack for decades.)
His piece drips with partisan bias and Trump Derangement Syndrome – he somehow drags Donald Trump and “racism” into a congressional map dispute, casting Republicans as arsonists complaining about a fire they set.
Give me a break.
Laline all but calls Staten Islanders racist, co-signing a lawsuit that cites a 2017 campaign incident (involving yours truly) as supposed proof the borough is steeped in bigotry. He’s dead wrong, and he’s omitting the real story. As someone actually mentioned in this lawsuit, I’m not letting his nonsense slide.
Laline’s job may be carrying water for the Democratic machine, but my job here is to torch his phony narrative with facts. And the fact is, if there’s an arsonist in this redistricting chaos, it isn’t Donald Trump at all – it’s the Democrats’ legal hatchet man, Marc Elias. Laline can’t see past his anti-Trump hysteria to notice the real firebug who lit this blaze.
Well, Brian, allow me to introduce you.
Meet the Real Arsonist: Marc Elias’s FrankenDistrict Plot
Laline and his ilk want you to think Trump “sparked” this redistricting mess. What a joke. The real fire-starter is Marc Elias – Hillary Clinton’s favorite election lawyer and partisan mastermind of map warfare. Elias and his gang of Democrat attorneys have launched a legal blitz to burn down Staten Island’s voice in Congress.
Initially, they filed a lawsuit aiming to carve up New York’s 11th District into two grotesque “Frankenstein” districts. One would stitch Staten Island’s North Shore to left-leaning Manhattan; the other would lump the South Shore with a chunk of Coney Island housing projects. That transparently political plan was DOA, even with the presiding Hochul-hack Manhattan judge.
The new plan is to swap the Brooklyn portion of the NY-11 congressional district with downtown Manhattan in a surgical sleight of hand on the electoral map. The goal is simple: erase NYC’s lone Republican-held seat by any means necessary.
But this scheme isn’t just about election maps – it’s a social engineering Trojan Horse. Tie Staten Island to Manhattan, and watch how fast the city pushes its urban agenda on the suburban outer borough. Think high-density “affordable housing” projects sprouting in Tottenville and our South Shore neighborhoods under the guise of “equity.” They call it diversity; in reality, it’s an invasion. It’s gentrification-by-fiat, with Staten Island as the target.
No wonder Republicans have blasted the plan as a blatantly unconstitutional racial gerrymander – a “naked attempt to disenfranchise voters,” as GOP chair Ed Cox put it. (It’s good to see Ed found his spine, particularly after the political beating that Joe Cairo just dealt him).
The last time the Democrats tried a power grab like this in 2022, the state’s highest court struck down their gerrymander as illegal. (And the last time the Democrats were this upset about being challenged was when Lincoln freed their slaves.)
Now Elias and the Democrats (the party of Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Big Steal) are at it again. They are attempting via judicial fiat what his party couldn’t achieve at the ballot box. This D.C. arsonist doesn’t care about “voting rights” or fair representation. He cares about flipping a red seat blue, period.
Remember, Elias was the architect of the infamous Steele Dossier smear campaign – shady tactics are his specialty. If you ask me, he belongs in federal prison, not drawing cartoonish districts to nullify Staten Island’s vote.
Brian, make no mistake: Marc Elias lit this fire, and he is the one trying to burn down our district’s democracy – not Donald Trump.
Twisting the Law and Crying “Racism” to Rig the Map
To justify this monstrosity, Elias’s team is twisting both law and facts beyond recognition. They’ve hung their case on New York’s new John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act – a state law that does not even apply to congressional elections or mid-decade redistricting.
That’s right: the NYVRA was meant to stop local voter suppression, not to redraw federal congressional maps. (Even Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries admitted the NYVRA’s protections currently exclude congressional districts.)
In other words, Team Elias is asking a judge to use a law in a way the legislature never authorized – a blatant act of judicial activism. Their lawsuit claims Staten Island’s current map “dilutes” minority voting power because the Black and Hispanic population has grown from about 11% in 1980 to nearly 30% today.
They allege minority voters are “routinely and systematically” unable to elect their preferred candidates under the present lines. Never mind that NY-11’s current congresswoman, Nicole Malliotakis, is the daughter of a Cuban immigrant – the first Latina ever to represent the district.
No, Elias’s crew insists minority residents are “disenfranchised” because Malliotakis wasn’t the “candidate of choice” for most Black and Latino voters.
You read that right: their own lawsuit effectively says Staten Island’s minority voters preferred the Democrat (who happened to be a white male, Max Rose) over a Latina Republican, so somehow that equals racial disenfranchisement. You can’t make this shit up.
This is the absurd logic they’re peddling – all to paint the Staten Island community as racist and justify a radical redraw. And to bolster that warped narrative, they’ve dredged up a single anecdote from 2017 – one involving me – as Exhibit A to smear Staten Island. From the Democrat Party/Elias court petition:
D. Racial Appeals Have Occurred in Staten Island Campaigns
90. Political campaigns on Staten Island have featured overt racial appeals. For example, in 2017, a political operative, Richard Luthmann, allegedly created a fake Facebook page in Representative Debi Rose’s name, stating that she supported welcoming a “welfare hotel full of criminals and addicts” and turning a St. George property into “a heroin/methadone den.”
Well, let’s talk about 2017, shall we?
The 2017 “Racial Appeal” Stunt: Democrat-on-Democrat Dirty Trick
The lawsuit eagerly cites a notorious 2017 incident as proof that Staten Island campaigns are rife with “overt racial appeals.” In court filings, Elias’s lawyers name-check me in an example about a Facebook page I created against then-Councilwoman Debi Rose, claiming she wanted to welcome a “welfare hotel full of criminals and addicts” and turn a local property into “a heroin/methadone den.”
Sounds damning, right? It was a nasty campaign gambit, no doubt. But here’s what Laline and the lawsuit conveniently omit: that stunt was orchestrated by Democrat insiders themselves. I know because I was hired to do it – by none other than Councilwoman Kamillah Hanks (at the time a budding political rival of Debi Rose and now the NYC Council’s new Majority Whip) and her husband, Kevin Barry Love, currently under state and federal investigation for extortion of Staten Island developers.
SI Dems Party Leader and NYS Assembly Deputy Majority Leader Charles Fall referred the developers to Letitia James and the EDNY U.S. Attorney’s Office, respectively. (Hey Julie Menin, WTF?).
Yes, the very example being used to brand Staten Islanders as racists was a hit job commissioned by Democrats against a Democrat.
Hanks and Love wanted to torpedo Debi Rose (who, by the way, is Black, as is Hanks; Kevin Barry Love is Staten Island’s “main cracker“) in a primary power struggle. I, as a political operative, carried out their dirty tricks. And guess what? Hanks and Love later legally admitted to their roles.
Court filings show Hanks “admits she and Love created a fake Facebook page to attack political rival Debi Rose,” and that she enlisted my help – then stiffed me on the $86,000 bill for services.
In other words, the supposed “racial appeal” was literally Democrat-on-Democrat betrayal – “a case of ‘Democrat on Democrat crime,’” as I’ve said myself, not some widespread racist campaign by Staten Island Republicans. Both Hanks and Rose are Black; this wasn’t about race, it was about power and sabotage.
Do I regret my part in that ugly episode? Absolutely – I even personally apologized to Debi Rose, whom I consider a good woman, acknowledging that while my stunt was legally protected speech, it was morally wrong. I know now that crime doesn’t pay – and Kamillah Hanks and Kevin Barry Love are CRIME, plain and simple.
But let’s get something straight: the substance of those 2017 comments wasn’t fabricated out of thin air. There was a plan afoot to site a shelter/rehab facility in a residential area, and many locals were outraged. My tactics were over-the-top, but the concern I highlighted – dumping a “welfare hotel” full of problem cases into the neighborhood – was very real.
And in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, can any Staten Island resident say with a straight face that this isn’t a top-level concern? Labeling those issues “racist” is pure nonsense.
The real scandal is Elias’s team repackaging that old saga (cooked up by Hanks’s crew) as evidence of Staten Island bigotry. It’s a dishonest smear, and I won’t let it stand unchallenged.
Malliotakis’s Legal Fumble – and How to Stop the Scam in Its Tracks
While we expose the Democrats’ shenanigans, we also have to face an uncomfortable truth on the Republican side: Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis’s legal team dropped the ball early in this case. Instead of immediately yanking this fight into federal court, where a partisan state-court scheme could’ve been neutralized, her lawyers inexplicably left it in a Manhattan courtroom before a judge who’s anything but impartial.
The presiding judge, Acting Justice Jeffrey Pearlman, is a former top aide and counsel to Governor Kathy Hochul – essentially a Hochul political operative in a black robe. Pearlman has deep personal ties to six of the top Democrat respondents in this case (Hochul included) and has no connection whatsoever to Staten Island.
Yet Malliotakis’s attorneys did not move to remove the case out of his hands. Big mistake. This lawsuit centers on a federal election (a U.S. House seat) and raises federal constitutional issues, so it could and should have been heard in federal court from the start. Any competent lawyer knows that claims of racial vote dilution in a congressional district belong under a federal or state Voting Rights Act or the 14th Amendment – i.e., in front of a federal judge.
By failing to remove the case, Malliotakis’s team left Staten Island at the mercy of a blatantly conflicted “Hochul judge.” That’s legal malpractice in my book.
But all is not lost -yet. There may yet be room for legal intervention in the state case. A smart litigant could file an order to show cause and seek to either get the suit tossed (because the NYVRA doesn’t even apply to federal elections) or to remove the whole circus to federal court.
Even at this late stage, a removal to federal court would be a game-changer. It would drag the battle onto fairer turf (the EDNY bench is still packed with hand-picked Chuck Schumer commies) and likely bog down Elias’s gambit in procedural limbo for months – easily six months or more, tying up their FrankenDistrict scheme well into next year.
In practical terms, that delay could prevent any new map from being imposed before the 2026 elections, preserving the status quo that voters chose for the midterm elections. Time is on Staten Island’s side if someone has the moxie to force the issue into the federal arena. The Democrats thought they could ram this through a friendly state court quickly; a federal detour blows up that timeline.
This entire ordeal – a phony “voting rights” lawsuit that is nothing more than a partisan power play – is exactly what I call it: a Trojan Horse. Under the banner of civil rights, they seek to haul in an agenda that Staten Islanders would never accept at face value: racial gerrymandering, outside control of the district, even Mamdani-style housing “solutions” foisted on the neighborhoods.
Staten Island may be the Forgotten Borough, but I don’t think they are about to roll over and play dead. It would take an all-out legal street brawl to stop this fraud. Where are the brawlers?
Brian Laline will keep scribbling his partisan fairy tales, and Marc Elias will keep lighting matches. But the real question is this: Is Staten Island going down without a fight?
Federal removal will expose the lies, drag the truth into the light, and douse Elias’s legal fire. The “Frankenstein” map will die on the operating table. The Trojan Horse will be kicked back to where it came from. And Staten Island – defiant, loud, and free – will remain fully armed against this assault on representation.
You don’t like that, Mr. Laline? Too bad.
Hopefully, the people of Staten Island will have the last word, not the Democrat lackeys and lawfare arsonists trying to steal their voice.
