Offbeat | US lawmaker hoped to distract from affair with smear

A state lawmaker had an email sent to his Republican supporters falsely claiming he had been caught having sex with a male prostitute, apparently believing such a smear campaign would help distract attention from an alleged extramarital affair between him and another legislator, a newspaper reported Friday.
The Detroit News obtained two recordings secretly made in May by a former aide of Todd Courser, a member of the Michigan House of Representatives. In the recordings, Courser asks the aide, Ben Graham, to email Republican activists and operatives from an anonymous account to create “a complete smear campaign” about him.
In the recordings, Courser tells Graham that he and state Rep. Cindy Gamrat, with whom he worked closely together, received identical text messages about their relationship that day from an unknown number. Courser wonders aloud whether someone had pictures, video or audio recordings of him and Gamrat.
Neither Courser, a married father of four, nor Gamrat, a married mother of three, directly confirmed or denied having a sexual relationship during the recorded conversations. But they also didn’t dispute Graham’s characterization of their relationship as an extramarital affair, the newspaper reported.
Courser said the email he wanted Graham to send would “inoculate the herd” — an apparent reference to his and Gamrat’s supporters.
“It will make anything else that comes out after that — that isn’t a video — mundane, tame by comparison,” Courser told the aide.
Graham said when he refused to send the email, he was stripped of some of duties and eventually fired in July.