So childish baby-faced Political Consultant Brian Laurens has accused me of breaking the telecommunications laws and falsely using his Caller ID in making robocalls against Senator Chip Rogers. Brian Laurens is the owner of Brikel Communications/Laurens Direct Mail and he’s threatening to use my cell phone number the same way.
Let me go on the record saying I did not do those calls and was not engaged by Brandon Beach’s campaign to do any robocalls until after they were made. I will stake my professional reputation on this and am calling on Brian Laurens to retract his statement and apologize.
I wrote about the robocalls on July 25th of this year. Note that date, it’ll be important soon.
Brian Laurens, a political consultant to Senator Rogers, accuses Beach of sending out robocalls and transmitting Laurens’s cell phone number as the Caller ID number.
I quoted an article in the Cherokee Tribune that quoted Brian Laurens about the alleged robocalls:
A Holly Springs political consultant who works for Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) is accusing Senate District 21 challenger Brandon Beach of pirating his number and using it to make robo calls on Sunday.
Beach on Monday said his campaign had nothing to do with the robo call and labeled the calls as dirty politics as usual.
Brian Laurens, owner of Brikel Communications and Consulting, is accusing Beach of using his cell phone number to call voters.
Laurens said he discovered the alleged robo calls were made when he returned home from church on Sunday.
The Holly Springs resident said the calls began to pour in around 2 p.m. and went through 8 p.m. Sunday.
“The call said something about Chip Rogers being for the TSPLOST and voting for it and was portrayed as coming from a registered LLC, (the) Grassroots Conservatives of Cherokee County,” he said.
But there are a couple of holes in Brian Laurens‘s story.
Brian says he knows that I did the robocalls in question because Brandon Beach’s disclosure with the Georgia Campaign Finance Commission shows that I did some calls for Beach in his Senate campaign against Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, who is a client of Brian Laurens and Brikel Communications.
Sure enough, there’s my company on Beach’s disclosure for a payment received 9/26/2012 for Automated Calls. I surely did do some calls for Brandon Beach. I don’t deny it. But I do deny doing the calls that Brian Laurens complained about on July 25th, and I deny ever having falsely used somebody else’s Caller ID to put out robocalls in any election campaign ever. Note that date: July 25th.
Washington Political Group, another Georgia company that does robocalls is also on that disclosure for payments as follows:
7/13/2012 $14,032.56
7/16/2012 $13,924.18
7/18/2012 $16,191.58
7/26/2012 $15,908.72
8/06/2012 $2358.59
Washington Political Group also appears on Beach’s earlier disclosure for payments of:
5/21/2012 $10,650.00
6/25/2012 $10,876.89
So that’s more than $80,000 that Beach’s campaign paid to Washington Political Group, who is known to do robocalls. I’m not saying that they did the calls; doing so presents several problems. First, it assumes that Brian Laurens was telling the truth when he complained about the anonymous robocalls. Second, it assumes that Brandon Beach’s campaign did the phone calls, and there is no evidence to that effect. Third, it assumes that Beach’s campaign would be stupid enough to pay for illegal robocalls breaking federal law, but then would comply with Georgia law in order to disclose the payment. Pretty goofy, if you ask me.
Also problematic for Brian Laurens’s claim is the fact that the payment to my company was made two months after the calls he claims went out. If Brandon Beach’s campaign were breaking federal law by transmitting fraudulent Caller ID information, they would have been required to disclose it before the date of any calls I did for them.
But let’s deal with that first issue: whether Brian Laurens can be trusted to tell the truth when it comes to politics. Or whether in fact, Brian Laurens has a documented history of lying about politics. This is really Brian’s problem: his reputation in Georgia politics.
People have asked whether Brian Laurens is truthful or a liar in the political arena before. We’ll be discussing that over the coming days.
