This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

No state House seat is more sought after than the one currently held by the late state Rep. Tony DeLuca. After DeLuca won reelection posthumously, the fate of the state House majority rests on DeLuca’s spot as well as two others in western Pennsylvania. With a special election on the horizon, the Allegheny County Democratic Committee chose Joe McAndrew, a former executive director of the committee, as their nominee to replace DeLuca. 

It was a longtime coming for legendary Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, who was awarded $45,000 in compensatory damages this week – after a jury found in his favor in a defamation suit. After a four-day trial, Bykofsky proved in Common Pleas Court that his former employer, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Inga Saffron, the Inquirer’s architecture critic, were guilty of defaming him on his last day of work in 2019, when his colleagues threw him a surprise going-away party and Saffron unleashed a diatribe which included smearing him for having “a taste for child prostitutes in Thailand.”

One Berks County official is making the move from CC to COO. The Berks County Commissioners announced Tuesday that Commissioner Kevin Barnhardt has been selected to be the county’s next chief operations officer. Barnhardt, who has served as a commissioner since 2008, will now oversee the daily administrative and operational functions of the county government and its more than $575 million budget.

The latest round of reporting around U.S. Rep. Scott Perry’s text messages might have him answering - “new phone, who dis?” for the foreseeable future. Perry’s text messages with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows revealed Perry’s efforts to push several baseless conspiracy theories and a plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Requests for comment from Perry’s office, much like the subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, were left on read.

Some say lawyers lie for a living, but this Cumberland County attorney took that a step too far. Corey James Adamson of Mechanicsburg has been suspended by the Pennsylvania Bar for reportedly mishandling at least five civil cases. Adamson admitted he was a “pathological liar” and lied to clients about actions he was taking, including adding himself as a guardian of a client’s children without asking her.

The Republican gubernatorial candidate’s financial woes are now going beyond his campaign. State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who pleaded for fundraising from groups such as the Republican Governors Association during his run, didn’t even spend all the money he managed to raise, with the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting Mastriano still had more than $1 million in his campaign account weeks after the election. What’s more, Mastriano is being called out by the Borough of Chambersburg for failing to pay a $4,217 bill for Chambersburg police staffing at a campaign rally. It looks like he may have the money to pay the borough back after all.