Becchi Tries to Get Constituent Fired
Corporate tax lobbyist Rosemary Becchi tried to get a resident of New Jersey’s 11th District fired during a global pandemic because she didn’t like comments made on her campaign’s social media pages.
According to Politico, the resident said “[Becchi] emailed from her law firm’s address and made no reference to her candidacy, which he believes was meant to lead his employer to believe he was targeting her as a private citizen ‘as opposed to a candidate running for public office.'”
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Congressional candidate contacts employer of online critic
By Matt Friedman | Politico
https://www.politico.com/states/new-jersey/story/2020/10/09/congressional-candidate-contacts-employer-of-online-critic-1322675
Rosemary Becchi, a candidate for Congress in New Jersey’s 11th District, recently became so fed up with an online critic that she wrote to his employer and accused him of “stalking” her, according to that critic.
His employer didn’t see a problem.
“Thankfully, my firm is supportive of the First Amendment,” David Steketee, a 43-year-old Madison resident who works in IT at a major international company, said in an interview. “They said ‘you did absolutely nothing wrong. We think this claim is completely without merit.’”
But Becchi’s decision to complain to Steketee’s employer is reminiscent of another flap in the same district in 2017, when then-Republican U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen wrote a fundraising letter to a board member of a bank and pointed out that one of its executives was a “ringleader” against him. (The executive, Saily Avelenda, is now executive director of the New Jersey Democratic State Committee.)
Becchi is challenging freshman Democratic U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill.
Steketee, a Democrat, is a frequent commenter on the Republican Becchi’s campaign Facebook page, but a review of many of his posts shows they’re often based on policy and rarely veer into insults, and when they do they tend to be tame. He’s also far from alone on the page, which includes frequent comments from several Becchi supporters and detractors.
According to Steketee, Becchi sent three samples of his Facebook posts to his employer, which he asked to remain unnamed. One was of his Steketee’s response to Becchi’s Aug. 13 post in which she advocated for allowing parents to take money out of 529 accounts to pay for educational expenses during the pandemic. Becchi’s post included a photo with her daughter, Francesca.
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In the other post Becchi cited, Steketee showed a photo of members of the far-right group The Proud Boys, who attended a pro-Trump rally in September that Becchi also attended. The Proud Boys call themselves “western chauvinists” and engage in violence. In the Facebook exchange, Steketee insinuated it was Becchi’s rally.
Becchi’s allies said in the Facebook thread that she did not organize the rally and tagged Billy Prempeh, a Black Republican congressional candidate in New Jersey’s 9th Congresisonal District who has been associated with the QAnon conspiracy movement. “Rosemary promoted it on her FB page and Twitter,” Steketee wrote of the rally. “And, as for Billy Prempeh, f— him if he supports Trump.”
Becchi sent an email to the chief ethics officer of Seketee’s company in mid-September, Steketee said, but he didn’t find out about it until Wednesday. He said she emailed from her law firm’s address and made no reference to her candidacy, which he believes was meant to lead his employer to believe he was targeting her as a private citizen “as opposed to a candidate running for public office.”
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