Brian Fitzpatrick is “growing desperate.”
That’s what The Bulwark reports today as part of a deep dive that outlines how “Fitzpatrick has resorted to an unprecedentedly deceptive campaign strategy” which relies on a federally convicted felon with “a disturbing pattern of sexist, racist, and Islamophobic posts.”
The Bulwark details how Fitzpatrick’s campaign fixer – federally convicted felon Dave Sommers – has a record of “despicable social media posts,” raising fresh questions about why Fitzpatrick has paid him and made him “the backbone” of his reelection advertising strategy.
When asked to address his ties to Sommers, “neither Fitzpatrick nor his campaign responded to multiple requests for comment.”
Read more from The Bulwark for yourself:
- PENNSYLVANIA REPUBLICAN BRIAN FITZPATRICK is growing desperate.
- Facing strong national headwinds and a top of the ticket dominated by the popular incumbent Democratic governor—and with the Cook Political Report shifting his race from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican” just this morning—Fitzpatrick has resorted to an unprecedentedly deceptive campaign strategy.
- Last week, Politico reported that Fitzpatrick’s campaign has been running ads attacking his Democratic opponent, Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, by claiming Harvie is under investigation by the FBI. There’s no evidence of that.
- It turns out Fitzpatrick’s attack ads cite articles from Patch, a hyperlocal news platform that encourages members to self-publish on their local Patch page. The posts are not written by journalists employed by the media outlet. Nor were they fact-checked. In fact, all of them were written by an individual with close personal and financial ties to Fitzpatrick.
- The man behind the posts is former journalist and convicted turtle-smuggler Dave Sommers, 72, of Levittown, Pennsylvania. Sommers appears to be a family friend of Fitzpatrick’s. Between 2010 and 2022, Sommers received thousands of dollars in payments and reimbursements from Brian Fitzpatrick’s campaigns as well as the campaigns of his late brother, Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick. The payments stopped the same year Sommers was charged with stealing a campaign sign belonging to Brian Fitzpatrick’s primary opponent.
- That charge didn’t end the relationship between Fitzpatrick and Sommers, though. This past summer, Sommers attended Fitzpatrick’s wedding to Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, posting pictures with the bride to his Facebook and Instagram accounts. And in another video posted to Sommers’s Facebook page, he sports a tank top that reads “TEAM FITZ”—the name of Fitzpatrick’s joint fundraiser for his campaign and leadership PAC.
- Sommers is one of only 141 people whom Brian Fitzpatrick follows on his official Instagram page. (Fitzpatrick’s own wife is not even on that list.)
- A deep search of Sommers’s social media accounts reveals a disturbing pattern of sexist, racist, and Islamophobic posts. So who exactly is this guy who has been publishing lies that his friend Brian Fitzpatrick has been campaigning on?
- “Every liberal Democrat female is a sexual assault survivor, especially the morning after, when the guy hasn’t fallen in love with her,” Sommers posted on Twitter in February 2021.
- After Fitzpatrick won re-election in 2020, the @sommers35 account posted to Twitter, “Looks like us turtle breeding criminals pushed Brian over the top”—a reference to Sommers’s 2019 conviction for trafficking thousands of protected turtles, for which he was sentenced to six months in prison.
- The February 2021 tweet quoted above isn’t the only time Sommers has posted something vulgar about women and sexual assault. In April 2025, Sommers’s account quoted a post from the uber-MAGA poster End Wokeness about conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett siding with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to oppose Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. Sommers wrote, “All four women…. Hmmmm… the very ones who MS-13 would rape.”
- Sommers’s bigoted social media vitriol is not reserved for women. This year, he posted to Facebook in response to a trampoline park event in Raleigh, North Carolina that turned violent: “Black teens go wilding…again…all over America. We don’t have to live like this!!”
- Just this Tuesday, Sommers shared a link to a tweet from Deep Leaks, captioning the post, “Obama is a pure Muslim. Here’s the proof.”
- IT MAY SEEM STRANGE to focus on the social media posts of an obvious crank even if he is friends with a congressman. But Sommers is not just a friend or associate of Fitzpatrick’s—he is the backbone of Fitzpatrick’s re-election advertising strategy. Fitzpatrick’s campaign and allied super PAC have spent millions on an ad campaign that relies on Sommers’s Patch posts.1 At least eight ads directly cite Sommers.
- Given Fitzpatrick has put so much stock into his attack ad campaign promoting Sommers’s Patch posts, I reached out to his campaign to see if they agreed with Sommers’s social-media musings. Neither Fitzpatrick nor his campaign responded to multiple requests for comment before the time of publication.
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