DV Journal

After a brief hearing Thursday, a judge delayed ruling on whether Bucks County can continue to hide records declared public by the state Office of Open Records (OOR).

Richboro resident Megan Brock is seeking emails from August 2021, when the county suddenly overrode COVID-19 guidance issued by its own Health Department Director, Dr. David Damsker, who said the science indicated more parent-friendly, less-restrictive policies. Instead, Bucks County bureaucrats replaced Damsker’s rules with stricter state guidelines for masking, quarantines, and vaccinations.

The OOR ordered the county to turn those emails over. Instead, county officials went to court.

Judge Denise Bowman on Thursday did not say when she would issue the final ruling on the matter.

Keith Bidlingmaier, a lawyer for the county, claimed the records Brock seeks are either covered by the attorney-client privilege or else  “pre-decisional” and therefore exempt under the right-to-know law.

Meredith Di Liberto, a lawyer for Judicial Watch, a public interest law firm also representing Brock, told DVJournal the county “relied on boilerplate” for its arguments.

“It boils down to saying they’re exempt (from turning over the documents) because they say so,” said Di Liberto.

Outside the courthouse, Brock was joined by state Sen. Jarrett Coleman (R-Bucks/Lehigh) and Jamie Walker, another mother who is being sued by the county in an attempt to deny her documents the state OOR ruled she should be given.

“When that guidance was abruptly changed after a letter was sent by the Wolf administration to our county commissioners, I myself and another mom, Jamie Walker, started asking questions,” Brock said.

“We came to the (county) commissioners’ meetings. We wanted to know why our kids were suddenly going to be kept out of school through long quarantines, why they were suddenly going to have their faces (covered) by forced masking, and instead of having our questions answered, our county commissioners bullied us, they called us names.”

Brock also claimed that county commissioners “actually blocked my phone number,” preventing her from contacting them.

After a long process, Brock won her right-to-know request at the state level.

“However, instead of giving those records, Bucks County sued me three times and sued Jamie Walker twice to withhold records,” said Brock. “This is a huge issue for every citizen in Bucks County, regardless of political affiliation.”

“Transparency is not a political issue,” Brock said. “It is an issue that protects the foundation of our constitutional republic. And it is a right of every citizen to know what is going on behind closed doors.”

“The public deserves to know how local county and state governments made decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Coleman argued. “As chairman of the Senate intergovernmental operations committee, my primary concern is understanding the decision-making process and how much independence the county health director had.”

DVJournal asked Coleman if his committee plans to subpoena the county commissioners to testify. “We certainly have the ability to do so,” said Coleman.

“Under decades of Republican leadership, this county never sued a citizen to hide the commissioners’ actions,” Walker said. “In a few short years under Democratic leadership, these types of lawsuits have now become commonplace in our county.”

“I asked for the emails under Commissioner (Diane) Marseglia’s second, unpublished county email address,” said Walker. “I won these emails already. The county refuses to release them to me. They’re making me hire an attorney and fight them in court. Bucks County residents’ tax dollars are being used to fund the frivolous lawsuits, and this is not how our government should operate.”

“Commissioner Marseglia herself said she will not stop the appeals because she wants to protect her friends,” said Walker. “All I want is the truth. I want to understand what was going on with our county’s highest elected officials during the creation of the health guidance in 2021. This guidance impacted 80,000 children.”

The guidance “endangered children. It contributed to massive learning loss. And it’s contributing to the current mental health crisis of our children today.”

The commissioners are “asking a judge to change the transparency law. They’re asking a judge to make the entire state of Pennsylvania less transparent for all of its citizens. Citizens are entitled to find out how our elected officials make decisions, especially when those decisions impacted so many children in Bucks County.”

Walker’s case is listed for trial on May 30. She is also represented by Schnee but not by Judicial Watch.

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Jamie Cohen Walker is the Bucks County mom who beat Attorney General Josh Shapiro in the state Supreme Court.

The Chalfont resident, a former certified reading specialist, is now a stay-at-home mom to her 16, 14, and 11-year-old children. During the COVID-19 classroom lockdowns, she was active in the Reopen Bucks movement to get kids back in school.

She says she is a politically moderate former Democrat, but she may be a model of the “mama bear” voter Republicans need to win in this year’s midterms.

“I’m Jewish. I was a Democrat. I would not be a Democrat now. I don’t think I could do it after seeing what they’ve done to our kids,” said Walker, a guest speaker at a recent rally for GOP gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

Political consultant Albert Eisenberg of RedStateBlue, said, “Suburban, college-educated women have been up for grabs since the GOP transitioned from the party of Romney to the party of Trump. But now the Republican Party is in its post-Trump era and many of these moms are returning to the fold.

“They are seeing de facto Democratic policies of absolute radicalism — people who genuinely believe parents should have no say in their child’s education, people who are still forcing toddlers to wear masks, which is completely inhumane,” said Eisenberg. “Adding to this sharp left turn of the Democrats is the skyrocketing cost of living and eroding value of a dollar due to the Democrats’ insane economic policies — and the suburbs are certainly coming back, in places, to the GOP this cycle.”

Since the 2021 school board elections brought a conservative majority to the Central Bucks School Board, Walker said she is not concerned that the board would agree to shut down the schools again in case another epidemic happens.

But if Shapiro is elected governor, that’s another story.

“If Josh Shapiro wins, could he shut down schools? Absolutely. The only thing that would shut down schools is a governor’s emergency. Our (school) board is really good now, so they would not shut down schools. And our health director would not shut down schools.

“But Josh Shapiro could shut down schools. Absolutely. He fought to keep them closed,” said Walker.

Walker is one of the right-to-know warriors battling the school district for information about how it made decisions about COVID-related closings and mask mandates and finding out through a trove of emails that the district had kowtowed to teachers’ union demands.

“I won my first right-to-know appeal in January 2021. The district said it would give me all the records except three emails and took me to court,” Walker said. “That was when (attorney) Chad Schmee reached out to me and said, ‘I can win these records for you.’”

After Walker won, Supt. Dr. John Kopicki “just up and disappeared,” said Walker.  “The superintendent of the largest district in Pennsylvania decided to leave in March 2021. As soon as he left, I received my emails.”

“We have a local health department,” said Walker. “Dr. David Damsker is our health director.  When you have a local health department, they determine the mitigation for something. Also, a mask is actually a modified quarantine.

She points to an “email that Dr. Damsker wrote to all (Bucks) superintendents telling them you don’t have to be hybrid,” said Walker. “Every child can be in school. You don’t have the authority to do this. They broke the law. They did not have the authority.

“And Dr. Damsker said if you’re wearing a mask (when exposed to someone with COVID), you don’t have to stay home and quarantine,” said Walker. “But our school district wasn’t doing that. Our school district was sending healthy kids home. That was against the law, too.

“No one ever wrote about it. No one ever questioned it. They kept 1,100 kids home that were considered contacts, and no one was getting sick. They weren’t consulting the health department. They were just doing it on their own,” she said. “I don’t think people understand what they did to children. They missed so much school,” she said.

“In June 2021, Dr. Damsker came to our school district and said the kids don’t have to wear masks anymore, and we’re going to treat COVID like the flu and move on from COVID. Well, a lot went down in August.”

On Aug. 31, 2021, former state Health Director Alison Beam required school students and staff to wear masks again.

“So Central Bucks already started, and everybody was normal, all the kids were back to school normal,” said Walker. “So they said on Sept. 7, all the kids had to start wearing masks again.”

Beam put the “illegal mask mandate in, and I joined a few other parents to sue Allison Beam. It was Josh Shapiro who defended it, his office. We won in Commonwealth Court,” she said, but then Shapiro appealed to the state Supreme Court. “And we won. We beat him in the Supreme Court.”

Then in December, Beam resigned.

“Our health director (Damsker) put out health guidance on Aug. 15, then Alison Beam and the teachers’ union pressured our county commissioners to change the health guidance, then nobody ever heard from our health director again.”

“It’s really bad what went on here,” she said. “Some of the Democratic people hated Dr. Damsker. There were Facebook groups about him, ‘Ditch Dr. Damsker.’ They did such horrible things to him.”

At the Mastriano rally, Walker said, “Here in Bucks County, we saw first-hand how Democrats were willing to use COVID-19 as a political tool to strip away our personal freedom and exert their will over us. We watched our health director was silenced by Democrat bosses when the Wolf administration did not agree with his health guidance. They interfered with our health director’s legal authority to set health guidance during a pandemic. We lived with the effect of that illegal interference for two painful years. A group of us parents stood in their way. We acted as the opposition to the Wolf administration’s mandates.

“We knew that keeping kids out of school would harm them, so we fought, and we fought extremely hard because the Democratic politicians and their allies, the teachers union, made us their enemy,” she said. The parents were called “domestic terrorists” and “jerks.”

“They weaponized the government against us,” Walker said.

Walker and another parent, Megan Brock, are in a legal battle with Bucks County over their right-to-know request about how the county issued its health directives, bypassing Damsker. The county sued the two moms to keep some of the commissioners’ emails private after Walker and Brock won an appeal to the state Office of Open Records.

“After decades of Republican control of Bucks County, these Democrat commissioners are the first Bucks County administration ever to sue a private citizen to hide their emails, their own words,” said Walker. “Those emails they’re trying to hide from us are about how Democrat politicians interfered with our children’s education.”

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