Things are getting litigious in the 11th District.
Attorneys for challenger Daniel Cowan have demanded that incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk "cease and desist your unlawful defamation of Mr. Cowan and by noon on Monday, May 23, 2016."
The sternly worded letter also demands Loudermilk "issue a formal and public statement retracting any and all statements or implications" that Cowan ever made money in Iran or from that country's state-owned businesses, that Cowan ever had "any connection with any group or any government that funded terror groups and apologizing for any statements or implications to the contrary."
Failure to do so will likely result in a lawsuit, says the letter written by Carolyn "Tippi" Cain Burch, of the powerhouse GOP law firm Chalmers Pak Burch & Adams. You can read the whole thing for yourself here.
Loudermilk's campaign was unmoved.
"Spoiled rich kid not getting his way so he called a lawyer to say ‘make them stop telling the truth about me,’" Loudermilk spokesman Dan McLagan said, and added a quote from "Captain Barbarossa" of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie franchise:
"'I'm disinclined to acquiesce to [their] request. Means no.'" Context of that can be viewed here.
The kerfuffle stems from a mail piece we told you about on Wednesday, wherein Loudermilk accused Cowan of profiting from business deals in Iran. Cowan, who now owns a boutique investment bank, once owned a company that specialized in managing the thousands of electronic transactions banks and other companies make every day.
In the early part of the last decade, Cowan's company entered a joint venture with a bank in Dubai. According to several news articles, the bank was also separately underwriting or helping to fund major, state-sponsored construction projects in Iran. The articles themselves are behind paywalls here and here. But the gist of both: Emirates Bank International, Cowan's partner, helped arrange deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Iran.
But Loudermilk's mailer, which you can view here, says that while "Iran was changing death to America, Daniel Cowan was making millions from a company that was helping Iran's government-owned industries."
Cowan us on Wednesday he had no idea his partner was doing business in Iran and said only "flawed logic" would lead Loudermilk to contend otherwise. The image at the top of this post shows Cowan's own Facebook response.
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